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Read the latest Oonagh Stransky? What did you think of the new Laurie Thompson? Wasn't the last Ian Monk a cracker? Caught up yet with Margaret Crosland, Adriana Hunter, Elfreda Powell or Bernard Scudder? In all probability you have, particularly if you are settling down with this article. They are translators of course, practitioners of an art where, as Adriana Hunter remarks, the more successful they are, "the more they disappear". Long ignored or vilified, translators are often viewed with suspicion, even by those to whom they have handed the key to wider international success (see CT38). But between them the contributors to this article have given us access to between two and three hundred volumes, not just crime of course, but also to books by Cocteau, Gramsci and Meyrink together with subjects as varied as Romanesque architecture and Palestinian cookery. That things are changing is perhaps indicated by the fact that the Amazon database now lists translators as the co-author of a translated work. So who are they? How does the process work and what skills do they bring to the problems that each volume presents? Bob Cornwell set out to find out.

THESE WERE THE QUESTIONS:-

1. Tell me about yourself. What, for instance drew you into translation? What background in literary or crime fiction do you have?
2. What do you feel are the essential characteristics of a good translator?
3. Confronted by a new author, how do you proceed? What stages are there in the process?
4. Have you been able to establish any kind of professional relationship with your authors? If not, do you consider such contact desirable - and why?
5. In questions of style, rhythm, atmosphere etc., how much freedom do you like to have? Do you like to remain faithful to the original text or do you prefer to have the flexibility, where it matters, to create the 'feel' rather than the literal accuracy of the original? Examples?
6. What particular problems does dialogue present? How do you deal with the problem of dialect, archaic or, in contrast, street language?
7. What aspects of translating crime fiction appeal to you? Or that you dislike?
8. How far do individual publishers seek to influence your approach? A positive influence - or a negative one?
9. Are you normally commissioned or can you/do you lobby for particular authors?
10. Any (printable) comments on reviewers? What kind of criticisms upset you most?
11. Which translation, of your own work, are you particularly happy about? And why?

THE COLLABORATORS:-

• Adriana Hunter has translated (for Bitter Lemon) both of the Tonino Benacquista crime novels published in the UK: Holy Smoke and the recent Someone Else.
• Mike Mitchell is a German specialist who has also translated Friedrich Glauser, in particular his seminal 1936 novel Wachtmeister Studer (Thumbprint), along with the more recently published In Matto's Realm, both for Bitter Lemon.
• Ian Monk should be well-known to crime fans. He has translated crime novels by Jean-Christophe Grangé, Daniel Pennac and Chantal Pelletier. He recently won the prestigious Scott Moncrieff Prize for his translation of Pennac's Monsieur Malaussène.
• Elfreda Powell and Margaret Crosland worked in collaboration on economic history professor Dominique Manotti's first crime novel Rough Trade (for Arcadia). Separately Elfreda Powell has also translated (amongst many others) Francoise Sagan. Margaret Crosland is also a well-known biographer (of Simone de Beauvoir, Cocteau and Colette, for example).
• Bernard Scudder is the man you turn to if you want a novel translated from Icelandic. His latest published crime novel is Silence of the Grave (Harvill), the second of two books by the hot (in literary terms that is) Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indridason.
• Oonagh Stransky is an Italian specialist, living in New York, and has translated two novels by Carlo Lucarelli for Harvill, one (Almost Blue), short-listed in 2003 for the Crime Writers Association's Gold Dagger.
• Hal Sutcliffe's first venture into crime fiction was The Writing on the Wall (Arcadia) from Norwegian crime writer Gunnar Staalesen.
• Mary Tannert lives in Germany and has translated (with Henry Kratz) the revelatory Early German and Austrian Detective Fiction (McFarland), an anthology which includes a tale by Adolph Müllner from 1828, that predates Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue by about twelve years. Lately she has worked with Ingrid Noll and other German writers for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
• Laurie Thompson is one of three translators who have worked on Henning Mankell's books in English (all for Harvill). His most recent published translation is of the first crime novel by Swedish writer Ake Edwardson to be published in the UK (by Harvill) Sun and Shadow .
• NB: Vivienne Menkes-Ivry, who contributed to the original article (CT44), felt unable to let her unedited remarks appear in this roundup.

MANY THANKS to Rebecca Toyne at Harvill, Laurence Colchester at Bitter Lemon Press and Gary Pulsifer and Daniela de Groote at Arcadia Books for putting me in touch with many of those above.

1. TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF. WHAT, FOR INSTANCE DREW YOU INTO TRANSLATION? WHAT BACKGROUND IN LITERARY OR CRIME FICTION DO YOU HAVE?

• Adriana Hunter: Most people seem to stumble into translation, and I'm no exception. I was very lucky to go to a French school for four years as a child (my father was in the diplomatic service), and I went on to read French and Drama at London University. I worked in film publicity for a while, doing a certain amount of translating of press packs, and interpreting for interviews. Then I worked in the editorial department of a book packaging company. While in France for an interpreting job, I read a review of a book in the French edition of Elle magazine (I'm very keen on contemporary fiction and read a lot of book reviews)… it was called La Disparition. I read it, was bowled over by it and knew that I wanted to translate it. I did some sample material and sent that round to a number of publishers. It was picked up by Flamingo and published as The Disappearance to very favourable reviews in 1999. The work has just gone on from there.

  What draws me to translation is what I see as a balance between science and art: the precision of accurately recreating something from the first language, and the creativity of finding the right voice and style to portray the mood in the target language. Translating is a bit like character acting: the translator has no voice as an author, he or she must disappear into the English version of the original author's voice as an actor disappears into a character... the more talent they have, the more they disappear.

• Mike Mitchell: I'm an ex-academic, in German language and modern literature; I have also taught translation. I have a personal interest in translation, have been a published translator since 1991, full time since 1995 (getting on for 40 titles now); mostly German, the odd French title. I mainly translate literary works: novels (Grimmelshausen, Meyrink, Rosendorfer etc.), some plays (Kokoschka, Horvath) essays (Loos) etc. Glauser's Thumbprint was the first crime novel I've translated; though I do enjoy crime fiction for my own reading.

• Ian Monk: I studied Classics and moved to France as a teacher with a desire to write poetry. If I subsequently became a translator, this was simply by chance. I gradually learnt French and thought that this would be a good way of earning money while using my language skills. I am now very much a 'general' translator, doing crime, 'literary' fiction, poetry, biographies, but also such stuff as marketing reports and web sites.

• Elfreda Powell: I am now 65 and have spent my whole career as an editor in publishing: first of much foreign fiction at Peter Owen in the 1960s. It was at the time a vibrant young company and I enjoyed working on other people's translations of Giono, Chagall, Asturias, Pavese, Violette Leduc, Monique Wittig, Blaise Cendrars, Josef Lengyel, Liviu Rebreanu, Michelangelo's letters, Gaddà. It was at Peter Owen's that I first met Margaret Crosland and worked with her on some of her translations of Cocteau. The pay at Peter Owen's was appalling, particularly as a female in the sixties, so I moved to Constable with its more general list as a commissioning editor (rather like moving to an old people's home). Then a spell at the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation in Rome, as an editor (and censor), a sharp learning curve for me, but I found it depressingly bureaucratic and somewhat corrupt; then Constable again, where I became editorial director; then Victor Gollancz (editing a lot of the crime fiction, among many other things). When Gollancz began changing in a direction I did not care for some fifteen years ago, I left, and have worked freelance ever since as a book consultant, editor and translator.

  I did my first translation for Peter Owen when I was 22: it took eighteen months of my spare time and I was paid £50 for an 80,000 word translation: it was of a French novel written very elliptically and entirely in the present tense and sold about 400 copies before it was pulped. Of the £50, £22 went towards the cost of a typewriter and the Inland Revenue took a third of the remainder. Shortly afterwards Miron Grindea at Adam, for whom I had also translated a few literary pieces (for free), suggested I also edit his magazine for him for free! So it was purely to keep my head above water that I opted to continue in full-time work as an editor for many, many years.

  (Margaret Crosland adds: Not very long ago translation was slave labour, mostly done by women working at home, who would accept miserable pay just to make them think that were earning something. I hope that situation has improved now.)

  Elfreda Powell continues: As well as the Sagan novel (of which more later), I have translated biographies of Anaïs Nin, Rubens, and Uccello (amalgamating the French and Italian editions), a dictionary of symbolism, books on angels, self-hypnosis, articles on suicide, a Palestinian cookery book (from Spanish) and am currently working on a translation of a book on the colours of Venice. I have also worked with a French publisher on various projects. The first time I collaborated with Margaret Crosland on a translation was on an entertaining and quite intellectual French book on bottoms! We consulted first on how certain key terms and stylistic quirks could be translated, then each translated alternate chapters, after which each read the other's work and suggested any changes thought necessary. No great mystique. It worked very well, and was a good antidote against the loneliness that comes with being shut in isolation with a translation for several months at a time, as we could frequently phone each other and have a chat over any difficulties we encountered in the translation.

