Maria Christou

Hello, Mrs. Christou. We are very happy that you are here with us today for this interview. Let’s begin with a few questions about how you got started in translation. How did translation come into your life?

I think it’s always been there. I’m one of those kids who grew up bilingual. I grew up in an English-speaking and Cypriot-Greek-speaking environment, where languages alternated. So, rather unconsciously, I was always translating, like all children: “How do I say this in English or in Greek?”. So translation is partly a natural thing. I never thought of pursuing it as a profession. I got into it by chance, when I found myself in Paris as a very young girl and, since I didn’t have an EU visa, I had to enroll in a school to get a student visa. And the only course available, the only degree, was an MA in French-English translation and interpretation. So I took the exam and enrolled in that. French is my third language. It got me interested from the first lesson. And that’s how I started, completely by chance. I didn’t intend to go into it.

That’s an incredible story.

That’s how it happened.

And what does “to translate” mean to you, in your experience all these years?

I become a channel of communication. I think that’s the great attraction of this job. I communicate and I don’t, I am in the spotlight and I’m not. Usually translators aren’t, but I mean that the place between the writer and the audience is a very interesting place to be.

Let’s move on to questions about the translation process. First of all, we know that you translate comics. What would you say the peculiarities or difficulties of this genre are?

Yes… Again, I’ve been involved in comics by chance, in the last 3 or 4 years, but I’ve translated quite a few, and mostly graphic novels. The great challenge and pleasure is that you’re translating in a physical space. You don’t have a blank page as in essays or novels. You have the constraint of the balloon. That forces you to be very precise, you can’t cheat, you can’t explain, you’re working within a physical constraint, which is partly the balloon. Moreover, it’s spoken discourse and I’m very interested in the translation of spoken discourse. You’re straddling somewhere between theatrical and everyday spoken discourse and literature. It is very interesting. And the other peculiarity for me is the image. The storytelling in a good comic is done simultaneously both through the discourse, the words, and through the image, whereas in literature, the narrative is done through the words and the reader creates the images in their minds. So what you write is not enough, you’re working with an image at the same time. And that creates other, special challenges for you in translation. You write things which, if there was only the discourse, even in a play, maybe you wouldn’t write them that way. What’s written must always be connected with the image that accompanies it. The challenge to translate comics from English to Greek – that’s what I’ve done mostly, besides one I think that was into English – is that, usually, the Greek words are longer, they have more letters. So, during the translation you count syllables, you count letters… Then there’s the typesetting. The splitting of a word in order to fit might ruin the rhythm of the spoken discourse. So there’s writing and rewriting at different stages. It doesn’t end when you deliver it. There’s the lettering, the translation is sent back to you, and then you suddenly see your discourse incorporated in the image and it is read a little differently. So you then go through a process of one or two more drafts, until you find the final one that both fits and can be split, and also has the musicality you wish. You have to serve translation and at the same time, it should also tie in visually.

Perfect. Is there any of the graphic novels you’ve translated that you found most difficult?

Yes, two of them. The first comic I translated was an adaptation of Cervantes’ entire Don Quixote by an English writer, who has adapted Cervantes’ 1,200 pages to a 300-page graphic novel. It’s wonderful, wonderful work. He has adapted, of course, the language to today, in the sense that when Cervantes was writing in the 1600s, he was writing in the modern language of the time. So this was a challenge. Many issues arose in that translation. The first is what you do when you are translating an adaptation, which author you serve. Do you serve Cervantes or Rob Davis? Or both? You’re balancing between the two. The second thing that came up, which I discovered along the way, is that the first translation of Cervantes was done from Italian into Greek. That’s why we pronounce Dulcinea “Dultsinea”, and Sancho Panza “Sancho Pantsa” in Greek, and so on. So it’s a literary piece of work that’s already known, it has cultural references and we know the main character names with an Italian accent. But this is an adaptation of the whole Don Quixote, so there are names we’ve never heard in Greek. So what do you do? What’s most frequent? There was a whole… I think the research on the names must have taken three weeks. Dulcinea was translated as “Dulthinea”, Rosinante as “Rothinante” and so on. It was all that, some very interesting research on this whole thing. Another challenge was the following: Davis sometimes had almost unchanged excerpts from Cervantes, but from the English translation because he was working with the English translation of Don Quixote. I had the Spanish text and the Greek and the English translation. There were challenges of this kind. The same author has written two graphic novels that I’ve translated, now three. He’s created a fantasy universe that could be our world, maybe in a hundred years or a parallel universe. You don’t know, it’s a teenage story. And he coined many words almost Alan Moore level stuff, which is…

Do you remember an example?

They don’t have a birthday, they have a “deathday”. The Greek words come first to mind now. They’re in a world where it rains knives every time it’s “knife o’clock” instead of “nine o’clock”. It had wonderful things like that. I remember another one in Greek. Parents are machines and they have broken mothers retired to a “mamasylo” [mamasylum]. Every two pages there was a coined word which suited that universe. Whenever something like this comes up, it’s very interesting for a translator.

