Emily Wilson

 04/17/2024

Armaan Arif

Professor Vincent 


   Emily Wilson's lecture was one of my favorites to witness this semester. Her passion for her work was so clear to see throughout her explanations of the text. I felt that she was one of the translators who was easy to connect to because of her passionate readings. I was grateful for the way she started the lecture by asking the "What is translation?" question and explaining the "translation is writing" statement. The interpretation of those slides really got me thinking about what I should write in my "Are translators writers" paper. She mentioned that translation is writing due to the fact that a translator writes a whole new text in a whole different language. This asserting perspective is interesting because a lot of people would still bring up the creativity argument, saying that translators just paraphrase what is given to them. Her perspective is definitely something I would like to delve into as I redraft my paper. 

   Another point I would like to mention was when she talked about translators making mistakes. Translation is clearly a very dynamic field which means two elite, world-class translators can have completely different translations of the same text. So the obvious question would be, 'Which is one correct?' or 'Which one is better?' Emily Wilson says that we shouldn't consider mistakes as mistakes, but rather interpretations. I tend to agree with her on this. Mistakes (interpretations) add to the dynamic of the field. Going back to the example of the two world-class translators translating the same text, they could both be wrong, they would certainly say each other's translations are wrong. However, they are different, which really illuminates the complexity of the translation sector. 

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