  Margaret Crosland adds: I have lost count of the biographies I have written but the International Who's Who of Authors and Writers lists them. The study of a subject's work often leads to 'finds' among his or her lesser known work. In this way I was led to translate some of Colette's later and very good novels: Down with Claudine, for instance, very hard to translate. I have translated a late piece of autobiography by Piaf. It has always sold well, for it was full of scandal, but the lawyers for the Piaf estate have now banned it: full of lies they said, and they were not far wrong. Recently I updated my own Piaf biography for Arcadia, retitled by Elfreda Powell A Cry from the Heart.

• Bernard Scudder: I studied English and Related Literature at the University of York, including medieval English, Anglo-Saxon and medieval Icelandic. I then went to the University of Iceland to study Icelandic and have been a full-time translator (employed and freelance) into English since 1983. This has involved a lot of commercial translation but also a wide range of literature - sagas, novels, ancient and modern poetry, drama, plus film scripts. If I had to name a specialist field of literature it would presumably be poetry - I sometimes say the reason I translate poetry is because I'm a poet with nothing to write. My involvement with crime literature began only in 2003 when Arnaldur Indridason's Icelandic publisher recommended me to Harvill; I'd translated several of their other authors for smaller publications in English. As it happens I have read little crime fiction but am familiar with the genre through TV serialisations (Morse etc.). Perhaps Indridason is an exceptionally gifted crime writer, but I was surprised by the craftsmanship that this kind of writing can produce, with depth of characterisation that easily matches a lot of 'artistic' literature and probably more skilfully wrought plots.

• Oonagh Stransky: I am a translator through and through. If that means I am a frustrated writer, as some might annoyingly suggest, then I accept that. I have written short stories and poems but I honestly prefer the kind of 'engagement' that comes with translation. At college I studied Comparative Literature, which is an excellent precursor to translation and in Graduate School I focused on Italian literature, filling in some of the gaps in my knowledge of the canon I had picked up along the way. I am one of those people that believes that translation is a creative act: it certainly doesn't pay the bills so it better compensate me in another way. I hear the author's voice, I follow the intricacies of the text and exploit the English language with an eye on Italian. I get a thrill from seeing my work in publication and enjoy collaborating on the production of books with editors and publicists. It's all part of the process of making books. As for the author, I always like to meet him or her, when possible, though not while I am working on their book. Their personalities can be a hindrance. The first book I translated was Almost Blue, by Lucarelli, for City Lights - and what thrilled me especially about it was the dynamic, contemporary language, the sense of mystery that permeated the book, and the sharp personalities of the three characters that told the story. It made translating it even more exciting, like being inside many different heads at one time. As I mention later on, I am involved in two professional organisations that work to improve the situation of translators and increase the number of publications in translation. One is PEN Translation Committee and the other is American Literary Translators Association, which I believe has many UK members too, and of which I am also a Board Member. Another factor that drew me to translation is that I grew up in many different countries. I never had the sense of one national literature, but many. All literature is comparative literature, they say, and I feel as though it is true.

• Hal Sutcliffe: I was teaching (English-French and French-English) translation courses when a lecturer in modern French language and literature at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Translation appealed to me and the literature side was becoming too much like a treadmill, never-ending new special subjects required to cater to whims of students. I didn't like this utilitarian, 'industrialised' approach to literature, which was thus being spoilt for me. So I took and passed exams for European Council in Brussels (French, German, Danish). Although I was offered two jobs, I never went. Eventually I got a job with World Health Organisation, went back to full time education (Russian) and then worked as a translator in the UN system (Vienna, Geneva, Strasbourg, The Hague etc.). Simultaneously I did academic translations (Durkheim, Gramsci etc.). So I have plenty of background in literary fiction, very little in crime fiction as such, but I am fluent in French and Norwegian, which is a big plus (there are quite a lot of charlatans out there).

• Mary Tannert: I got into translation when the bottom fell out of the U.S. market for professors in foreign languages. I had the good fortune to like translation and to do it well, neither of which is a guarantee just because a person works in foreign languages! I came to translation on two fronts simultaneously: I began to freelance as a commercial translator in the early 1990s. At the same time, my colleague Henry Kratz (my mentor at the university where I taught part-time) and I decided, just for the fun of it, to prepare an anthology of translations with some of the material I had collected during my Ph.D. research but hadn't been able to use in my dissertation on the history of German crime fiction. I had already given several papers on German crime stories at academic conferences and these had been met with great interest, but it was increasingly problematic that so few German crime novels have been translated into English, and that virtually none of the historic material that shows the development of German crime fiction had ever been heard of in England or America, much less been translated. So doing the anthology, besides being enjoyable, was partly self-serving: it left me less to explain!

  Since then I've become a professional translator, mostly commercial. I now work for Siemens full-time in translation project management, which mostly involves commercial projects, and I translate literature only on the side.

• Laurie Thompson: I drifted into translation. From a university background. Having graduated in German, I taught English and US language and literature at the University of Umeå, Sweden, in the early sixties. (My wife is Swedish - we met in Germany). Then taught German and Swedish language and literature at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (as it is now called) 1967-83, and Swedish language and literature at the University of Wales Lampeter, 1983-2000. I was always more literary than academic, and became editor of Swedish Book Review when it was founded in 1983 (originally - from my point of view - to help boost the new Swedish Department I was setting up: but obviously, that's not the way the translators see it). SBR is the journal of the Swedish-English Literary Translators' Association, and I edited it until 2002. Meanwhile, I became increasingly interested in translation (not the theory, that I don't believe in, but the practice), and started doing more and more literary translation from Swedish. (In a previous life I had 'qualified' as a technical translator from Russian in the army, as a National Serviceman, and translated three books on electronics and various other smaller things. And a few minor items from German.) Increasingly I found translating far more rewarding than the so-called academic life, and was delighted to accept early retirement and become a more or less full-time literary translator in Swedish, which is the only foreign language I feel comparatively qualified to translate from. I'm afraid I have absolutely no background in crime fiction, apart from having read a few books in English and Swedish, and then been asked by publishers to translate crime fiction novels.

2. WHAT DO YOU FEEL ARE THE ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF A GOOD TRANSLATOR?

• Adriana Hunter: In all fiction, the most important thing a translator needs to know is when to let go of the original, not to cling to it to closely, the better to serve it in the target language. With crime fiction you have to be especially careful to pick up on and recreate clues that may have been dropped imperceptibly into the text.

• Mike Mitchell: An intimate understanding of the original language; a good ability to write English, to adopt different styles, perhaps more of a 'pastiche artist' than a truly original writer. Every genre has its own styles and conventions and I think a translator should be able to feel his/her way into them so that I don't think - looked at from this perspective - translating crime fiction is any different from translating, say, Adolf Loos's essays on architecture, Kokoschka's Expressionist plays or Grimmelshausen's 17th-century picaresque novels. Each has its own style (for want of a better word) and its own corpus of knowledge that needs to be understood, A professional translator should be able - and willing - to absorb that and find an appropriate English equivalent.

• Ian Monk: I think I am well placed to translate crime work because you need to have learnt the language in the country. As I often say, I learnt my French in books and bars, so this means I have a better grasp of slang and real spoken French than University professors in the UK!

• Elfreda Powell: In Britain, unlike France, we are awash with very good crime writers, and crime fiction has a much wider and bigger readership than the average literary novel. A French crime novel, when translated, has to stand up to that competition. When a book is marketed as a crime novel, therefore, I feel that the translator is duty bound to make it readable. It is not a question of merely translating what the French says, but of recreating it in an acceptable and friendly form for the British reader. It must flow. The reader must not feel that the text is too much of an effort to read.

  Margaret Crosland adds: In crime fiction, the important thing is impact. The translation must be readable at high speed without any hold-ups, the reader must never be brought to a stop by some mysterious phrase or word. The translator must use whatever method or trick he/she finds necessary to clarify any problem, however minor. The translation has to be literate but never literary, if possible.

• Bernard Scudder: First of all and obviously, a good knowledge of the subject language, but in the wider sense of 'cultural literacy', i.e. the translation should interpret and convey rather than just render what stands on the page. Icelandic is an old language, essentially unchanged in form since the Viking Age, and translations from it into English have been plagued by archaisms and 'grammatical fundamentalism', a kind of academic stranglehold posited on the original being somehow sacred and 'superior' to any translation of it. Crime fiction is relatively new in Icelandic - the genre is really only 10-15 years old - and I am not aware of other crime translations, but this pitfall clearly needs to be avoided, since the success of such fiction clearly depends on engaging the interest of the modern, general reader by eliminating all linguistic quirks of the original.

