Edinburgh International Book Festival: David Bellos

For some reason, David Bellos has been listed as a Scot in the programme, but this is not the case, as he pointed out. He’s actually from England, but of course, as a translator he’s somewhat international. His book Is That A Fish In Your Ear? – spot the Douglas Adams reference – goes into the issues raised by translating. On the evidence of the book, and of this event, Bellos is a passionate defender of the translator’s art. The event took the form of a short interview with a host, but for some reason host and guest didn’t really gel – possibly due to the heat in the tent, which was small but full to capacity, and therefore oppressively humid. Nonetheless, Bellos’s comprehensive knowledge impressed, and he really shone when it came to questions from the audience. People were keen to know his thoughts on various subjects, and he answered them wittily, and politely. One of the most impressive answers was on machine translation, which, Bellos said, fascinated him. Google translate in particular, which is built around an algorithm we’re not allowed to know, but which works on a basic model of prediction through statistical probability, impressed Bellos, to the point that he said he would use the word ‘spectacular’. As far as his own impressive works go, he told the audience that when writing his translations of Georges Perec, the man whose linguistic experiments included writing a book without the use of the letter ‘e’, he found that while there are complicated parts – very complicated parts – much that was in between was reasonably easy to do. Of course, he did follow this by grinning wryly. [Keir Hind]