Translating is a creative activity, a laborious operation requiring a sharp ear and a feeling for language, musicality and intuition; in other words, it is something that cannot be taught. Or so they say. Moreover, the actual process of translation is mysterious and elusive, impossible to describe. Whichever way you look at it, nobody becomes a translator as a result of reading theory or following courses.

In which case one might well ask what is the point of translation courses like those put on by Föreningen Ordfront (the Ordfront Association). For several years I have been teaching a course for that organization on "literary translation from English to Swedish" — and I must admit the question is one I have often asked myself.

On the other hand, translating is also a craft, and of course there are tips and rules of thumb one can pass on, and practical, concrete problems to discuss. In fact, intuition is said to be based on experience, and when it comes to translation it is very much a question of "learning by doing".

All Ordfront courses, and there are currently twenty-seven of them, concentrate on practical work: most of them deal with creative writing and cover everything from poetry, prose, drama and film to journalism and comic strips. All the tutors are professionally active in the field they are teaching.

Classes take place in the evenings or at weekends, and my own translation course consists of four sessions at fortnightly intervals, each one lasting two-and-a-half hours. That makes ten hours in all, which might well seem on the short side; but in addition there is the time the participants (and I) spend on homework: they have about a page to translate for each of the last three sessions — nearly always texts I myself have already translated and hence know inside out. As there are two weeks between each meeting, there is time to send out all the texts to the students before we gather again to go through them.

Needless to say, the aim is not to produce fully-fledged translators, but to give some insight into the craft of translating and an opportunity to develop one’s skills. There are no special course requirements (most Swedes are well acquainted with English), and the courses are suitable both for beginners and those with a certain amount of experience of translating.

People have all kinds of prejudices about translating, which is why I always start my courses by pointing out a few things which generally cause a degree of surprise: that I am not a walking English-Swedish dictionary, that I am not a linguistic expert (and am certainly no purist when it comes to the language), that I have no academic qualifications in English and have never lived in an English-speaking country for any length of time. I usually point out that I am not going to be able to answer questions about what is "right" and "wrong" — something many people expect me to do — although I might possibly be able to pronounce on what is good or bad. Mind you, ten minutes later I sometimes hear myself saying: "I think that’s wrong, actually" — there is no logic in this job.

There are plenty of opportunities to improve one’s English in Sweden: Swedish television schedules are crammed full of English-language programmes, especially American ones, which I for one both enjoy and benefit from. As a translator, I learn a lot from listening to the English language in a visual context, and also scanning the subtitles to see how my subtitler colleagues have solved some of the difficulties. In fact it was my interest in films that started me off as a translator.

Being familiar with English can actually cause problems: as many Swedes think they know English, and as they clearly know Swedish (in so far as one can ever "know" a language), they often draw the false conclusion that there is not a lot of difference between the two languages, and hence that it must be rather easy to translate from English into Swedish. The consequence is that inexperienced translators sometimes end up in a sort of no-man’s land, producing translations that do not sound like genuine Swedish. "You must turn it into real Swedish" is one of my most frequent exhortations to the course participants. The translation must stand on its own feet in Swedish.

Nevertheless, it is obvious that a translator must be very well acquainted with the source language, in both its written and spoken forms. It is no good simply looking words up in a dictionary; just as important as the dictionary meanings of words are their usage and frequency in the everyday language, and the way they are incorporated into the context. A question one ought to ask oneself is: what looks usual in this text, and what looks unusual? An unusual word or expression ought to be rendered by something similarly unusual in the translation, as the aim is to produce the same effect on the reader as was exerted by the original.

It might seem banal, but another important question is: what does the text actually say? And at least as important: what does the text NOT say? What is written between the lines? The trick is to let whatever is written between the lines remain between the lines, as it were. Don’t explain. Don’t over-interpret.

In fact, over-interpretation is not one of the more common errors perpetrated by inexperienced translators: the opposite is more likely. Beginners try too hard to be faithful to the original and are too keen to be correct, particularly with regard to the meaning of individual words: this can easily result in other aspects of the text being overlooked, all those things that bring a literary text to life and make it personal. No matter how correct a translation might be, it is a failure if it is lifeless, if it does not make the author’s voice heard. A correct translation can quite simply be wrong.

It follows that a good loosening-up exercise for the would-be translators is to produce a quick version — in about twenty minutes! — of something like a short poem by Emily Dickinson, experimenting by ignoring the meaning of the words altogether and just concentrating on the form: trying to reproduce the sound of the words, the rhythm, the rhymes, and even the actual appearance of the poem on the page. The result can be the most marvellous nonsense verses!

