Want great writing advice? Ask a translator

Whether you’re writing an essay for school, revising a chapter in your novel, or composing a sensitive email to coworkers, translating the words in your head into writing can be a frustrating process. A literary translator knows this feeling well, and moreover, accepts it as a natural part of the work of writing. With advanced degrees in diverse topics, including translation, writing coaches at Gilliam Writers Group can offer unique and surprising insight into what makes great writing. Here’s one way how.

In 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, the translator Eliot Weinberger studies the translations of a brief eighth-century Chinese poem, one of the most frequently translated poems in the world. One need not read more than a handful of the nineteen translations, including those by Ezra Pound and Octavio Paz, to understand how movable language can be. So many words to choose from! And not just words, but word orders and paragraph breaks and tones and on. It’s easy to feel like nothing ever quite fits. 

Even in the translations Weinberger praises, there are still apparent issues, something inexact about the English (and French and Spanish) equivalents to the Chinese. The delicate art form of translation is also an inherently imperfect one, with mysterious gains and losses. And haven’t you ever felt this way about your own writing, like the words never quite fit how they did in your head?

“Translation shows me how to work with new words, how to experiment with new styles and forms, how to take greater risks, how to structure and layer my sentences in different ways,” writes Jhumpa Lairi in an essay for LitHub. “Reading exposes me to all this, but translating goes under the skin and shocks the system, such that these new solutions emerge in unexpected and revelatory ways.”

You don’t have to speak more than one language to benefit from a writing coach trained in literary translation, whose job it is to understand the function of language at its atomic foundation. 

With the surge of remote work in the past few years, your options for coaches and tutors have grown, and it can be hard to find writing coaches online who suit your specific needs. You can trust that the writing coaches at Gilliam Writers Group offer a singular and creative approach to learning, helping you find just the right (or wrong) words for the job.