  Secondly and probably more important still is the ability to produce a natural and stylistically effective English text which reads like an original rather than a translation. The key is for the translator to 'experience' the original and convey that experience as a native English writer. Capturing intangible qualities such as tone, register, atmosphere and psychological tension is more important than faithfully rendering the dictionary's 'letter of the law'.

• Oonagh Stransky: For crime fiction I think you need to be strong, gritty, unafraid to deal with shocking material, ready to deal with gristle and blood and what might seem - at first - like an occasional 'lowering of intellectual standards'. By this I mean you cannot translate a noir and think it is Proust. It is a noir, it is part of a genre, a canon and doesn't need to be put up on a pedestal. It has its own qualities which become self evident.

• Hal Sutcliffe: A good knowledge of colloquial English and especially of the foreign language. And an ability to see the book as a whole.

• Mary Tannert: Let me answer this question somewhat backward. As a translation project manager, I manage a network of freelance translators, all of them pros and specialists on various topics - legal, computers, financial, scientific, marketing, etc. I hire them to do draft translations and then proof-read their work before returning it to the customer. The hardest job in the world to persuade a translator to take is a marketing or advertising text. Most translators like factual texts and precise messages. They find it difficult, if not impossible, to 'make pictures from words', to play with language, to be creative in associating ideas, to reduce a thought from twenty words to just three. If I press them to take on such texts, they return wooden prose - factually accurate, but utterly lifeless and useless from a marketing point of view.

  Literary translators, on the other hand, love language that paints pictures far bigger than the sum total of what the words mean, and they have both the creativity and the discipline to immerse themselves in a fictive world and yet not lose their control over it.

• Laurie Thompson: I think the basic essential of a good translator is an ability to write. In our case, in English. Obviously, one needs to know the foreign language pretty well, and also the cultural background; but such knowledge won't lead to a good English translation unless one also has a flair for writing English. That applies no matter what kind of book one is translating. If the crime novel is a police procedural or something similar, one needs to have access to some 'authority' familiar with detailed procedures in the country where the book is set: I'd have thought this would usually be the author. And one also needs to contact a 'local' authority - for crime novels, I personally consult Inspector Alun Samuel of the Dyfed-Powys police force in Wales, who can always tell me what the UK equivalent is of whatever the Swedish police do.

3. CONFRONTED BY A NEW AUTHOR HOW DO YOU PROCEED? WHAT STAGES ARE THERE IN THE PROCESS?

• Adriana Hunter: I never think of being confronted by a new author but by a new book. Each book has a voice and identity of its own, regardless of the author. I usually read through the book only once and rather flittingly before translating it. I don't like picking through it too carefully and starting to worry about 'how am I going to say that?'… that would be like tasting an omelette before cracking the eggs!

• Mike Mitchell: I read his work - perhaps read about him - auto/biographical, critical material, perhaps not, then start translating. I find it takes me quite a while - 20, 30 40, or 50 pages - before I begin to feel I am on the same wavelength and have found what seems to me the right English equivalent, before I have found what I call the 'voice'. That is the most important part of the process, getting to grips with a book by translating it; the rest - background etc. - is incidental.

• Ian Monk: Generally, I start very slowly, trying to feel my way into the style. Then, once this seems to be flowing fairly well, I speed up and rapidly do a first draft of the entire book, not bothering too much if there are any particularly awkward passages or key words to be found. Then I like to put the draft aside for a month or two, go back to it and type it into the computer. This is a vital rewriting step for me, and often the moment when I solve any persisting problems. After that, I print it out and pick my way through the thing in detail in order to fine-tune.

• Elfreda Powell: We did not get off to a good start with Dominique Manotti. The initial reason for collaborating was one of speed. But, because of financial pressures, the publisher took a whole year to send us the contract for the translation. In the meantime he had advertised it twice in his catalogue, with a misprint in the working title, before we embarked on translating it at all. The French title, Sombre Sentier, refers to the Rag Trade district in Paris (hence the final title, Rough Trade). Margaret had translated it as Dark Path an initial pun (actually I still think this was a most appropriate title). In the catalogue it appeared as Dark Paths. This put Manotti in a royal rage. We then produced a specimen chapter for the publisher to submit to the Arts Council for a possible grant (which he got), but the author also insisted on seeing it, and again threw an enormous wobbly because it was not a literal translation. I then drafted a very long letter to her explaining the rationale behind the style we had adopted, which the publisher sent to her, but she was not entirely appeased. However, in the end, she expressed her satisfaction.

  Margaret Crosland adds: In a collaboration, both people must read, check and even edit each other's work.

• Bernard Scudder: I start with a fast reading to take in the plot, characterisation, the general pace and tone of the work. Sometimes I take a second, more considered reading, dwelling on what I can tell will be problem passages or themes in the translation; in the case of Indridason's crime fiction, I have hitherto simply plunged into the translation after a fast reading, having made mental notes of potential problems and how to solve them (I probably wouldn't make a very good detective!). For some of my translations I have read certain English texts that I feel on a hunch will help me with the tone or atmosphere, although this has not been necessary yet ( I hope, at least) with Indridason. He tends to research his subjects well but I happened to be well at home in English, through my earlier commercial translation and journalistic work, with the background themes in the two novels by him that I have translated so far: the nation-wide genetics database and the British occupation of Iceland in World War II. A crucial part of the investigation in Jar City hinges on sunken house foundations and burst piping, of which I unfortunately had firsthand experience from a flat purchase. So a bit of medical syndrome background information from the Internet is all I have needed to acquire so far but I may well need to mug up on English terminology and concepts for subsequent works. Authoritative and convincing background detail is vital for keeping the general plot buoyant (incidentally I've just finished reading The Da Vinci Code and noted with interest how Brown sustains a ridiculously implausible thriller plot with its endless hair's-breadth escapes, through the solid erudition of his subplot). A translation must get the tone, terminology and substance of such facts totally right - the fictional elements offer much more leeway.

• Oonagh Stransky: I'm not usually confronted by an author, but by a publishing company who has heard about my work or seen it somewhere. But when reading a new book that I will be translating (or even if I have to do a sample for the publisher) I take the time to gauge exactly what kinds of initial effects the book is having on me as I read it. These will help me later on maintain the certain qualities that the author most probably intended the reader to experience. For example, when I read Almost Blue I was struck by the eeriness of the killer's psychological bearing. It was almost frightening. As I was working on the translation (remember that this book is written in three voices: that of the killer, the detective and the blind man) I really got into the killer's head, to the point that I was having weird dreams about him. This made me focus especially on his character... it may not be a very 'deep' character, but he does have his qualities and it is necessary to respect them.

• Hal Sutcliffe: I read and reread, starting to note down problems. Then I gradually develop a sense of the whole work almost as though I'd written it myself.

• Mary Tannert: Clearly one starts by reading that person's work, partly to get a sense of where the work reveals the person behind it. I also like to understand the breadth of the author's style if that person writes not just crime fiction, but other fiction or non-fiction. Mostly, I have to decide whether I like the author's work enough to want to spend the time and energy that a good translation demands.

• Laurie Thompson: Read the book(s), of course. Contact the author (assuming he/she is alive - otherwise it is a bit more awkward), and establish how much input he/she wants to have.

4. HAVE YOU BEEN ABLE TO ESTABLISH ANY KIND OF PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR AUTHORS? IF NOT, DO YOU CONSIDER SUCH CONTACT DESIRABLE AND WHY?

• Adriana Hunter: I have met and/or spoken to a number of my authors. In a couple of cases we have worked through manuscripts in considerable detail. I find these discussions about the choice of words and possible misunderstandings fascinating. I do consider such contact highly desirable but only after I've finished the translation, not before or during. I don't like anything to upset the voice and rhythm of the English work (which I see as the same but completely separate to the original, with its own identity… like a clone brought up in completely different circumstances: same genes, different individual)

• Mike Mitchell: Yes, with all those who are living. Some will answer straightforward questions, but basically expect you to get on with it; some are interested; some want to be - from my point of view often too - involved in the translation process. Making contact with the author is often interesting; usually it is only important in answering specific questions of detail, but occasionally I have found that the author's view of what s/he thinks important in their books has affected the way I go about translating. It is different in every case, impossible to generalise on.

• Ian Monk: I just think it's necessary to be able to contact the author if necessary, and if you have any queries or have noticed inconsistencies. The advantage of working with living authors is that you can explain any mistakes you feel they have made and then agree on any corrections together. This avoids the translator having to take it on himself to 'improve' a book. I have, for instance, pointed several cases of impossible timing, or chronological slip-ups which have been corrected in the English text, and subsequently in the French paperback, too. Most authors are very happy to receive this sort of query.

