An Insufficient Process of Internationalization: Militant Translation and the Experience of Translating into English the Best-Selling Catalan (Sf) Novel Ever

Abstract

The theorization of translation focuses on the actual process of translating but overlooks the behind-the-scenes process by which a translation materializes, from commission (or proposal) to publication. Translating into English the science fiction produced in the less -known languages is, in this sense, a particularly complex endeavor. Anglophone editors can hardly be expected to know foreign SF traditions often neglected in their native territories. This situation requires that translators into English of SF written in languages with limited international projection act—using Catalan-Italian translator Francesco Ardolino’s concept—as ‘militant translators’, that is to say, as the curators of the whole process of translation and beyond. Here I chronicle how I became the militant translator into English of Manuel de Pedrolo’s Mecanoscrit del segon origen (1974), which is not only first-rate SF within a rich local tradition but also the best-selling Catalan novel ever. I not only published my inverse translation (as Typescript of the Second Origin, Wesleyan UP, 2018) but also became the main generator of bibliography in English about Catalan SF and about Pedrolo’s Mecanoscrit, as I narrate.

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