Interview: Translations with Nevena Andrić

Episode 132

Release Date: March 20, 2024

Your hosts had the opportunity to chat with Nevena Andrić, who works as a translator at one of the biggest Serbian publishing houses. They discuss the joys of translating beloved works like Night Watch from Discworld and The Song of Achilles. They also talk about the different challenges of translating fantasy vs scifi vs nonfiction, works with gender fluid characters and how languages incorporate gender in disparate ways, and how much wine it takes to translate Yeats.

See the list of works that Nevena has translated into Serbian: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/6456299.Nevena_Andri_ 

Thanks to the following musicians for the use of their songs:

- Amarià for the use of “Sérénade à Notre Dame de Paris” - Josh Woodward for the use of “Electric Sunrise”

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

---

Episode Transcript*

*this transcript is AI generated, please excuse the mess.

Sara: 0:09

And I'm Sarah, and I am so excited that we are joined by Navina Andrick to talk about translations today.

Nevena: 0:18

Hi! Thank you, thank you for inviting me.

Lilly: 0:21

Thank you so much for joining us. But before we get into our main topic of conversation today, what's something great that happened recently? Sarah, why don't you start?

Sara: 0:31

Something great that happened recently is I have used up most of the boxes of lemons that I had from my lemon trees. So I only have one box left. I'm very pleased. It's been a lot of lemons.

Lilly: 0:46

It's a Herculean effort.

Sara: 0:47

Yes.

Nevena: 0:49

Well, I have a little herb garden on my balcony and something just sprouted today. I'm not sure what it is, might be a weed, might be cilantro, we don't know. It's really exciting, but I was really excited to plant anything this year, so yeah,

Lilly: 1:07

That's so exciting! Yay!

Nevena: 1:09

yeah.

Lilly: 1:10

That's the best part of spring when plants start growing. My good thing is very boring. I finally took care of some health insurance paperwork that I have needed to do for like three months. Nothing drastic, just one of those things that I have to do but have been putting off. And I finally did it, and now it's not on my to do list anymore, and that is good.

Nevena: 1:31

That sounds great.

Sara: 1:33

That is quite good.

Lilly: 1:35

What is everyone drinking today? I have decaf coffee, because that's where I am now. Decaf.

Sara: 1:43

I have a milky oolong tea. It's quite good.

Nevena: 1:48

I have just regular coffee with milk. So yeah, nothing, nothing really exciting. I

Lilly: 1:55

cream in mine, yeah. I could drink black coffee, but what am I trying to prove? Why would I?

Nevena: 2:03

can't.

Lilly: 2:04

Yeah. I started reading Oh no, I should have looked up the title before I started this sentence. The Siege of Burning Grass? Sarah, help. Is that the name of the book?

Sara: 2:16

Yes, The Siege of Burning Grass by Primi Mohamed.

Lilly: 2:19

Thank you. Thank you for telling me what I'm reading. Just started, um, about a chapter or two in. I love it so much. The prose is amazing. I'm enjoying it immensely.

Sara: 2:29

haven't actually asked us a question. You just went in to say what you were reading. Sorry.

Lilly: 2:36

is everyone else reading right now?

Sara: 2:38

I just finished reading The Butcher of the Forest, also by Premium Muhammad, which was excellent. It's her latest novella. She is such an incredibly prolific author. I think she has, that just came out, and then The Siege of Burning Grass is coming out, and I think she probably has more things because she writes an incredible amount, and all of her work is fantastic. I really loved it.

Nevena: 3:01

I'm reading Unseelie by Ivelisse Haussmann, I think. I can't remember any names ever since I switched to ebooks. I just can't remember names because I'm not staring at them all the while. But Unseelie is I actually really, really love it. I picked it out because it has great cover art, because I'm a sucker for cover art. But it has an autistic main character, autistic protagonist, and fairies, and magic, and it's really fun. It's like young adult to middle grade, something in between, I think.

Sara: 3:39

That sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah.

