Sophie Hughes is a literary translator who works chiefly from Spanish into English – she has translated fiction by Fernanda Melchor and Enrique Vila-Matas, among other renowned authors. 

In this article published last year in the New York Times, she takes the reader through the process of translating several paragraphs from Melchor’s novel Hurricane Season line by line, in what can be called the translator’s version of literary close reading. 

The excellent work by the NYT designers has turned Hughes’ article into a sort of interactive infographic, allowing readers to visualize, in more or less real time, the many hesitations, to-and-fros and self-editing required by a good translation. 

We see Hughes ask herself “So how would I turn this into a human translation?” when considering how to avoid the “ploddingly literal translation” offered up by Google Translate, which just sits there like a lifeless chunk (Hughes wryly comments: “I’m often asked if machine translation services or A.I. will put human translators out of a job. It doesn’t keep me up at night.”) We watch her wonder how to avoid a repetition which “nobody [… ] would say in English”, while acknowledging that “some sort of repetition is crucial”. We witness how the compromises and happy solutions that make a good translation emerge as she works her way through the text. 

The meaning of a text in translation, as Hughes says in her conclusion, is not merely a concatenation of isolated elements, but rather should be seen as a puzzle that can only be solved if seen as a whole, and “never… become wedded to one solution to the possible preclusion of the next.”

The clever economy of the design mirrors and augments the elegance of Hughes’ argument. Highly recommended.