Josu Zabaleta (2009): Night's Lies: the translation workshop
Based on the publication of the translation of Night's Lies of the Italian author Gesualdo Buffalino and other recent literary translations, the translator and author of the article puts forward his work methodology, his "workshop", and reflects on the latter. It is possible that the basic core of the process by means of which, based on the triangle "original text - translator - blank sheet of paper", the latter is filled in with a text that intends to be equivalent to the original in the target language, in other words, the core of decisions of the translations should not change substantially; but it is undeniable that everything that surrounds this decision making has changed radically over the last years, due both to the abundance and accessibility of information, documentation and consultation material (the Internet, dictionaries, publications), as well as the new tools that have appeared in the translation field (programmes for the elaboration of general or ad hoc linguistic corpus, query systems). As well as displaying the technical resources that the translator uses for his work, the author specially points out two aspects of his work, which are not really new: the search for linguistic models within the literary tradition in Basque, to find inspiration for his translation; and the use of other translations of the original document to other languages (for examples, he proposes the translations to French, Spanish and Italian, and his own translation to Basque, of Dom Casmurro of J.M. Machado de Assis), since they constitute, for anyone used to carrying out such meticulous text analysis as those carried out by the translator, a detailed guide of the difficulties which he will probably come across during his work. Likewise, the author also proposes different macros that facilitate this task if the translation is carried out using a tool such as Wordfast.
