Donald Reindl received a doctorate in Slavic linguistics at Indiana University. For the past twenty years, he has been living in Slovenia. He teaches translation at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana and runs a small translation company, where he works as copyeditor and translator. He translates into English—mostly from Slovenian, but occasionally from other languages as well.
He answered some questions regarding his work, mainly as a translator.
What do you consider yourself to be the most: copyeditor, professor, translator, or maybe something else?
At this point mostly a copyeditor simply because of the dynamics at my company; my Slovenian business partner handles most of the translations. And, in terms of time, I actually spend more hours doing my copyediting than teaching—which probably means I’m simply working too much. I enjoy the copyediting, although teaching is also quite enjoyable; I like having contact with the students.
What would you stress as the main challenge for translators, when translating into English?
I think the biggest challenge for Slovenian translators is English idiomatics and register, especially when they are translating dialogue. Here, I mean the dialogue that you find in, say, literature or advertising. There’s a very fine line between sounding natural and sounding stilted. This really isn’t so much of an issue when translating technical texts or an academic text.
What are some of the characteristics of a good translation from Slovene to English?
I think that a good translation should especially be comfortable for English readers—it should be an easy fit for them. By that, I mean it shouldn’t contain unnatural solutions that distract them from the message of the text, and any culturally unfamiliar concepts should be explained just a little bit to keep the flow of the text going.
Do you have a preferred text type for translation?
Generally, I like a text that I’m able to learn something from too, whether it’s linguistics, geography, or history, which are some of my favorite topics. It’s also very satisfying to work with a text that contains culturally specific details and then to create solutions that you know any English reader will be comfortable reading.
What is the most interesting translation you have done so far?
I’ve done quite a lot of interesting texts; the most interesting one that I did recently was probably a forensic medicine text about DNA extraction from skeletal remains. This was both technically interesting because of the way that the science was presented, and it was also personally interesting because the victims that were being studied were actually my distant cousins here in Slovenia.