Nevena: 3:42

It is, it is, I'm really enjoying it.

Lilly: 3:45

But we are actually here to talk about some of the work that you do as a translator. We were hoping you could start off by telling us a little bit about yourself, how you got into translation, that kind of thing.

Nevena: 3:56

So I majored in Scandinavian languages and literature at the university in Belgrade and I minored in English. But at the Scandinavian languages we had really awesome classes in literary translation and stuff. And right after I finished university I started working in a publishing house as the rights manager. I was 25, really young, and after a year, I burnt out, and then I just stayed on as a translator. And I've been with that publishing house ever since. It's the largest publishing house in Serbia. It's called Laguna, and we used to publish a lot of fantasy. Now, Not so much because the house has to publish to the market basically and I have been translating a ton of very famous authors I basically started because no one wanted to translate fantasy because it has a lot of difficult words and I really, I love fantasy. I have loved it my whole life. So I just jumped right into it. I grabbed the chance. I was like, okay, give me everything and they did. So I, I've translated like, I don't know, 19 books by Terry Pratchett. I've translated some Roger Zelazny. uh, Lois McMaster, Bujold, uh, Neil Gaiman. I, I've translated, uh, like Madeline Miller, like Circe and Song of Achilles, like basically a lot of writers.

Sara: 5:36

It sounds like basically, if you've heard of them in English, you have probably translated them into Serbian.

Nevena: 5:43

Most likely, uh, I mean right now there, there are two of us, uh, me and my friend Ivan, and we translate fantasy basically, so it's either me or him in, in our publishing house.

Sara: 5:56

What has been your favorite thing to translate?

Nevena: 6:00

Oh, that's Such a difficult question. I mean, the only worst thing that you could have asked would be what's your favorite book? My favorite thing to translate? Okay, I have to pick two. I have to pick two. The first one is a Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. That's my favorite book by Terry Pratchett. I adore it. I have read it like a million times and the first time I read it, I like, I read it in a night. I just picked it. Read it all the way through. It was a bit challenging to translate because Okay, this is not a spoiler. The book came out 20 years ago, right?

Sara: 6:36

Yeah.

Nevena: 6:36

I talk about it or not?

Lilly: 6:37

Oh yeah, go

Sara: 6:38

Go for it.

Nevena: 6:39

because the the the main character Sam Vimes goes back in time like 20 or 30 years and It needs to be old timey, a little bit old timey, the way that people speak and everything. And it was interesting and challenging to find the right tone in Serbian, to, like, capture that. Because it cannot be 20 or 30 years from now, because that's basically, like, the 90s, or it were, it were the 90s when I was translating it. And I needed to go back to, like, the 60s or something to get the right tone. It was, you know, A bit of experimentation until it happened and my second favorite book to translate it was actually a series because I I'm cheating right now. Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny, because it's one of my favorite books. And when I was translating it, it was literally like being transported into the world of the book. And every morning I would get up and I just couldn't, I couldn't wait to get to the computer and to just, to just go there.

Lilly: 7:44

It sounds like you mostly work with fantasy genre. Do you do any, like, science fiction, any, like, related genres, or is it mainly fantasy?

Nevena: 7:55

I have worked on a bit of science fiction. I have translated two books by Lois McMaster Brujol, The Warrior's Apprentice and The War Game, but that's not so much science y science fiction, because I really don't have a science background. It was not really my thing. Difficult to translate and I also I adore her books

Lilly: 8:19

Do you find, uh, translating specific genres or topics easier than others? It sounds like science fiction is more difficult because of the science terms.

Nevena: 8:30

Well, I think it would be I think it would be depends on the science fiction, I guess But I don't think it depends on the genre that much. I'm really bad with non fiction I mean i'm not bad, but i'm really slow because it's I need to check a lot of facts, a lot of real world stuff that I don't know because if it's fantasy, I've been translating it for like 15 years and I know most of the words and, not just words, but the right orthography and just the way it should be translated. And with real world stuff, it's really difficult because if you mess it up, somebody might complain.

