Translation

Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri was a left-field choice for me, a book of essays about writing in English and then Italian and translating her own texts – and those of others. But I enjoyed it, not least because it made me think about the English-to-English translation needed in inter-disciplinary work. We use the same word for subtly or even significantly different concepts. Capital is an obvious example, but also discounting, efficiency, optimization, rational and many others. The first stage of any project with people from other backgrounds is a translation stage. Hard work, but also so satisfying when there are moments of illumination of how other people think about a common question.

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