Do the quotations first: sourcing quotations in translated academic books

Jerzy Franczak, a professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the author of scholarly books and fiction alike, wrote this to us once the job was done:

“Współpraca z nimi nie tylko przyniosła znakomity efekt, ale sama w sobie okazała się małą intelektualną przygodą.” (“Working with them produced an excellent result, and the collaboration itself turned out to be a small intellectual adventure.” My translation.)

The job was a year of work on his study of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, a book of more than 400 pages, published in English as Errant Letters: Jacques Rancière and the Philosophy of Literature (Peter Lang, 2023). Almost 100 emails. Several long phone calls about points of translation, and a few about paperwork.

When an argument comes largely out of French, then gets processed and written up in Polish, and then has to work as an English book, preparation is most of the job.

(I will write separately about how hard it can be for authors to sign a contract with their translators inside a translation grant, and how we try to help with that.)

We find up to 95% of the quotations ourselves

Scholarly books carry long footnotes and quotations from publications all over the world. Usually those sources already exist in English, either written in it or translated into it. During a project we track down up to 95% of the original quotations ourselves.

Then come the genuinely hard cases.

Rancière is only half available in English

A great deal of Rancière remains untranslated from the French. So we prepared a list of the quotations we could not find in digital repositories and asked the author to help us with it.

Many of those problems were solved by his trip from Krakow to the libraries of Paris. Not every author has that option.

How the author sorted his own quotations

Availability decides how a quotation gets handled, so Franczak groups every Rancière passage in his monograph into six categories: matched to an English edition with a page number, matched without one, copied out in French, not found, promised for later, and Polish only. That inventory tells you where the work sits.

To show how tangled this gets, here is how Franczak catalogued the Rancière material in his Polish monograph by availability. The categories are his, in my translation:

• matching quotations from English-language editions, with the page number in that edition;
• matching quotations from English-language editions without a page number;
• French quotations copied out in the original;
• quotations I could not find;
• quotations I will supply later;
• Polish version only.

An English edition missing 4 chapters

Check which edition an English translation follows. On the Shores of Politics renders the 1990 French Aux bords du politique and omits 4 chapters that the revised 1998 French edition added. One of the missing chapters sits in an anthology, another in a journal, and the rest exist only in French.

In December 2022 the author told me that a lot of the work came from serious differences and gaps between the French originals and the Polish and English translations. Chapters from certain volumes survived in translation only inside collected editions or journals.

Take Aux bords du politique. The English translation, On the Shores of Politics (Verso, 1995, translated by Liz Heron), follows the 1990 French edition and drops 4 whole chapters that the revised French edition of 1998 added.

The author located one of them in a separate anthology and one in a journal, and quoted the other two for us straight from the French. At that point we used our own resources and translated from the French as well.

What we learned

We always build a list of the quotations we cannot find. Since this particular adventure we build it in the first step of a translation, before a single paragraph of the book is drafted.

That way we can discuss the problem with the author and write to specialists at universities anywhere in the world while the translation is already moving.

That is how the next book is going. More on it soon.

If your book quotes widely and you want the sourcing settled before the translation starts, request a quote.