What are the top 3 most valuable books to read about translation?
I’m going to answer this by going a bit outside the box.
Here are five books, three of which are not about translation at all, but rather about writing—because translators are writers, first and foremost.
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Admittedly, we don’t always get a chance to put our writing skills into play, for example, when we’re translating trilingual (or more) instruction manuals for cell phones or a legal contract, but this is still important. Book #1: The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White (from my alma mater and also of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web fame). Book #2: Because incorrect grammar can kill a good translation, and grammar isn’t always being taught in the schools these days, Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynn Truss. Obviously there are other issues involved in grammar—such as capitalization and so forth—but this is a light-hearted approach that makes it clear why a comma counts . (I have seen another book called—and this is #3--Woe Is I that may well do the same thing for grammar. It’s on my get-to bookshelf reading list.) #4: I recently read a book on translation that impressed me more than most books do with its practicality and usefulness, despite its being written from a British perspective, A Practical Guide for Translators, by Geoffrey Samuelsson-Brown. Finally, there’s one more book on my to-read bookshelf that I’ve heard excellent comments about, and that might well supplant G S-B: Translation as a Profession, by Roger Chriss. This is #5.
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By Adriana Tassini
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