• Elfreda Powell: I have exchanged letters, phone calls and e-mails with some of the authors, where their texts are ambivalent or they have referred to something very obscure, or words are actually missing, but on the whole life is much simpler if there is little contact. It is not a question, as I have said, of translating the text literally (that is only the first draft): it has to be recreated into an acceptable English idiom, and this is something some of them find difficult to accept. This is less of a problem with Italian and Spanish authors than it is with the French, who very often consider they have a better knowledge of English than the English themselves. On two separate occasions I have been told that I should translate 'flic' as 'bobby'!

  Margaret Crosland adds: I think contact with the authors is useful in the case of obscurities, and the author of a book about the Italian castrati singers was helpful to me. If an author is very fussy and think they know English well (they usually don't) they should find their ideal translator themselves and pay them, arranging things with the publisher.

• Bernard Scudder: I can't say what Arnaldur Indridason thinks about working with me, but I feel I've established a good working relationship with him. I draft a translation, perhaps having discussed a couple of obvious moot points. He e-mails back the draft marked with some definite changes and other suggestions - sometimes alterations to the original, and almost always shortening and tightening up the text. He then comes round and we go through the entire manuscript, discussing his proposals and doing text searches to make sure the changes are consistent throughout the whole work. We've only had one manuscript (Jar City) returned from editing so far and the next novel should be coming back any day. We went through all the editor's suggestions for Jar City together and I incorporated Arnaldur's comments into my copy which I sent off. So there's been a lot of collaboration and consultation and it's all been very positive.

• Oonagh Stransky: I like to meet the author after completing the novel. If I meet him before I feel like it can influence my imagination and I don't want that to happen. If I have the chance of working on a second book by an author, however, and if I've met him after completing the first, it is quite easy to 'forget about him' and just focus on the book at hand. This is what happened to Lucarelli. He came to New York to receive a prize for the translation and we had a pleasant time. But then it's business as usual. On the other hand I have also worked with authors who like to check in on you every five minutes and that is really annoying.

• Hal Sutcliffe: For me, it's a condition I lay down when discussing the project in the first place. If the author wouldn't co-operate, I wouldn't want to take on the job... And most are great, though often can't remember details and in any case are not expecting to have every word scrutinised... as the translator does.

  Where possible, I also work together with a person who is a native speaker and has sound literary knowledge as well as working up contact with the author. Such experience shows me that it is indispensable to discuss various points with the author, who may not have foreseen any problem in a particular phrase. My other language contacts are usually academics or people involved in subtitling etc. So I plague them with questions too, narrowing down questions to ask the author only the minimum.

• Mary Tannert: When I work on the history of German crime fiction, I'm out of luck. Those authors are all long dead. When I translate contemporary writers, so far I've been allowed to contact them personally with my questions. They have all been extremely kind and helpful. (Ingrid Noll once liked my solution to a translation problem much better in English than in the original German, which was very heartening!) I would find it extremely difficult to translate a living author to whom I could have no contact at all: whom would you ask what this phrase or that sentence meant? Imagine publishing a translation and then hearing the author say 'That's not at all what I meant!' I'd much prefer to tell the story the author wanted told than the one I had to piece together by guessing.

• Laurie Thompson: I have translated crime novels by three Swedish authors. One wants no input whatsoever, but is willing to answer questions, if I really need to ask any. Another is keen to read the English version and answer questions, but will leave details and final wording to me, only pointing out errors or misunderstandings. The third, who is a former English teacher, is keen to point out stylistic subtleties he is rather proud of which I might have missed. This is very useful. I think it is always useful - even essential - to contact the author and form a working relationship. We translators are playing around with their babies, after all. In my experience almost all authors have been most co-operative and helpful, acknowledging that their English is pretty good but not good enough to make detailed judgements on style and subtleties, which they leave to me. It can get awkward if an author is convinced that his English is better than the translator's. Luckily, in my experience at least, this rarely happens. It has done, but not in connection with a crime novel.

5. IN QUESTIONS OF STYLE, RHYTHM, ATMOSPHERE ETC., HOW MUCH FREEDOM DO YOU LIKE TO HAVE? DO YOU LIKE TO REMAIN FAITHFUL TO THE ORIGINAL TEXT OR DO YOU PREFER TO HAVE THE FLEXIBILITY, WHERE IT MATTERS, TO CREATE THE 'FEEL' RATHER THAN THE LITERAL ACCURACY OF THE ORIGINAL? EXAMPLES?

• Adriana Hunter: I try to remain very faithful to the original but, as I mentioned above, it's important to know when you have to let go of individual words or images in order to render the translation more accessible to the reader (or as accessible as the original was to its readers - some books are trying to be opaque!) Atmosphere is very important, and so are jokes and word games which are notoriously difficult to translate. Only a frighteningly pedantic translator would struggle to explain a pun from another language rather than binning it and finding their own opportunities to raise the same sort of laugh in a nearby sentence. I worked on a couple of medieval crime thrillers by Viviane Moore (The Darkest Red and The White Path) and these used a number of florid old words and sayings. I didn't trawl through archaic dictionaries looking for the exact same words in English, I just added enough 'forsooths' and 'my lieges' of my own!

• Mike Mitchell: What I think of as 'word-for-word dictionary faithfulness' is in general to be avoided. Put in general terms: if the original is a thrilling adventure story or a sparkling comedy and what comes out in English, however close it keeps to the linguistic coattails of the original, is not a thrilling story or a sparkling comedy, then it is not a 'faithful' translation.

  As I said above, what I look for is an English 'voice' which I feel is a good English equivalent to the 'voice' of the original (talking about narrative prose in particular). I don't really find it helpful to give a specific example as the 'voice' is an overall aspect, rather than something you do with specific words or expressions. One example that might make the point was in Blumenfeld's autobiography. He wrote that around 1910 the first cars appeared and with them the first car jokes, then told a slightly risqué joke; I substituted a different but similarly mildly risqué English joke (Lady to chauffeur who is under the bonnet 'Would you like a screwdriver?' Chauffeur: 'Oh, yes, Ma'am. As soon as I've got this engine fixed'.)

  I quite liked an article by David Sexton, many years ago in the Guardian, where he said 'reading books in translation is a lesson in reading books badly... In translation the writer has no proper voice of the kind that even a hack can command ... The words do not bring each other to life, they do not breathe together...' I hope not all translations are like that, but that is what I think a translator should try to avoid. Having said that, I do always try, with any phrase or sentence, to start out from a very precise understanding of the original.

• Ian Monk: I think that all good translation requires a sort of freedom. It is not enough to translate the 'words'. So what I do is say to myself: how would I say that in English? And then write it down, even if the literal sense strays away from the original. It also important to remember that in the context of crime (and any new fiction, for that matter) the translator is responsible for creating the feel of the book and the image of the author. It is important to make the work as fluid as possible in order to attract a readership. If the book subsequently becomes a classic, there will be plenty of opportunity for other translators to make other versions, which may give a different slant on the style, atmosphere etc.

• Elfreda Powell: I do think it necessary to have some freedom as regards style, and this is a problem with French authors: not just fiction writers. Non-fiction writers can have wonderfully interesting texts, written in a very fey prose style, which if translated literally would be instant death in the British market. It is a sad fact that the French public are far more tolerant of manipulations and contortions of style than the English. Obviously rhythm, atmosphere are key elements that must be replicated, if not in exactly the same way as the original, then in a parallel way. For example, Manotti wrote the whole of her book in the present tense. This is something of which the English (particularly the crime fiction reading public) are not very tolerant: it can become very wearing when it is prolonged, although the historic present is something perfectly acceptable to a French readership. We therefore decided to limit the chapters using the present tense to the opening one, and to those involving Commissaire Daquin's Turkish lover, Soleiman. Even so, on reflection, there were a few chapters too many. Many of Manotti's sentences are very short and have no verb. On the whole those were left as they were, though some of my friends who have read the book think that this is too staccato. But Manotti's favourite ploy was to write whole paragraphs of one word sentences which consisted simply of infinitives: 'To go downstairs. To open the door. To walk outside. Etc.', so that you are not sure whether this action is being anticipated in the protagonist's head, or whether it is actually being carried out. There is no exact equivalent of this in the English language. We translated these as present participles, thus veering towards the acting-out rather than the anticipation. There was one other tweak, which enraged the author mightily. The opening chapter, describing a Thai girl being raped and strangled is, in the French edition, an exact repetition of a passage almost at the end of the book, in which this scene is finally discovered, after months of searching, as evidence of the murder and its perpetrator, on a video recording. In the French it begins: 'La fille est là': 'The girl is there', or as it was finally translated on p. 250 'The girl was there.' But to open the book with 'The girl is there', would have started it on the wrong foot, so I changed it to 'There's a girl, sitting naked on the edge of a bed' in order to lead the reader into the plot.