Let’s move on to some questions about the professional field of translation. Are you satisfied with your financial rewards from translating comics?

I’m a special case, I think, because I’m a partner in the publishing house I mainly translate for. So I don’t exactly have earnings as a translator. I mainly translate for myself. And it was a very deliberate move, mainly because after 25 years I wanted to start choosing what I really want to translate, what I think has a challenge, what I think should be out there. But, by and large, no, I’m not satisfied. I think translators in Greece, mainly of literature, are underpaid. To be straightforward.

And how about the status of translators? Do you think it has improved recently?

I think a lot of efforts are being made and I’ve seen improvement lately. Efforts like yours or like the various Translation Slams that take place… It has helped a lot in getting people to start understanding what this process of translation is all about. I think the biggest complaint of translators is that when there’s a good book and a good translation, the author gets all the credit. When there’s a bad book and a good translation of this bad book, because that happens too, the translator takes all the beating. I think that’s a fact. And that derives from a lack of knowledge of what this profession is. You’re not just someone who knows a foreign language. There’s a technique that’s being worked on. That’s why I would suggest studies in a good department of translation, if possible. Not that it’s necessary. There’s also an innate aptitude, but translation studies certainly unlock a lot of techniques and save you years of finding out about them through experience. People don’t know that it’s time-consuming work which demands technique, that every single thing you write isn’t just what you read, you’re balancing and making decisions all the time. Do I focus on the reader? On the writer? On musicality but I sacrifice the meaning? On the meaning but I sacrifice musicality? All that stuff. The greatest pleasure and challenge for me is all that. But it’s a time-consuming process.

Let’s move on now to the interaction with some other factors. Do you think that text editing is necessary?

I very much believe in translation editing. I don’t think we have… It is certainly done in our publishing house. I’ve done translation editing there too. I don’t know if it’s often done here, but I think that abroad, even though there’s less translated literature in the English-speaking world, editing is being done more systematically. I believe a translation editor is required before the text editor makes typographical corrections in the text. There is a gap when… I’ll put it this way: Even the best translator in the world will miss some things in a long text of 100,000 words, for example. Especially with the time pressure we work under because the workload is heavy, since the pay is low – it always goes to that – you don’t have the time to put the text aside for a month as you should, and then read it again with fresh eyes. That’s where the translation editor who knows both languages helps. They compare the translation with the original text, they make notes, and, in collaboration with the translator, they make corrections. When the editor then gets the text, they know that the text is correct and their interventions cannot be in style or in something they don’t like in Greek, because this is how the author wanted it in the original. In that sense, I think that should be the process. A text editor is also required at the end, but regarding typographical mistakes and such. And better collaboration with the translator. You have to keep sending the text back to the translator and discuss with them, and not just correct something, you ask, “Why did you choose this?”.

Regarding the authors you translate – you mentioned earlier the adaptation of Cervantes’ work – do you communicate with them if you face a problem?

Yes. With all of them so far. There is, there must be communication with the author, when possible.

You said you have a dual role both as a partner of a publishing house and as a translator. Yet, in other cases, in other collaborations, have there been any instances of censorship or of someone changing something in your translation perhaps without asking you? We talked earlier about editors and the relationship between you and them.

It hasn’t happened to me in literary translation. It has happened to me in other texts, e.g. essay-type texts that were going to be published somewhere and so on. Yes, there were interventions by others. That’s why I very much insist that you ask the translator, “Why did you translate it like this?” if you disagree. There has to be that cooperation. We all serve a text, after all. That’s it. It’s not a matter of censorship. It’s a matter of serving the text as well as possible.

What is a general image of comic book translation in Greece?

From what I’ve seen, I think it’s being done well. There is good work being done. We have good translators. I’d ideally like to see more Greek comics translated into English. There is a whole process of producing a comic, it goes through your hands, it goes to the proofreader, it goes through all the lettering, they all go over it many times before it’s printed. And all this process works, I think, in favor of translation. You have longer production time than you do with a book of 100,000 words, which you deliver and then you may not see it again till it comes back in print, and then you often see that interventions have been made. In comics, there is necessarily that production process, so you end up with good translations in general, I think.

And a closing interview question. Are you optimistic about the future of comic book translation in Greece? Since you said that you think we have translators…

Yes. While it’s a very, very small scene, judging e.g. from the last Comic Con, I see that it’s becoming broader. It has a very young audience, kids who are 14, 15 now and you see them growing up and keep coming and searching. So, yes, I’m optimistic that we’ll have more Greek and more translated comics in the future.

What advice would you give to a student who wants to go into translation? Comic book translation maybe.

Comic book translation?

Or translation in general.

Translation in general. Lots and lots of reading in both or three working languages. And as much cultural contact as possible with these languages. It’s not just a language thing. And this very much applies in comics where you have everyday speech, the way people talk. And watching a lot of movies. Generally anything that has spoken discourse.

Great. Thank you very much.

I thank you. And good luck.