Sotiris Souliotis

Good afternoon, we are very happy to have you with us. First of all, we’d like to ask you what kind of texts you translate.

Hello. Thank you very much for having me. I am also very happy to be with you. I translate both prose and poetry, mainly from most of the Scandinavian languages, such as Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Lithuanian, sometimes from German into Greek, and also from Greek into Danish.

Was it a lifelong dream to get involved in translation?

In a way, it was, although, when I was very young, around 12 or 14, I didn’t exactly have that dream crystallized. I was just fascinated by foreign languages that I saw on various everyday objects, like Black & Decker and pressure cookers, with manuals in different languages, and all these unfamiliar languages fascinated me.

Very interesting. What image of translation did you have before getting involved…

Pardon?

What image of translation did you have before getting involved professionally and what changed later on?

No image at all. Before I started thinking about translation I had no idea, I didn’t even think that translation played a role. When I was a little kid, I thought that normal people only spoke Greek, and there was something wrong with everyone else who didn’t know Greek. I couldn’t understand why there were other languages when people could speak the “normal” language just fine.

How do you feel when you translate a literary piece of work?

Well, it also depends on the literary piece of work and whether I’ve worked on the same author before or if it’s the first time. When I translate a literary piece of work, I go through a stage of adaptation at the beginning. But then, depending on how interesting it is, sometimes in the middle of it, sometimes earlier, sometimes even towards the end, it fascinates me, no matter how good or bad it is. I get into the atmosphere of its heroes as if I were participating in it.

Is there a translator you admire or hold up as a role model?

I can’t say I hold up anyone in particular as a role model. Of course, I have occasionally heard about the fees of my colleagues who live abroad, who get twice as much as I do in Greece for books of similar length. So I’d love to be on those fee scales, so to speak. But I can say I admire all my colleagues, who at some point find something that I don’t know about. But no one in particular.

Great. Besides being a translator, are you also a writer?

Me? I wouldn’t say so. I’ve never published anything. But I’m a member of the Danish Writers’ Association because in order to be a member of the Translators’ Association, you have to be a member of the Writers’ Association first. Well, there was a happening by the Writers’ Association at one point in a park in Copenhagen where everyone read their poems to the others. We could bring people. I brought two.

Wonderful. You talked before about other translators abroad. Are you satisfied with the financial rewards for your translations?

More or less, yes.

And what is your relationship with the authors you translate?

Excellent. 95% of the authors are very willing to cooperate. Once I finish a translation and I have some questions –after I answer the questions I have myself, the ones that have to do with language and so on– there are some questions that you have to discuss with the author. Well, the authors are very willing to discuss and send you their answers. My questions are, of course, not too long, they take three A4 pages at most. Except perhaps for some particular Scandinavian writers, who –both because they’re busy and popular, and because their general policy is not to talk to the hangarounds of literature, like journalists, translators, TV personalities, and such– are harder to talk to, and I talk to them through editors.

How do you think the quality of translation can be improved? Experience through the years definitely helps.

Yes, experience definitely helps. Also your contact with the language you translate from and the contact with your native language, the latter, especially, is very important, because if you live in a foreign country and you translate in your native language, your language in your country changes without you. So you have to visit your country regularly. That’s also the spirit of some of the scholarships that the Danes give to foreign translators who live in Denmark, to come, so to speak, to the land of their birth and remember their language.

And what do you think the difficulties of translation are?

It’s when you have two languages that have both linguistically and culturally two completely different systems. That’s where the difficulties are. For example, if we talk about Greek and Danish, Greek is a theoretical, analytical language with very nice philosophical concepts, but very few words about modern things and objects of the Western culture. We all say “this thing” or “that thing”, while the average Dane has words that they use for these objects. We do have them, too, but only on a very academic level.

You said that you translate from Scandinavian languages.

Yes, but not exclusively.

What is your relationship with the languages you translate from?

Do you mean if I like them?

No. How did you start translating from these languages? Was any of them your native language, were you bilingual or did you just learn them?

No, I learned them, because I always wanted to learn a Scandinavian language, and especially Swedish, because when I was younger, I admired ABBA and Olof Palme –I still admire the latter in particular– and I wanted to learn the language of the country that created the welfare state and had a prime minister who embodied that social model. Of course, I was not in Sweden, but somewhere close to it. I managed to get a place at a university in Denmark through the Erasmus program, so I went. And one thing led to another, I learned Danish, then I learned some Swedish. Norwegian and Danish are the same in writing, they just have some different words. So that’s how it all came about.

Do you find that editing is necessary?

Yes. It is.

It is essential.

Yes, because, no matter how good a translator you are, you need to have your text read by an editor, who preferably doesn’t know the language you’re translating from, in our case, a Greek from Greece who doesn’t know Danish or Norwegian or Swedish or any of that, so as not to be influenced by the original, to read with the eyes of the Greek reader who will read the book here.

Are you optimistic about the future of translation in general in Greece?

Yes, because, in every country and in Greece as well, we all want to learn something from others and the only way to learn it is through translation. There’s no other way. No matter how much Google Translator improves, unfortunately, the times I used it, I fell flat on my face.

Thank you very much.

I thank you, too.