• Bernard Scudder: The 'feel' is all important, but perhaps especially in crime fiction which is an imported genre in Iceland. Notwithstanding the need for local colour, few readers will be initially tempted by the 'Icelandicness', which is often what leads people to read the sagas, for example. In my view, the way to reproduce the atmosphere is with a convincing English text, because a 'typically Icelandic' text will of course only sound convincing in the original. Arnaldur Indridason's style is concise, economical and lightly ironic - it was nice to see a reviewer drawing a comparison with the style of the medieval sagas! Naturally it is important to keep this quality, although never by paying the price of 'un-Englishness'. Good Icelandic writing is richly idiomatic - the classical (medieval) style was that of saga storytellers, not scholars, and that quality still applies today. So the translated style has to try to avoid being consciously literary and arty-farty but without being too colloquial, because that effect would be out of register in English.

• Oonagh Stransky: There is a fine line between faithfulness and flexibility. I feel driven by the first but entitled to the latter. Lucarelli's book, for example, went overboard describing what it felt like for the woman detective to have her period. Now the author is a man and I'm a woman, and the editor was a woman. I translated it faithfully but brought up the fact that it sounded wrong, heavy-handed, and so on and consequently we made some fine tuning adjustments.

• Hal Sutcliffe: Experience in international organisations (especially legal ones such as the International Court of Justice) has taught me to stay faithful to the original where possible. But sometimes you have to take liberties. An example from The Writing On The Wall was calling a character by the nickname of Molly to be able to work in 'Good Golly Miss Molly' and a dancing reference; I couldn't resolve this with the original name or image.

• Mary Tannert: See my answer to Question 3.

• Laurie Thompson: Obviously, one should try to recreate whatever atmosphere the author creates in the original, using similar stylistic devices as appropriate - but because languages differ, it is not always possible to copy devices exactly. An experienced translator will not stick too rigidly to the original - he will try to be as accurate as possible, of course, but the English reader of a book normally wants to have the impression that the text was written in English, and doesn't want to be frequently reminded of the fact that it is a translation because of language that might be 'correct', but sounds awkward or stilted.

  For instance, unlike most European languages, English nowadays has only one word for 'you'; Swedish has a formal and informal word, and also an impersonal construction or a third-person form of address (e.g. 'would the inspector like to sit down?', 'what would the lady and gentleman like to eat?'). Usually one has to find a way of expressing things that reproduces the degree of formality while sounding 'normal' in English, but the precise method is usually different.

  The three crime writers I have translated have quite different styles and characteristics. One is very strong on plot, but his style is 'easy' without strong characteristics (apart from too frequent repetition of certain words and phrases - the English editor urges me to 'correct' as many of these as possible, and always makes more changes even so. The author doesn't mind). Another uses a 'hard-boiled' style, with a lot of slang, cursing and jargon. It is not usually possible to reproduce this literally, and equivalents have to be found. (Swedes tend to swear more than the English, in situations where the English would be more circumspect - reproducing the cursing in a 'literal' way would usually produce the wrong effect, giving the impression that the characters are cruder than they actually are.) The third is very careful with his style, plays with words and constructions, is economic with words, and creates an atmosphere by having a detective whose language and behaviour often seem old-fashioned and slightly remote to his younger and more with-it colleagues. He is the hardest of the three to translate, and the atmosphere can certainly not be reproduced by a literal translation.

  I think the wording of these questions doesn't reflect the reality of what the translator does. It's not a question of being allowed to have freedom - the translator takes that freedom automatically in order to achieve the best possible version faithful to the spirit of the original. No translation is perfect, of course, but one does one's best.

6. WHAT PARTICULAR PROBLEMS DOES DIALOGUE PRESENT? HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT, ARCHAIC OR, IN CONTRAST, STREET LANGUAGE?

• Adriana Hunter: Dialogue can be a killer because the words people use - particularly in English, I think - place them accurately in a particular socio-economic group (the ugly word class is trying to rear its head here). If the translator gets the dialogue wrong, they run the risk of ruining the whole mood of the book. The French have an all-embracing slang word for a man: 'type', and it's torture trying to get it right in English. Jeeves and Wooster would say 'chap', a Yorkshireman would say 'lad', an Eastender would say 'geezer', I might say 'bloke'. I'm back to my comparisons with character acting again: you have to have that ear for dialect and speech patterns. I'm working all the time, listening to the way people say things in all sorts of situations… I never know when it might come in handy.

  Dialect is particularly difficult because, as with puns, you don't want to labour away pedantically explaining the French version… you have to find an equivalent in English. I've translated a couple of wry crime novels by Louis Sanders (Death in the Dordogne and The Englishman's Wife) and they are both set in the Dordogne with lots of local colour. When the locals were speaking, I used my own sort of idiom and the odd dropped 'h' or 't' to create something that was obviously a dialect but not identifiable as an English one (which would not have been appropriate).

• Mike Mitchell: Dialogue I often find easiest to 'get into'; feel the character and speak with his/her voice. Very contemporary street language is not something I've come up against much; for the odd passages, I've consulted my children, who are closer to it. One possible problem with street language can be that it is not only associated with a milieu and a generation, but also with a culture: what do you do with adolescent German which is full of (perhaps slightly out-of-date) anglicisms, which are considered, to use the German term, 'cool'?

  Dialect, on the other hand, is a problem I've been faced with. Apart from the occasional minor character, I've never used an English dialect; I would only consider that workable if the novel was not too closely situated in the foreign culture. I generally go for some kind of non-standard language with, if necessary and allowed by the 'voice', an indication in the narration.

  Thumbprint is a good example. It is set in Switzerland and the language is an important part of the setting. (Whether Swiss is a 'dialect' or not is something I won't go into here.) Mostly the characters speak 'normal' colloquial German with the odd Swiss word or phrase. Sometimes they speak broad Swiss: this is impossible to copy, if only because there is no English 'dialect' which has a status and usage comparable to Swiss, not even Scots. Anyway, to make a Swiss detective speak broad Scots, sound like Taggart, say, would, to my mind, just sound ridiculous and disorientate the reader, rather than increasing the vividness of the setting.

  Glauser tells us his detective, Studer, normally speaks the German of Bern, though as I said above, what appears on the page is mostly ordinary colloquial German; but sometimes, when he's angry, Studer speaks 'formal' (close to written) German. The author points this out, as a way of indicating his mood. Another character speaks a mixture of Swiss and formal German which doesn't sound quite authentic and, again, Glauser points this out. I've copied this commenting on the characters' language, doing it in places where the author doesn't, where it seemed to me that the particular type of language used reflected mood or feeling. I felt I could do this because the author's 'voice' makes that kind of comment. Beyond that, I have kept a few Swiss words and phrases, where the meaning is clear enough, in order to try and emphasise the Swiss background (e.g. 'Chabis' = cabbage = nonsense)

• Ian Monk: I think I pretty much answered that one in Question 5. It really is a question of what sounds right.

• Elfreda Powell: Dialogue does often present problems and is undoubtedly one of the most troublesome elements in a crime novel. Make it too vernacular and it sounds too English, so in some cases it is best left plain. In Françoise Sagan's novel (not a crime novel) she used a Gascon dialect. I first of all translated this into normal English, but later had second thoughts and changed it to a West Country dialect: one I am most familiar with. This was a bad mistake. The book was reviewed in two leading newspapers by the same pompous Scottish reviewer, who took objection, and on reflection, he was right. Better to leave it plain. In Manotti's novel, Daquin has one conversation with an ex-student friend with whom he had studied political science. When I first translated it, it was incredibly fey (it sounded almost daft in English) and seemed to detract so much from the character that the author had so carefully built up (something vital in crime fiction is that the leading detective must be sympathetic), so I changed it to plain English. However, of course, one reviewer (a friend of Manotti) picked it up, but I still think I was right to change it. And there is one very good French crime writer, Léo Malet, who does not seem to have been translated successfully into English, because of the 1940-50s argot he used. I have, in my role as editor, seen a number of attempts that didn't quite make it.

  Margaret Crosland adds: Trying to translate dialect is a waste of time, it's bad enough trying to read it in Thomas Hardy. Dialect is aural in my opinion, writing it never seems to work.

• Bernard Scudder: The problem with dialogue is that the character types don't always end up saying what you would expect them to say in English, if you are over-faithful to the original text. Dialect is virtually non-existent in Icelandic, and linguistic class distinctions are much less pronounced than in English - often the better educated an Icelander is, the worse he speaks his mother tongue. Thus the dialogue translation sometimes has to be 'coloured' or matched to the speaker. Inspector Erlendur comes across okay but his American-educated yuppie assistant needs a transatlantic ring to some of what he says, while Erlendur's junkie daughter needs a bit of 'estuary mouth'. So theoretically these three characters could speak the same sentence which would be translated in three quite different ways.

