Translator Burton Pike Accepts 2016 Friedrich Ulfers Prize

A witty translator wrote that a translation is your book with someone else's name on it. When I was teaching translation, I would tell my students that in translating prose fiction the words were the least of their problems. First, I told them, you need to identify the book's or the story's rhythm, how the words flow; you do that by reading the text aloud and listening. Then you fit the English words and sentences to the underlying pacing of the German, and you would be in business.