Sara: 9:11

So what exactly is your translation process? Like how long does it take you to translate a book? Does it just depend on the book or?

Nevena: 9:21

Well, uh, it mainly depends on the number of pages. I mean, if you take, like, a Terry Pratchett book that's, like, 300 pages, 400 pages long, I can probably do it in two months and a half. But when I translated Peter V. Brett, whose books are Way bigger, like 700, 800 pages. It will take like four months, five months, because the longer a book is, the harder it is for me to keep it all in my head. So I have to reread and reread and reread the text afterwards so that I catch all the mistakes and stuff. Not just typos, but like all the spelling of names and everything.

Lilly: 10:05

It sounds like you're translating from English into Serbian. You don't do any translation the other way. I just want to clarify. Okay, thank you.

Nevena: 10:14

Well, I, I have, I have done it, but, like, not, not books, like, scripts and something when I was younger, before I got this gig. So, yeah.

Lilly: 10:23

Cool. Are there any, like, go to translations for common idioms? Is that a thing? Or do you have to come up with it on the fly every time?

Nevena: 10:33

Well, basically I have my own go to translations for a lot of idioms. I don't think about it anymore. When I was starting to work on this, it was really difficult because I'm kind of used to it. to thinking in English, for some reason. And so, going back to Serbian, to start translating it back to Serbian, that was a bit tough. But then I got used to it, and now I really don't stop to think about it. I, I, I don't know. Sometimes it will get tough, obviously, because some idioms are not exactly same in tone in both languages. Like, it will sound more formal than it's supposed to, or more colloquial, and so you have to come up with something else. And sometimes idioms just can't be translated with an idiom, and you just have to explain it. There just aren't any corresponding idioms.

Lilly: 11:32

Do you ever have to give, like, extra contextual information about, I don't know, a language thing or a cultural thing?

Nevena: 11:40

I hate footnotes with all my heart and soul. I hate them. They, to me, they look like dirty text on the page.

Lilly: 11:49

you love Pratchett!

Nevena: 11:51

no, I love his, I love his footnotes. I hate translator footnotes.

Lilly: 11:56

Okay.

Nevena: 11:57

I, uh, I will not mention a book by name, but there was this book that was fiction. And it was about music and there were a lot of bands mentioned and next to the name of every band there was like a footnote and it said a band from the 60s a band from the 70s a band from the 60s yeah we get it it's a band it's pretty obvious from the text it's a band so yeah i don't i i try i try to avoid footnotes whenever it's possible but sometimes there are they are just Necessary.

Lilly: 12:31

It sounds like that would be easier to avoid with fantasy since the book is creating its own world to begin with.

Nevena: 12:38

Absolutely. I mostly have to use them in non fiction. In fantasy, I really don't remember I must have used Oh yeah! No? There was a really interesting thing. The new series by Peter Vibret, The Desert Prince, has a gender fluid character. And, in English, it's very convenient that there are no, basically, verbs are not gendered. In Serbian, verbs are gendered. If you say, like, Olive did something, you're basically saying, Olive, she did something. Or, Olive, he did something. And in the book, you're supposed to get it from the text that they are gender fluid, but it's not clear until a certain point in the text. And so I had to start changing pronouns because we don't have like a plural. They in Serbian. We just have he or she. I mean, we have they, but it's not contextually right. And so I had to start using interchanging pronouns. I consulted the author. He agreed, but I had to put a footnote to say,

Lilly: 13:55

Heh heh

Nevena: 13:55

is not a typo.

Lilly: 13:56

heh.

Nevena: 13:57

This was done in agreement with the author.

Sara: 14:01

So it sounds like you sometimes do talk with the author about a translation decision that you make. How much input do they have? Like how closely do you tend to work with the author during the translation process?