  Icelandic is also a 'pure' language with few loan-words. Street language has a heavier input of English slang which obviously doesn't stand out culturally as such when translated, but a few choice swearwords can usually be thrown in for the appropriate effect.

• Oonagh Stransky: I have never had problems with dialogue. Street language is a fun challenge. Dialect has only cropped up in very contained instances.

• Hal Sutcliffe: There aren't really enough characteristic dialectal spellings in English to make this as easy as in Norwegian, where some dialects are mutually unintelligible. When translating Knut Faldbakken's Insect Summer, the use of dialect was especially appropriate. The reason? The central character, an Oslo grammar school boy, is dispatched for to spend the summer holidays with his aunt and uncle 'in the country'. Although the action is set in north central Norway, it is nevertheless north in relation to Oslo, so we thought it would be appropriate to use dialect for his main pal from the local area there. And it was very effective (especially as I grew up in the West Riding of Yorkshire).

  However, if the book is to be sold in the States or Canada, dialect is maybe not such a good thing. Perhaps they need their own dialect version. On the other hand, a fair degree of sophistication surely has to be assumed of readers, otherwise we may as well all hang up the tools of our trade and go home. I've got mixed feelings about this, but ultimately do not believe the translator should gear the text to the American market. Yet I do think Americans looking for a translator would tend not to opt for a British one if they could avoid it. Don't think it would be possible, really, to gear a book to both markets (there's also Australia!).

  So does the possibility of American publication restrict my options as a translator in any way? Not really, as they're two different markets and I'm not sure exactly how book sales work (I presume Arcadia simply receives orders, from wherever, and sends off the relevant books). But it is something I'm conscious of and might affect certain choices of words. In Staalesen's The Writing On The Wall, it would simply tire the reader (not to mention the translator!) to have tried to reproduce the various dialects. And what purpose would it serve? Not many people here would be able to identify a dialect from the spelling alone (whereas they would in Norway). So I opted for ungrammatical speech, indicating the dialect by phrases such as 'in her pronounced Stavanger etc. lilt' (or words to that effect, which indicated that dialect was being used but left it to the reader to supply the rest from her or his own experience of dialects. In the end, I do feel this was the best solution.

• Mary Tannert: Tough questions. For me it comes down to this: can I render the milieu and the register of the story with the language (English) at my disposal? Can I translate not just the words and sentences, but also the culture that informs the story? And will the attempt to do so do the story justice, or violence? This goes for the setting, for the underlying understanding of crime, criminal investigation, and justice in the original culture, and for the dialogue.

  For example, a favourite Austrian author of mine is Wolf Haas, whose Viennese detective is a former ambulance driver. Haas's characters and his use of the language are both peculiarly Austrian. Neither is translatable. The result of an attempt would make a mockery of Haas's genius. Better not to try. On the other hand, Jakob Arjouni, who lives in Frankfurt and whose detective figure is of Turkish descent but German nationality, is eminently translatable, because the world in which his detective moves is strongly flavoured by the American hard-boiled tradition. Crime investigation doesn't actually proceed in Germany at all as Arjouni describes it in his novels. But his approach is instantly accessible to readers who are familiar with hard-boiled crime stories.

  In general, the translator has to have the freedom to adapt what cannot be translated, but equally the story has to permit adaptation without losing what makes it unique.

  As for the archaic, that was both a challenge and a source of great satisfaction with the anthology. Since the point was to show the history of German detective fiction, Hank and I didn't want to modernise the speech; we wanted its 'age' to be evident even in the English, but we needed to keep it from being either unreadable or parodistic. The novellas by Adolph Müllner, Otto Ludwig, and Balduin Groller were where we proceeded cautiously; with the others it wasn't so evident. What helped was that they were written for a wide readership - published in instalments in literary newspapers, etc. - and that meant that the literary tone and register couldn't aim too high without the risk of losing the reader. Still, I deliberately adopted certain styles as best I could when I translated (I did the first draft of these three), using a sort of quasi-Romantic for the Müllner, a quasi-early-Realism for the Ludwig, and an arch, slightly ironic tone for the Groller (there are nineteen Detective Dagobert novellas, so I had a chance to immerse myself in the style first). Then, when Hank checked my work, he corrected any excesses. In a way those were the most fun and the most satisfying novellas to translate, because the speech itself goes a fair way to making the story what it is.

• Laurie Thompson: A recurrent problem is the use of informal words that don't have a direct equivalent in English. Swedish has informal words for boy or young man, girl or young woman, which are often also used in the sense of boyfriend or girlfriend. Often, one has to use the more formal English word because the alternatives (lass? babe? chick? crumpet? bit of fluff? obviously not!) would sound odd in the context, and then 'compensate' by using an informal word or expression close by, so that the overall effect is similar. Similarly, there are informal words for old man and old woman - but we don't have equivalents in English. It is usual for small children in Sweden to address unknown adults as 'Auntie' and 'Uncle', often in the third person. In all these cases, one has to find roundabout ways of achieving a similar effect. (In the latter case, one might get away with 'Mister' or 'Missus', for instance; but sometimes one has to dodge the construction and achieve the effect by other means.)

  Dialect is often a problem. In almost all cases it is not a good idea to use a recognisable British dialect to echo a Swedish one - it would be totally misleading to reproduce a northern Swedish dialect by using a Scottish one, for instance, and give the impression that the book is set in Glasgow rather than Kiruna. So one mentions where appropriate that the man is speaking in a northern dialect (or whatever) and uses non-standard words, phrases and constructions while avoiding a recognisable British dialect. See above for some comments on swearing. You also have to adapt Swedish practices for English readers - the crudest swearwords in English usually refer to sexual or bodily functions, whereas references to God and the Devil tend not to be so crude. More or less the opposite is true for Swedish. So you assess the degree of crudity, and choose the nearest English equivalent rather than a literal translation. And of course, all or at least many of the stylistic and linguistic choices the translator makes will probably have to be reworked if the book is published in America! But that is normally done by an editor in the American publishing house, just as a British editor will 'rewrite' a text first published in America.

  Generally speaking, I don't think the linguistic problems are usually as awkward to solve as the cultural differences. Many of these are not specific to crime fiction - e.g. differences regarding Christmas celebrations: in Sweden the main day is Christmas Eve, when people usually stay at home for a traditional meal (with ham as the traditional meat, not turkey or goose or chicken), and exchange presents; there is no tradition of 'office parties' or brash celebrations - party time is New Year's Eve. Attitudes to alcohol are different: there are no 'off licence' shops in Sweden. Low-alcohol beer (I can't remember the exact limit, but think it may well be 3.5%) can be bought in supermarkets, but strong beer, wine and spirits can only be bought in state monopoly shops. And so on… Usually you have to leave the original settings and references, but might have to try to insert an unobtrusive 'explanation'.

  In the crime field, a problem is different organisation of the police force, and a different role played by the public prosecutor. In the equivalent of the CID, reforms affecting detectives mean that there are not usually any constables (replaced by 'probationers'), and no sergeants. (Things are different in the uniformed branches.) The role played by sergeants in Great Britain is roughly equivalent to that of Inspector in Sweden - although the parallel is by no means exact - and an English Inspector could well be closer to a Chief Inspector in Sweden. (The dictionary gives the same Swedish word for both Chief Inspector and Superintendent.) So one has to blur the lines a little and hope that English readers will not be put out by details of different roles (and change things slightly if there is a chance that they might be - e.g. call probationers constables). I have never heard an English reader comment on the fact that there are no sergeants in the Wallander novels by Henning Mankell, for instance - but it's a fact!

7. WHAT ASPECTS OF TRANSLATING CRIME FICTION APPEAL TO YOU? OR THAT YOU DISLIKE?

• Adriana Hunter: I'm not a great reader of crime fiction, but I've translated a number of crime novels and I enjoy the tension of them. Rhythm is one of the most important parts of translation: if the work is going well the translation automatically has good rhythm, and tension adds to that key element. I also like the teasingness of clues, the things dotted through the text that a reader thinks back to when they've finished the book - when you're translating you're scrutinising the text so closely that you get an opportunity to pick up on the clues as you go along.

• Mike Mitchell: Sorry but I don't feel there's anything I specifically like or dislike about translating crime fiction. In my own particular case, I enjoyed the challenge of Glauser because it was something different from the other things I have done so far.

• Ian Monk: It's fun, not very hard. I think the style factor is easier to handle than in much other work, and so that's less satisfying. But I like trying to create the right mood.

