Dolors Gallart – Translator

Since childhood, I have loved books. At the university I studied something related to them, of course : Romance Philology. The main professional issue for that was teaching, but after few years teaching languages to teenagers, I decided to change. At first, I translated computer science texts (operating systems) with a team of colleages. As that didn’t fulfil my aspirations, I took the more risky path of book translation, which is what I like to do, even if it’s not very financially fruitful, specially in Spain.I have translated nearly all sorts of books, one of airplane scale models, for example, long time ago. That was when I decides to draw a line at technical subjects.I love words, languages, the music of sentences. I particularly adore translating descriptions of landscapes, athmospheres, because I’m a great fan of nature and I know, for example, a lot of names of plants in several languages.Another driving force of my work is my yearning for knowledge.Every book is a learning experience for me. When I translate little illustrated books, I often hace much fun because of the variety of subjects (travels, cooking, erotism, self-help…) and with fiction books, the characters, the places become very real for me because, as a translator, Ispend a lot of time in their company, scrutinizing everything.Even if I sometimes don’t Iike them very much, the relationship is very intense until I finish the book and I have to develop an empathy for them to present them in the best light possible in Spanish.For me, the most important thing in translation is to maintain the difficult balance between fidelity to the source text and to the target language, without forcing it, so as it doesn’t loose it’s natural flow and spirit and becomes more ardous or burdensome to read. That’s what I always try to do.