After several months of hard work by my brilliant translator, Jon Berasategui, the Spanish version of my novel The Red Gene is now done and will be published later this year as El Gen Rojo. Working with Jon has been a delight. I hadn’t really considered beforehand the level of trust required of an author. Has my translator fully understood the subtleties of the English language, why I chose this word or phrase over another? In almost all cases the answer was yes and my trust increased as the work progressed. An author reasonably fluent in the language can potentially be a pain for the translator so I could only admire Jon’s patience with my doubts. In the to-and-fro of our collaboration there were occasions where I questioned one of his choices and after some discussion we agreed on a change; in other cases we made a joint decision to stick with his version. I hope Jon would agree that this process, at times involving several rounds of dialogue between us, has always been friendly and respectful.

Working with Jon has been a huge learning process for me. Expressions (literal meanings in brackets) such as pasado el arroz (past the rice) for ‘over the hill’, montaña rusa emocional (emotional Russian mountain) for emotional rollercoaster, saltar la liebre (let the hare loose) for let the cat out of the bag, tirar la casa por la ventana (to throw the house out of the window) for splash out and my favourite, mandar a alguién a freir esparragos (to send someone to fry asparagus) for telling someone to ‘go to blazes’, were all new to me. My grasp of verb forms and tenses still feels shaky but I hope it has improved a little. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ll ever quite get the hang of Spanish punctuation. Using dashes instead of quotation marks defeats me still.

That English expression ‘go to blazes’ is an example of the dated language I sometimes used for dialogue in the more historical sections of a novel that spans some seventy-five years and which makes the work of the translator even more challenging. It’s yet one more factor to take into account when choosing the most appropriate Spanish equivalent. As a simple example, the forms of address (whether to use the familiar tu or more formal usted) have to reflect the customs of the period. Usted is little used these days, at least in Andalucía, but as in Britain, social status in Spain was more pronounced in previous generations.

Some of my Spanish characters make mistakes when speaking English. How to convey this in a translation? Similarly, some of the dialogue spoken by English characters has been phrased in the Spanish translation in a way that reflects English speech patterns. For example, one of the English characters says, “I suppose I’d better introduce myself”, which appears in the Spanish version as “Supongo que será mejor que me presente”, a phrasing that I don’t think a Spaniard would ever use.

Translating a novel inevitably involves countless decisions at every point. One of the basic issues to be decided is how literal to be. There should be scope to translate more freely as long as the meaning and mood are retained. It’s a question of judgment that has to be carefully considered – not just once but in every sentence. I can’t imagine AI ever managing this with the skill and perception of a good human translator. Would I trust to Google Translate a novel that took years of hard work and emotional energy to write? No way! ¡Ni hablar!