• Elfreda Powell: What appeals to me most about translating crime fiction is, obviously, that it is much less heavy-going than most books on offer, and, as a bonus, has a plot, interesting if sometimes gruesome locales, pace, tension, drama, to keep up the impetus!

  Margaret Crosland adds: One drawback to translating crime or mysteries is inevitable - you have learnt the solution when you first read through. So you tend to be your own detective as you work your way through, and you long to tell the characters where they're going wrong. You can't do that with literary work. I was told by the late April Fitzlyon, a very skilled translator from Russian, that when the Victorian translators first worked on Tolstoy, they often made the novels have a happy ending - the readers preferred it that way. But nobody can change the ending of a crime novel!

• Bernard Scudder: I think the enjoyable aspects of translating crime fiction are essentially the same as those that I enjoy in reading the narrative - unfolding characterisation, suspense, the slow and careful piecing together of a picture. I know (from other translations of fiction) what would annoy me - a crucial twist in the plot that depends on untranslatable semantics, but crime writing tends to be concrete rather than abstract and I fortunately haven't encountered the problem yet!

• Oonagh Stransky: I like that people really appreciate the tones and qualities that permeate crime fiction. They're avid readers and they give strong feedback. I do, however, like to also translate many other styles of writing.

• Hal Sutcliffe: I like the feeling of mounting excitement.

• Mary Tannert: I've been reading crime fiction for nearly twenty years, and belles lettres, primarily German, since the beginning of my studies in the 1970s. I currently read both English and German crime fiction in about equal amounts, plus German translations of crime fiction from countries whose languages I do not read (Henning Mankell or Andrea Camilleri, for example).

  The German crime fiction market consists three-fourths of work in translation, primarily translated English and American best-sellers - John Grisham, Elizabeth George, Donna Leon, etc., though Germans love Mankell as well. But there is more and more good German crime fiction being published all the time.

  There's no other genre I'm drawn to, over and over, like this one. I'm fascinated by the way a society understands and deals with its sense of order, of justice. The only thing to dislike would be a sloppily-told story. I've read many, but fortunately I've never been asked to translate one. I suspect it would be frustrating.

• Laurie Thompson: I don't distinguish between translating crime fiction and other fiction. Being facetious, I suppose one could say that the crime plots are often more interesting than in other fiction - but that applies more to the reading than the translating. I see myself as a translator who has occasionally been asked to translate crime novels, rather than a translator of crime novels.

8. HOW FAR DO INDIVIDUAL PUBLISHERS SEEK TO INFLUENCE YOUR APPROACH? A POSITIVE INFLUENCE - OR A NEGATIVE ONE?

• Adriana Hunter: Luckily, no publisher has ever 'sought to influence my approach'. That might put me off doing the job in the first place. With one book, I did have an editor whose French was better than their English; they picked through the book minutely, criticising areas that they felt didn't accurately reproduce the original. It sounded trite, but I had to keep saying: 'I know that's not what he said in the French, but that's just how you would say it in English!'

• Mike Mitchell: So far I have been lucky in that I have found publishers who are on the same wavelength, or are willing to go along with what I do (the odd exception proves the rule). I haven't translated for one of the big publishing houses, where that might be a problem, I don't know. The publisher of the Glauser translation is himself Swiss and there were one or two individual things where he had a preference, but they were specific points I could easily go along with.

• Ian Monk: This varies enormously. Generally, Harvill are the easiest to work with and when I get my manuscript back, there are only a handful of changes and/or suggestions. Others are much more hands on. The editor at Bitter Lemon, for instance, radically altered my version, sexing it up rather too much I think. In this case, I didn't bother to protest too much, because I don't think it matters really. In another case, when I got back the manuscript of In His Arms by Camille Laurens (not a crime book) from Random House vast changes had been made as well. In this case, I'd worked very hard on the author's long, subtle sentences, so I told the editor that we had a straight choice: either to start again from scratch, or else publish the book without my name on it. She immediately backed down, and I more or less got what I wanted.

• Elfreda Powell: Some publishers try to influence your approach; some don't. Arcadia tried to reassure us, but also had to keep sweet the French author and her agent, so perforce had to be two-faced.

• Bernard Scudder: Harvill has a very sharp editor who certainly tightened up the translation and improved it as an English text. Arnaldur and I accepted the great majority of her suggestions and remarks, and I only dug in my heels on a handful of pet pedantries. It was a case of a free hand and constructive guidance, not deliberate alteration of the text for commercial purposes. Very positive, and a useful lesson for me when it came to translating the second book.

• Oonagh Stransky: They have never sought to influence my approach.

• Hal Sutcliffe: The publisher influenced the translation of The Writing on the Wall by asking me to remove dialect, which, after reading [the translation of Izzo's] One Helluva Mess, I agreed with. So I had to use other ruses.

• Mary Tannert: I don't have enough personal experience of publishers to say. The only giant negative is the massive disinterest of American crime fiction publishers toward work in translation. It practically takes a Nobel prize-winner to get them to pay attention. I often wonder, for example, whether Vintage Books would ever have published Carol Brown Janeway's brilliant translation of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader if Janeway weren't an editor at Random House. And the book was then a tremendous success in the U.S.!

• Laurie Thompson: In my experience publishers don't seek to influence my approach. I'm not quite sure what the question is getting at. I am asked to translate a book, I do so, the publisher edits it (in consultation with me), and it is eventually published. I don't think any publishing house in the UK has an editor who reads Swedish, and so they rely on me to be competent and accurate. When an author has been translated by several translators (especially when they are a mixture of UK and US), the publisher tries to edit the translated manuscript in such a way that the differences in translators' styles are reduced to a minimum, so that regular readers won't notice the difference (they hope). As most crime novels depend on plot rather than style, this seems to me OK, and I have no problem with letting the editor tamper with my version.

9. ARE YOU NORMALLY COMMISSIONED OR CAN YOU/DO YOU LOBBY FOR PARTICULAR AUTHORS?

• Adriana Hunter: I'm normally commissioned but I still love scouting around for new fiction, and when I find something I like I do everything I can to find a publisher for it. That's how I got my very first translation job - so I know it can work.

• Mike Mitchell: The Glauser was commissioned. I have tried to interest other publishers (Granta, Harvill, Arcadia) in foreign crime novels, but so far without success.

  In my other work, I work regularly for a couple of publishers, where it is a combination of commissioning and my own suggestions; apart from that I have sometimes been commissioned to do a book by other publishers.

• Ian Monk: I am just about always commissioned. I have lobbied unsuccessfully for several books; getting publishers to agree is nigh impossible.

• Elfreda Powell: Normally I am commissioned, or what usually happens is that I am sent a book to report on, and if I feel strongly about it, I will probably get asked if I would like to translate it. In the case of Manotti, Margaret kindly asked me to help her out.

  Margaret Crosland adds: I've never translated anything without a contract, except possibly poetry, which I like best of all, and poetry usually has little connection with money, unless the poet is dead or good at blackmail.

• Bernard Scudder: Entirely commissioned these days, I think - authors, or the Icelandic publishers who invariably act as their agents, approach me with a view to presenting a book for publication abroad. A series of Icelandic novels came out in the UK several years ago and I was able to suggest titles then, but as a rule the Icelandic literary scene is so small and esoteric to boot that no UK publisher would approach me and say: 'We're thinking of publishing something from Icelandic for a change - any suggestions?'

• Oonagh Stransky: I am normally commissioned but I have lobbied (successfully) for authors to be published. I think it's very important for translators (who have their ear to the ground) to have good relationships with editors, so that they can work for the rights of translators.

• Hal Sutcliffe: I lobby by offering to translate a chapter the author thinks is a good one, but am usually asked to do so by Norwegian publishers, the translated chapter then being hawked around (but not by me).

• Mary Tannert: Normally I take commissions, although I do have completed manuscripts of historical crime fiction that I translated out of sheer fascination rather than pecuniary interest. To lobby for a particular author would mean that I had the ear of someone in a position to publish a story, and so far that's not the case. But if any publisher reads this who wants suggestions, I could certainly make some!

• Laurie Thompson: I have never lobbied for a particular author, and have only ever been commissioned by a publisher.

10. ANY (PRINTABLE) COMMENTS ON REVIEWERS? WHAT KIND OF CRITICISMS UPSET YOU MOST?

• Adriana Hunter: Reviewers rarely comment on the translation (which we should take as a good sign… at least it wasn't clunky). They can sometimes be extremely complimentary, which is nice. Every now and then they criticise the translator for reproducing something that was in the original and then you feel hurt ('I didn't say it, I just wrote what he/she said!'). One reviewer of my first ever translation criticised my choice of the idiom 'spend a penny' when it perfectly translated the expression used in French, and was exactly the right choice for the age of the person speaking at the time and the situation in the book. Mercifully for her, I've forgotten the reviewer's name but - ridiculously - it still galls me!