Nevena: 14:15

This was the only time, actually, because mostly, mostly a book is enough. I mean, a book is its own world. Everything is pretty clear. I never had any, any very serious questions. Sometimes we have to write to the publishing house to ask, like, how do you pronounce the name of the author? Because in Serbian, you have to transcribe it. So this was the only time I actually had to contact the author. And I wrote him. A very, very long email with a ton of questions because, because of what I just explained and some other stuff that are really, really hard to get into Serbian and to keep it subtle about gender and things. So I had to, I had to write to him and to try to find the best way to solve that and he's He's a really, really nice guy. I met him afterwards. He visited Serbia. He's really cool. He replied in like four hours. I really didn't expect him to, to reply that fast. And we just emailed back and forth. We agreed on everything very easily and it was great.

Lilly: 15:22

Do you ever collaborate? You said you have a colleague who's also transcribing fan er, translating fantasy, excuse me. Do you ever collaborate with them, or is it mostly an independent project?

Nevena: 15:35

No, it's, it's always an independent project. I can't really imagine how it would work if we had to. Work together because our styles are very different. I mean, as a translator, you basically You need to die. I mean, you need to not be visible in the text. Your style needs to not exist. But it still does. I mean, my translations and his translations are just really different. And I would say both are fine. We're just different people and it just sounds different. Maybe somebody wouldn't notice, but I'm, I'm used to paying attention, close attention to text and I, I just, I would really notice it. It would maybe work with like, alternating points of view. If I translated one and he translated the other, but I don't really see why we would do it.

Sara: 16:28

Do you ever read a book that's been translated and think, Oh, this is not how I would have done it. I would have done it, you know, totally differently.

Nevena: 16:38

Oh my god. Yes. Yes. That's really tough. I really don't like to read in Serbian anymore if it's translated from English because it's really difficult to distance myself from that, from what you described. Sometimes, when I'm in the editing phase of a book, I'm trying to edit everything. I want to edit websites that I'm reading, I want to edit books that I'm reading, I just can't stop editing. Thinking like that, like, okay, there's a typo, okay, there's, um, we need to change the order of the words in the sentence. It's just, it's, I'm a little crazy. At least when I'm editing. So, yeah, I asked your question. It's really hard. I can really appreciate some great translations. If I stop thinking about the words and start thinking about the book, then it means it's great. I at least think it's a great translation of a great book.

Sara: 17:40

So it sounds like it is kind of hard for you to take your translator hat off when you're reading in Serbian, as you've just described. What about when you're reading in English? Like do you look at a book and think about how you would translate it?

Nevena: 17:55

How did you know? did you know all the time? I'm getting better at turning it off. But it's like a running commentary in my head as I'm reading or listening to books. It's like a running commentary in Serbian where I'm consecutively translating what I'm hearing and it's really tiring. It really tires my mind and so I really try not to do it. But sometimes if I have worked a lot that day it's absolutely impossible to turn it off.

Lilly: 18:24

What has been the hardest thing for you to translate? I know you had mentioned nonfiction, so let's keep it in the fantasy genre.

Nevena: 18:31

I'm I'm going to break that rule at once. The most difficult thing was, was Terry Pratchett's biography. I mean, it's non fiction, but it's still about Pratchett, so it's almost fantasy. It's like borderline. It was not so difficult because of the language. It was really difficult because of the content. Because I was really, really attached to Pratchett, of course I didn't know, but like, when he died, I cried for three days, unconsolably. I couldn't stop. And so When I was translating and reading his biography, whenever I got near the end when he started getting sick, it was so hard, emotionally, to get through that. To get through that over and over and over again, checking the text, editing. Whenever I got near the ending, I would just start crying again, and I knew, I knew all the words, I knew all the sentences, I knew what was going to happen, obviously. But I just couldn't help it. So, yeah, that was, that was really tough.

Lilly: 19:39

Yeah, we read that last year and that was a hard book to get through. It was so good, but so sad.

Nevena: 19:45

yes, yes.

Sara: 19:48

Do you have, like, a dream book that you'd like to translate? Is there one book that you really would love to work on?

