Why Translation Deserves Scrutiny | by Tim Parks | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

Meanwhile, someone directs me to a translators' online forum where a certain Tim Gutteridge, a British translator based in Spain, has suggested that criticizing a translation for plain errors is hardly a crime-language competence lies at the core of translation, does it not?-and is being scolded by colleagues who feel this is "unethical"; translators need support, not criticism. Reading the thread, it rather seems that they are policing him, and not vice versa. In any event, the issue is so keenly felt in the translation community these days that the editors of In Other Words, the twice-yearly publication of the British Centre for Literary Translation, have decided to dedicate a major article to the ethics of criticizing translations in their forthcoming January edition.