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Lost in Translation

Why the act of rendering a text into another language is more than mere correct placement of words and sentences

Mario López-Goicoechea
Writers’ Blokke
Published in
4 min readJan 16, 2025

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Translation is more than this Photo by Edurne Tx on Unsplash

You have laughed or you have cried. You have perhaps indulged in hours of cogitation, your thoughts strongly interosculating and contaminating each other giving birth to random ideas which will only find a logical existence after even more deep reflection.

Or maybe you have chosen the easy, accessible text, the one that helps you “unwind” and forget about modern life’s constant demands. Reading is like that, challenging or fun, or challenging and fun. Fiction is the epitome of this process, the semi- or pseudo-real world created for us, readers, whose key we might obtain at the beginning, middle or end of the book, according to the author’s wishes.

What is then, fiction in translation?

It is all of the above, plus an intrinsic search in the writer’s mind. It is the attempt to return to what happened before the first word was typed or handwritten on the page. Translation, and I mean literary ones, is not just a direct transposition from original text to target language. It is rather a more subtle process in which the translator’s own life experience comes into play…

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Writers’ Blokke
Writers’ Blokke

Published in Writers’ Blokke

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