• Mike Mitchell: I've not had any reviews that have been very critical of the translation (or if I have, I've managed to forget them). The reviews I like are the ones that try to understand what the author is doing, especially if they decide it is what I was trying to put across in my translation. I'm not really worried if they don't mention the translator, usually reviewers aren't qualified anyway. One review I had, which was generally very positive, warned readers that I had substituted the author's poems (within the novel) with some poems of my own. I still don't think I did, but in fact, I took it as a compliment anyway, even if it wasn't meant as one. If he really thought they were truly 'poems' then I had succeeded (see what I say about 'faithfulness' in Question 5). The only review that made me angry was one of Glauser's Thumbprint which merely said there were fifteen copyediting errors in the first four pages; neither I, my wife, my mother nor the publisher could find any.

• Ian Monk: The criticism that exasperates me most is (said of Grangé's Blood Red Rivers in the Times Literary Supplement): 'I don't know if this is badly written, badly translated, or both'. Well, it's surely the critic's job to find out, isn't it? I mean this is French, not Estonian, or something.

  The other thing that annoys me is the complete absence of the translator - though this can also be seen as flattering. For example, again in the TLS: 'Camille Laurens is a thoroughly stylish writer' (one in the eye for the girl at Random House at the same time). Generally speaking, I don't think reviewers have the slightest idea what translators do, or how they contribute to a book's success or failure.

• Elfreda Powell: Reviewers - ugggggh! If only they were of better quality, or had some knowledge of the original book, or did not follow each other like sheep, or feel they can only make their mark through negative comment. I remember a reviewer of Uccello, who based his whole review on one word I had used in the Preface (out of a possible 150,000), saying that the word must have been an inaccurate translation, when in fact it was completely accurate. Perhaps he was fishing for a commission?

  I was very surprised too when Francoise Sagan got so many long (and sometimes pompous) reviews. It was a lightweight book (though difficult to translate) and by that time in France she was of absolutely no importance as a literary figure: pure library fodder.

  What is most upsetting, of course, is when they don't bother to mention the translator's name at all: a common occurrence.

  Margaret Crosland adds: When reviewers can't think of anything to say they will attack the translator, and often give the impression that they should have translated the book themselves. Sometimes they form a claque and all say the translator is a genius. Many translators are not acknowledged, despite the best efforts of the Translators Association, and we all have to work at this, especially women, perhaps, for in Victorian times many women authors were not named.

• Bernard Scudder: I've seen several reviews of Jar City and found nothing offensive in them, they were all positive! All but one did not even mention the translation, which was great - it should mean that the translation was not intrusive but 'worked', so the story was judged on its own merits. The one that mentioned the translation said I 'captured the tone of Iceland's Old Norse, the flatness and fact-based simplification of the language. That flatness works very well in capturing Erlendur's difficulties with his daughter, as well as the natural reticence of the Icelanders themselves.' Not true of all Icelandic literary styles, but I can't complain about a comment like that.

• Oonagh Stransky: Nice question. The worst review I received was by a reviewer who took the original book and went line by line through my work until he found one line that I eliminated (a stylistic choice) and then he harped on it to no end. I am an active member of two professional organisations: PEN Translation Committee and American Literary Translators Association. This second organisation meets every year in a US city and this year I am organising a panel discussion and a workshop on the art and importance of reviewing literature in translation. It should be a valuable event. I think the best reviewers are actually fellow translators.

• Hal Sutcliffe: Criticisms masquerading as wise cracks or vice versa by people who clearly haven't the first idea of the language from which the book they are writing about is translated from. This happened with Ketil Bjørnstad's The Story of Edvard Munch, which was fiendishly difficult to translate (imitating or quoting from Munch himself and thus sometimes clumsily put). Can't remember the name of the female critic; she completely missed the point. Robert McCrum wrote a good review though.

• Mary Tannert: Our biggest problem is being ignored. Rare is the reviewer who even mentions that the work in question is a translation, much less thinks about what that might mean for the reader! I like reviewers who mention translators by name, even if they are not in a position to comment on the merits of the translation. I don't like reviewers who claim to understand translation and then complain globally about the quality of a whole work on the basis of one or two small examples of minor importance, or render grand assessments without any command of the original language to give their opinions substance.

• Laurie Thompson: About half the reviews of books I have translated make no reference to the translator. I regard this as a compliment. Most reviewers have not read the original, and so comments about the translation being good or bad have to be taken with a pinch of salt. I can't say I am upset by reviews at all, but I suppose I am a bit annoyed (or wryly amused) when somebody writes that this particular novel seems less good than the previous one by the same author, less coherent, less compelling - but perhaps that is the fault of the translator...

11. WHICH TRANSLATION, OF YOUR OWN WORK, ARE YOU PARTICULARLY HAPPY ABOUT? AND WHY?

• Adriana Hunter: Oh dear, how to choose! I did especially enjoy a book called Death of an Ancient King (La Mort du Roi Tsongor) by Laurent Gaudé which has recently been published by Fourth Estate. It's unlike anything I've ever worked on or read before; it creates its own extraordinary universe of honour, duty, love and death in the sweeping, scorched plains of a massive continent. I also really love a book I finished translating in the summer: Grey Souls (Les Ames Grises) by Philippe Claudel (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). A painfully beautiful book about love, loss and wasted lives set in the first world war and pivoting on the murder of an eight year-old girl.

• Mike Mitchell: Difficult to answer. The translation of Erwin Blumenfeld's Eye to I (with a colleague) because of the number of allusions, puns, jokes, hidden quotations, songs, verses etc. made it a challenge; Grimmelhausen's Simplicissimus simply from the challenge of making a large-scale 17th-century novel readable for a modern audience without anachronisms, omissions etc. But I've generally been happy with what I've done - how successful they are I leave to reviewers and, above all, readers.

• Ian Monk: I think the later Pennacs and Marie Darrieussecq's A Brief Stay with the Living (Faber). Just because I really feel that I got the style right.

• Elfreda Powell: I don't have a favourite translation. In general I don't carry out post-mortems on my translations, because by the time the book appears, I've moved on to something else. I enjoy the work while I'm doing it, but probably if I ever were to read it again after publication, I would want to rewrite it completely.

  Margaret Crosland adds: Among my translations is a short book with the publisher's inaccurate if commercial title: God Remained Outside. It is by de Gaulle's niece, about her time in Ravensbruck, published by Souvenir and it was runner up for the Scott Moncrieff translation prize a few years ago. It has sold well, a royalty would have been useful but publishers never like this risk.

• Bernard Scudder: On the crime front, I've only done two novels so I can't really judge yet; I need a couple more to make a decent comparison. In other literature I'm most pleased with Angels of the Universe by Einar Már Gudmundsson, because I think I caught the tone and spirit of the Beatle era original in an English that worked, and Egil's Saga, because I think the tenth-century protopunk Egil came out as such rather than the stuffy archaism that he's sometimes portrayed as being, and because I think I got the content and feel of his poetry across. I'm also pretty chuffed with various other poems I've translated.

• Oonagh Stransky: I like working on Lucarelli, but I also learned a lot about my self and my work from the translation that I did of Giuseppe Pontiggia's novel Born Twice. It has recently been nominated for a prize but unfortunately Alfred Knopf in New York has not yet released the information to the organisation that is giving the award that would clinch the deal, so to speak, so I may never receive that prize. This would be a real shame. As the money is never very good for translations and as reviews are few and far between, prizes are very important and constitute a certain kind of recognition that is always appreciated. [BC notes: Oonagh Stransky eventually won that prize, awarded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in December 2004.]

• Hal Sutcliffe: Knut Faldbakken's Insect Summer. Because the person I translated it with was fluent in Norwegian (his mother tongue) and English and was also deeply knowledgeable about literature, had a good sense of humour and had grown up on a Norwegian farm. We really managed to capture the essence of the original and remained faithful to it but not slavishly so. Where we couldn't get some pun or other, we noted it and added one of our own later to make up for it.

• Mary Tannert: I think I'm happiest with the oldest work I've done, the novellas in the anthology mentioned in the introduction - especially Adolph Müllner's The Caliber and Otto Ludwig's The Dead Man of St. Anne's Chapel. Staying true to the style and narrative integrity of each of these older works was a wonderful challenge, and I have the feeling that we (Henry Kratz and I) succeeded. It will never be a best-seller, but it was a source of tremendous satisfaction. That said, there are some contemporary German crime novels that I would love to be commissioned to translate, and I suspect they could rival the historical novels in satisfaction.

• Laurie Thompson: I can't say I am ever particularly happy with a translation - it could always be better.