Chapter 4. Talks with translators
prevent translated poems being conscripted into the dominant discourse, and
therefore the dominant socio-political values, of a dominant receptor culture.4.3.5 Working with translating agents
4.3.5.1 Degrees of dependence
Interviewees reported widespread use of other translating agents, following vari-
ous cooperation patterns. They did not mention working relationships with
publishers, editors, printers and graphic designers (despite their importance in
translation production: see e.g. Gutt 2000: 66, or Jones and Arsenijević 2005) –
perhaps because these actors rarely intervene in translating itself.
There were enough differences between interviewees, however, to regard de-
pendence on translating agents as a continuum (see Figure 22) – though all trans-
lators reported working both solo and with input from others. Thus the relatively
other-dependent Alan and Carl claimed respectively to have mainly co-translating
experience and to rely strongly on text helpers. The relatively independent Ellen,
by contrast, said that she very rarely used informants, though she had some co-
translating experience.4.3.5.2 Co-translating
The sheer number of published accounts by translators of complementary-language
co-translating (e.g. Csokits 1989; Hughes 1989; Kunitz and Weissbort 1989; Eshle-
man 2001; Weissbort 2004) indicate that it is a common poetry-translating mode.
These accounts also show that the complementary-language co-translating proc-
esses described by Alan (p. 92), which resemble those reported by Ellen, are fairly
typical. Interviewees also echoed these published accounts, and Chapter 3’s trans-
lators, in regarding themselves and their co-translators as having equal status.
Three interviewees also described what might be called same-expertise co-
translating. Here both translators were source-poem readers and receptor-lan-
guage poetry writers, but complemented each other in other ways: for instance,
Ellen’s analytic orientation combined with her co-translator’s wholist orientation
to give both a detailed and an overall vision of the poem:Fully autonomous Highly dependent on other agents
Ellen Bruce Alan
Derek Carl