Translation Has Never Been Higher-Profile

That's the verdict from the London Book Fair per this article in The National--which does a great job of covering international lit.

The hushed chatter around the unusually quiet London Book Fair is that foreign fiction translated into English has never been so high-profile. Undeniably, this is thanks to the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy (which began with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), currently standing at over 21 million copies sold worldwide. Roberto Bolano's 2666 has also been a huge success. And prizes such as The IFFP and events like April's Free The Word festival in London have thrust more and more books and authors from the non-English speaking world into the spotlight. As Hahn runs his finger down the shortlist, he mentions novels from Bengal, Germany, Congo, Italy and France.

There's just one final intriguing question though: what does he do when there's a passage of a book he's translating which he really doesn't like?
Oh, it happens all the time, he laughs. E-mail has made it very easy to say to a writer, for example: ‘This joke at the end of chapter two is very funny, but it's not funny in English.' And in that case I would always suggest changing it in a specific way rather than leaving it out. Because the original author has two choices: either I persevere with the original, in which case no one will laugh, or we change the joke and keep the laugh.
The job, essentially, is to recreate the experience of reading the book, not the specific sentences of the original. One of the advantages of working with most of the authors is that you get the permission to do just that – they trust you. And it's genuinely a lovely job: you're getting your head completely inside a book, and if that's a place it's exciting to be, that's a fantastic feeling. You're getting to write a great book even if you're not a great writer yourself.