Chapter 5. Five translators translate
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Fleur
Geoff
Hugo
Irene
Francis
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Fleur Geoff
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Figure 35. Toen wij: run-through length (tape-units)
This analysis enabled her to assess the poem’s translatability:
TU62 the thought, the idea, the images, the words
TU63 seem fairly simple at first sight, [but] I suspect that when I get down to translat-
ing it,
TU64 it might prove slightly more challenging than I think at the moment.
In Irene’s third pre-translating run-through (RT3: 122tu/9m), she looked up key
source-poem words and noted their translations.
Only in the next run-through, RT4 (266tu/20m), did Irene write her first ver-
sion, twice backtracking to the beginning – both to revise her emerging version,
and to work out the meaning of a new line by updating her mental macrostructure
of the poem’s meaning:
TU398 Viel toen de tijd in # Let’s see: if I can
TU399 reread [my version so far] I might get a feeling of what I should have [here]
RT5 (57tu/4m) quickly debugged the resulting version. Irene then rewrote this as a
pure-line version (RT6: 207tu/16m). She quickly checked this in RT7 and RT8 (12
and 35tu/1m and 3m), without and with reference to the source poem respectively.