Nevena: 19:55

I think there are many. That's such a good question. I, I have no idea how to answer. No, really, I mean, There's so many books and every few days I think of something and I'm like, oh my god, I would love to translate this. But basically my, my dream books were Nightwatch and Chronicles of Ember. I just, I couldn't believe I actually got to translate it. Like, I mean, they actually bought the rights and everything. My friend who was the rights manager at the time was like, oh, I have something to tell you, but you need to sit down. Uh, we have bought. a book. Can you guess which one it is? And I, of course, I couldn't. And he said, it's something with princes, because the book is called Nine Princes of Amber, the first one. And I just started screaming. So I guess that was my dream book. And it would probably be something by, by Robin Hobb. I mean, the, the first three books in the realm of Elderlings have been translated already, but. The others have not, so I guess, I guess that would be something I would pick.

Lilly: 21:03

How often when you're translating a book is that the first time you're reading it?

Nevena: 21:08

Maybe 50 percent of the time, I guess. Because a lot of, a lot of the genre books, the fantasy books, I have already read. I mean, sometimes it happens that I have not, but I have read a lot of them because we generally translate the famous stuff. But, uh, books from other genres, because I have translated A lot of things. Romance and, like, contemporary literature and stuff. Those books, I mostly, I read for the first time while I'm translating them.

Sara: 21:43

So, how often do you come in to translate a book, like, mid series? Like, there was someone else who translated the first book, or the first couple of books, and then you come in and finish the series. Does that happen?

Nevena: 21:56

Yes! It happened quite often at the beginning of my career. Because I just, I got into publishing at a weird point, when there were many series that were, like, midway translated and then the translators left or gave up or whatever. So When I started, the editor was like, Oh, you like fantasy. Do you want to continue this series? Do you want to continue this series? The translator gave up on this series. Do you want it? And I wanted everything. But right now, it doesn't really happen anymore. Because basically, if I start a series, then I will continue it. If somebody else starts to translate the series, they will continue it. If it happened, I mean, I really, really don't mind. It's, it's all fine. But it happened with Locke Lamora, it happened with Verkosigan Saga, probably some other books too.

Sara: 22:58

Did you find it harder to translate something coming in mid series? Like, did that affect your translation at all, or was it basically just the same?

Nevena: 23:08

Well, in these books I mentioned it was, it was no problem at all, somehow. But when I, uh, when I translated Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, I, I did the second book. And the first, I was pretty disappointed. really green. It was like my, I think my second book that I translated. I don't know. I had to check everything, every word, every name. I tried to copy the style. I was really worried about it. It's a bit of a demanding book for a beginner, to be honest.

Sara: 23:42

Is there anything that you wish you knew? Like, anything you know now, as a translator, that you wish you had known starting out?

Nevena: 23:51

There's a really, really silly thing. It's extremely silly because English and Serbian have like really different word orders. And I was a bit afraid to change the style too much, and then I kind of kept to the English word order, which is not incorrect and not bad, but could be better, until my copy editor, she just said, Okay, you're like aware that you're allowed to change the order of the words in the sentence And I I said, oh Okay And after that it was way better and easier. I mean, I know it sounds really silly, but I was I was just nervous to change it too much. Right now I change it around, I mean, as much as I want to until, until it sounds perfectly natural to me, as if it was like composed in Serbian. Sometimes you keep the style better if you do that, because you want it to sound to a Serbian speaker the way it would sound to an English speaker in English. So it needs to sound perfectly, perfectly natural.

Lilly: 25:08

I can't even imagine how hard it would be to translate something like poetry for that reason. Especially when an author is breaking the rules on purpose. Like, how would you even move that over? I don't know. It seems nuts.

