Staged for the Market


The challenge of capturing the "foreign" in translation lies in balancing the text's smoothness and familiarity, as if it were originally written in the target language, with the need to preserve elements of its difference and origin. Translators have long debated this choice. In the past, keeping foreign words or phrases in the text was more acceptable, especially when there was an established cultural familiarity. But representing foreignness isn't straightforward. Often, it depends less on the original language and more on what the receiving culture imagines foreignness to be. This becomes especially complicated when translating from languages that lack a shared history with English, such as Yoruba, where we just have no idea how they are meant to sound. In many cases, making something sound "foreign" in translation only works when it isn't really so foreign to begin with.

Jhumpa Lahiri shares a similar concern when she writes about book covers as an outer layer that introduces the book to the world. Covers speak in a visual language shaped not by the writer, but by designers, editors, and marketing teams. Their choices are often driven by aesthetics, but increasingly by market demands. Like translations that try to preserve the essence of the original, covers aim to convey something of the book's spirit. Yet they, too, are filtered through the tastes, assumptions, and expectations of a particular audience. Lahiri has seen this firsthand in the covers of her own books, images that often reflect stereotypes or simplified projections of who she is. In both translation and cover design, what reaches the reader is shaped by more than the original text. It is shaped by the world the text enters, and by what that world is ready to see.

~Ibrahim