Thread by @translationtalk

I thought today I might work through a single, simple sentence – stage by stage, issue by issue. It’s the first sentence of a novel I’m just starting, by the excellent @VillalobosJPe. Here it is:

Mi primo me llamó por teléfono y dijo: Te quiero presentar a mis socios.
[1/18]

Nothing too hard to understand, so here’s the first quick stab:

My cousin called me on the telephone and said, “I want to introduce you to my partners.”

Translating is so easy!
[2/18]

Oh, note that I’ve added quote-marks – I tend to standardise punctuation to whatever the norm is in the language I’m translating *to*. (No reason, I think, to write in one language and observes the norms of another.)
[3/18]

Btw, “called me on the telephone” is unnecessarily bulky. Maybe on the phone? Or (God help me) on the ’phone? My cousin *phoned me*? It’s not especially chatty in the Spanish. Would there really be any ambiguity if I just went with the simple “called me”? Or called me up?
[4/18]

The Spanish “socios” are definitely business partners, so even if that means filling out the line a bit, I might have to say that. My “partners” is potentially too ambiguous. OK, so here we go ... [5/18]

My cousin called me up and said, “I want to introduce you to my business partners”.

Yes. Better.
[6/18]

No. Wait. A common problem translating between languages where one is gendered and one isn’t: in the Spanish, the cousin is male, in English you can’t tell. This feels disproportionately important to me today, because just this week I got irritated at ...
[7/18]

...a book where the author had chosen to specify the narrators’ genders, but the English-lang. translator had failed to give us that info. (Incidentally, if I were tweeting in Spanish, you’d know the gender of both author & translator by now. In English, you have no idea.)
[8/18]

There are Englishes where I could use, say, “cousin brother”; but that doesn't happen in *my* English, or in the English I’m translating into (mid-Atlantic-ish?). I just don’t have a word in my English that does what “primo” does. Maybe I could smuggle in a pronoun?
[9/18]

My cousin called me up, and he said, “I want to introduce you to my business partners”.

(Does that “he” do the job?)
[10/18]

I leave the line at that and move on. But within a couple more sentences I’ve discovered two things that make me reconsider:
(1) The dialogue in this book is completely integrated into the prose – so um, maybe I should take the quotes back out?
[11/18]

(2) The tenses jump around quite a bit, so if I’m going to make it work in English – not just this sentence, but the whole para/page/chapter/book – I’m going to have to give them some thought. As a direct story-telling voice, I’m tempted to start in the present. So …
[12/18]

My cousin calls me up, and he says, I want to introduce you to my business partners.

Looks about right - I’ll try reading it aloud. Final check.
[13/18]

Nearly there, but that second comma is annoying me now. A colon would do. The “business partners” is annoying, too – it keeps snagging when I read it aloud, but I think I’m probably stuck with that? Yeah, I’ll keep that, *for now*.
[14/18]

And that “he” (plus the first comma it wants) is troubling me now – it all feels like a bit of a mouthful, & I don’t want too much unnecessarily tangly wordiness in an opening sentence. After all, sometimes voice matters more than meaning. Maybe I’ll just scrap it. [15/18]

My cousin calls me up and says: I want to introduce you to my business partners.

[16/18]

Yes, that’s it. How simple. It will change again later, in consultation with the author, or one of the editors, or when I just read it again and decide it’s terrible and I want to re-write the lot, but it’ll do for now. Which means I can start worrying about Sentence Two.
[17/18]

PS For any French-readers, the Fr translation begins: “Mon cousin me passa un coup de fil et dit: Je veux te présenter mes associés; rendez-vous samedi à cinq heures et demie place Mexico, devant les cinés.” (Interestingly, tr Claude Bleton runs two sentences into one.) <ends>