Nevena: 25:21

It is not, I have had to translate poetry within books a few times. In order to do that, I need to get drunk. I generally, I just open a bottle of wine and have a go at it until I feel like I can translate poetry and it kind of works. I mean, in that, in that Tad Williams book, when I was like really young, there is like a poem. Within the text that's full of alliterations, weird rhymes. I actually, it's a really good poem. I really like it, but it was a hell to translate. And also at the beginning of the book, there's like a few verses of Yates. It's like, okay, did I really, in my second book in my career, did I really have to get Yates? And like this big, big poem by Ted Williams. But actually I'm, I'm pretty proud of the way it worked out. Oh, and also another funny instance is like I had to translate a poem by Robert Burns that's like in weird Scots English from the, what, 18th century or whatever. And it needs to be in not understandable to the main character. So I had to translate in Serbian into weird, old timey words that had the same or pretty much the same meaning. And that also rhymed. But it also worked out, but it kind of, it, it, it took a lot of wine.

Lilly: 26:56

I don't know if this is a thing. So maybe the answer is just no, and that's fine. Does work ever get re translated? Like, maybe the first time it was translated was decades ago when it gets updated or something? Does that happen?

Nevena: 27:10

It does. Uh, it's actually, it's happening to me right now. I'm translating David Copperfield and it's been translated 80 years ago. And I mean, it's, it's, it's pretty normal. I mean, if you look at war and peace, it's got, I think. Three translations into Serbian. I don't know why I know that fact, but for some reason I checked at some point and a lot of classics have been Translated like two or three times, of course People will sometimes object to new translations because they're used to the old translations. It was funny because my publishing house where I work actually reprinted an older translation than what is the usually used one. And then the people were like, Oh no, this new translation! Who did it like this? This sounds really old timey! And then the publishing house had to, like, explain, No, that's the classical translation! Et cetera.

Lilly: 28:15

For a book like War and Peace, I'm familiar with it, obviously in English, because that's the language I speak, but presumably it would be translated from Russian into Serbian, right? The, like, you wouldn't translate a translation.

Nevena: 28:31

Well, it happens sometimes. For example, I'm reading a Finnish book to my kid right now, and it was translated from English, because we couldn't find a translator from Finnish. There used to be a guy who did it, but he died, and so now we don't have a translator. There is, I think, that we don't have Finnish in, On any university in Serbia, you can't, you can't study it, so it would have to be somebody who has lived in Finland or something like that. And so, if it's possible to find a translator from a language, it will be translated from the source language. If it's not possible, it will be probably translated from English, because what can you do?

Lilly: 29:13

Oh, fascinating. That's gotta be so weird. Like, what happens to a text when it's translated and retranslated like that? That's so interesting.

Nevena: 29:21

I know, but in the book I'm reading right now, for example, the names sound really English. Like, Elijah. I'm pretty sure people in Finland are not named Elijah. And so I'm, uh, I wonder if it has been, like, the original Finnish name, have they been replaced? Or did the Finnish writer use more English names because she wanted the book to be, I don't know, maybe translated? Or are there names in Finland? Really like that maybe modern names. I have no idea. So that's really interesting. I know translating some books from I speak norwegian. I don't speak finnish. Obviously some books that have been translated from norwegian to english I know some names have been changed to make it more palatable to english readers like Mia was changed into kia for some reason. I thought it was really weird

Lilly: 30:17

Well, thank you so much for indulging us in this conversation. It was so much fun. I feel like I learned so much. And it was great just to, just to hang out for a little bit. Thank you.

Sara: 30:28

Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. This has just been wonderful.

Nevena: 30:32

Thank you so much for inviting me. I I never I never guessed it on a podcast before

Sara: 30:40

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Fiction Fans.

Lilly: 30:44

Come disagree with us. We are on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Instagram and TikTok at FictionFansPod. You can also email us at FictionFansPod at gmail dot com.

Sara: 30:56

If you enjoyed the episode, please rate and review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and follow us wherever your podcasts live.

Lilly: 31:04

Also have a Patreon, where you can support us and find our show notes and a lot of other nonsense.

Sara: 31:11

Thanks again for listening, and may your villains always be defeated.

Lilly: 31:15

Bye!