Translators

Getting comedies onto the big screen has become a sobering business in Hollywood. Once one of the movie industry's most successful genres, with stars such as Eddie Murphy and Will Ferrell boasting $20-million paychecks, comedy is now among the most challenging propositions for the studios that bankroll them. The fact that they typically aren't popular overseas — where culturally specific humor can be difficult to translate — has become a larger obstacle in an increasingly global film business.

There was a time, way back in the late 1990s, when coolhunting was still cool, when nearly every Madison Avenue ad agency wanted a resident hipster to interpret the spending habits of those inscrutable Gen-Xers. Then the Internet exploded, connecting everyone to everything in an instant, and suddenly, the art of predicting the next big trend got way more complicated.

I enjoyed your article, "What Is the American for Maman ?" because it was from a translation of "L'Etranger" that I first realized that translators of novels can often stray far from the literal. I read the Stuart Gilbert translation in the spring of 1967 and liked this sentence in Chapter IV (I really don't know why, as Meursault would say): "She looked sad for a bit, but when we were getting our lunch ready she brightened up and started laughing, and when she laughs I always want to kiss her."

Regarding Alan Cheuse's review of Juan Benet's "Return to Region" ("Within the Verbal Kingdom of a Spanish-Language Faulkner," Oct. 4), outrage is not nearly strong enough a word to express my reaction to the omission of the translator's name from the review. Does Cheuse or The Times imagine that "Return to Region" was somehow magically transformed from Spanish into English much like Athena sprang from the head of Zeus? No, it required the very hard work and creative abilities of someone who speaks both languages and understands their nuances to render "a horizon of heather and brambles, sprinkled with sage and hawthorn" from the original Spanish.

JUST BEFORE HIS ASCENSION, Jesus gathered his disciples atop a mountain in Galilee and commanded, "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature." Easier said than done. Of the world's 5,445 known languages, 3,800 have never been written down. More than 300 million people speaking 3,180 languages have never seen a Bible in their native tongue.