Another interesting angle is to reverse roles, as it were, and investigate what a Swedish sentence looks like when translated into English. The opening sentence of Strindberg’s Hemsöborna runs: "Han kom som ett yrväder en aprilafton och hade ett höganäskrus i en svångrem om halsen." This is one of the most famous sentences in Swedish literature, and illustrates several of the characteristics of the Swedish language — compound nouns, for instance, and not least the coordinated syntax which helps to create an effect of hustle and bustle typical of the novel as a whole. An American English version dating from 1965, by Arvid Paulsen, goes: "He came one evening in April — came like a whirlwind, an earthenware jug hanging from a belly-strap flung round his neck." A couple of dashes have been added, as have two participial phrases; the sentence is longer, the form is different, and the Swedish "och" (and) has disappeared.

I generally use this sentence as the starting point for a discussion on the way sentence structure differs in English and Swedish, something I have become increasingly convinced is at the very heart of translation problems between the two languages. What on earth are we to do with all those subordinate and abbreviated constructions, not least the ubiquitous present participles (the ing-form) that occur so rarely in Swedish? Well, one has no alternative but to reconstruct the sentences, often with the aid of that Swedish "och" which is more common and implies more than its English equivalent "and" (and hence is not really an equivalent!).

The word "och" is not always an appropriate solution, however. In my latest translation, for instance, I was faced with the following sentence: "Hawes was coming into the room, blowing on his hands." It might look simple, but it is far from easy to render it into Swedish. I eventually went for: "Just då kom Hawes in i rummet med händerna kupade framför munnen." Rather than use an "och"-clause, I used a preposition phrase — and changed completely the way in which the man came in from the chilly outdoors: but what else could one do?

Some years ago, when I started to get interested in the way "och" and "det" are used in Swedish, I took two novels at random from my bookcase to see how they started off: Stig Claesson’s Samtal på ett fjärrtåg and Selma Lagerlöf’s Charlotte Löwensköld: they provided immediate evidence to support my thesis on the high frequency and special implications of the Swedish words "och" and "det" in literary language. I would be fascinated to see how those sentences were rendered in English.

Having gone through some basic differences between Swedish and English like those mentioned above, pointed out common errors and traps, and distributed a few useful brief articles and essays on translation (excluding any that are too theoretical), I can get the students started on the nitty-gritty: translation exercises. It takes quite a lot of time to scrutinize ten or a dozen versions of the same text, comparing them, trying to work out the strong points and weak points of individual students, deciding what to praise and what to criticize, and how to do this in a constructive way: I have to try to work out just what their thought processes were (or were not) as they struggled with their individual versions. It is always very noticeable that practically no one ever translates a given sentence in the same way: there are no end of variations, and when we meet to go through the texts there is barely enough time for our animated discussions. We go into great detail on every word, every phrase, every sentence, from every conceivable angle: the style, tone, rhythm, word order, punctuation, and so on — not to mention the eternal, classical question that simply cannot be answered: how free should a translation be?

After going through the students’ efforts, I hand out my own translation of the set text, being careful to point out that it should not be regarded as the only possible version.

One thing I had not expected when I started teaching these courses was just how useful they would be — for me. This is partly due to the fact that I am forced to try and spell out precisely what I am doing when I get down to translating something, and partly because I have to accept that no matter how long I have been in the business, other people can sometimes come up with possible variations that had not occurred to me.

What do the participants get out of the courses? The most important aspect is of course the practical exercises: one can never stress too much that the only way to become a translator is by translating. The Ordfront courses I run most certainly do not constitute a progression from the simple to the more complicated: when it comes to translating, there are no simple texts. You just have to get down to it, over and over again.

Some of the course participants ask about their next step, and rather hesitantly, I inform them about the various translation courses mounted by certain Swedish universities. I prefer to suggest a simple and inexpensive tip: go home and get down to work on a book you know has already been translated into Swedish, then go to your local library and compare your version with that of a professional translator.

If any of my pupils feel bold enough to launch themselves on to the professional market, I point out that the current precarious state of publishing in Sweden means there are not all that many opportunities, but that they should ring round and offer to provide a sample translation — ring not just to publishing houses, but also to literary journals: there are an awful lot of them in Sweden.

My own motives for teaching on these translation courses are a little obscure. Of course I enjoy passing on my own experiences of a profession which normally plays a background role; of course I would like to inspire and encourage anyone interested in embarking on this difficult occupation. Perhaps I just want to demonstrate how hard it is, or to refute the widespread perception that Swedish is an impoverished language, or simply to satisfy my own social, and pedagogical, needs. And perhaps I want to convey something of my own uncertainty, and indeed to demonstrate how being uncertain and taking a long time are positive things, and to show that translation is largely a matter of searching for solutions, a way of reading, reading carefully, of feeling one’s way.