I managed to meet up with Sophie Hughes yesterday, and we had what the Italians call a chiacchierata, a word that feels so right for the unhurried, pure-joy exchange of our talk. I suppose chiacchierare really just means “to chat,” but that English term feels terribly wanting in color and warmth. Also, we both seemed to be talking so fast that it was hard to keep up. Definitely a chiacchierata.
Sophie translates from Spanish and Italian, lives with her husband and two small children in Trieste, and is the most frequently nominated translator in the Booker Prize’s ten-year history, with some twenty books published over that period, by authors such as Vincenzo Latronico (Perfection, 2025), Alia Trabucco Zeran (Clean, 2024), and, with Annie McDermott, Woodworm, by Layla Martínez (2024). She also translated Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (2020). She’s a judge for the Booker this year.
I won’t do a run-down of all we touched on. I don’t think I could remember all the details anyway, though some of the usual suspects surely came up — dialects and metaphors, working alone, working with others, ways of reading, how to support the work itself.
We very briefly talked scheduling, as I’m trying to bring Sophie for a talk at Indiana University in Spring Semester, 2027 — those of you in the vicinity, please make a note of this!
On the practice front — for translators invariably gravitate towards the concrete details of texts — we zeroed in on the use of Spanish words in English translations. Now, this is a thing many translators do, and I routinely point it out to students in my classes as an option. It’s so common in fact that it’s become an almost automatic solution when faced with a source word or phrase with any kind of local color or special discursive force, and that can be almost any word.
Bilinguals are known to switch languages in the middle of sentences, then switch back, then switch again. Linguists who have studied the phenomenon have noted that the switching isn’t random but frequently happens at words that have strong associations for the speaker in a given context. A barrio (in Spanish) does not have the same feel as a “neighborhood,” “the train station” does not feel the same as la gare (in French). And so on. When bilinguals are talking and get to one of these lexical items, it often functions a bit like a railroad switch, after which they start down a different language track. Multiplied across the many language contexts in which people live, it starts to look messy even if there’s an order to it, but that’s part of the living context that translators try to convey.
When you add the fact that Spanish is widely recognized and understood in the U.S., using the Spanish words can feel not just like a good solution but a natural one. Of course people will get it, and the result for U.S. readers can often be more effective.
But what about a British reader? An Australian reader? An Indian reader? A Singaporean? If English is the language into which you’re translating, which means, in the broader literary context, the language is Englishes, then the solution starts to feel like it might create impediments rather than promote understanding and expressive effectiveness. It’s rather a U.S. American move and, at one extreme, might be construed as a bit tone deaf towards the rest of the world.
Obviously, books mix languages all the time. That’s not what I’m referring to. And other counter-examples are not hard to come up with. Writing that’s highly localized often requires markers to signal where you are. Education levels and power dynamics among speakers usually come through in word choice, some of which might be dialectal, foreign-sounding, or, in fact, foreign. And there are always — always — questions of the market. (And rights.)
All this is part of a familiar translation landscape. But that landscape, at its horizon, also has readers. And for English, that means potentially across the world. Who those mysterious beings are and what they might know or not know (including Spanish) are the sorts of questions two humans might easily have a chat about.
For our chiacchierata, it was good for about ninety seconds before we zipped on to somewhere else.
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Russell Scott Valentino 