This has been on my mind a lot.
I would assume that most readers lump “world SF” and “SF in translation” together, but we all know what they say about assuming…
Nevertheless, “world SF” and “SF in translation” mean very different things because, obviously, the latter type of text has been translated from another language. Writing a story in English based on the story in its original language means making choices about puns and jokes and culturally-specific references (do you say “Kakao Talk” or “Messenger”? Do you say “you stay in the house” or “you don’t get out much”?). It means deciding whether or not to translate or outright change names or add explanatory footnotes or add or delete a reference to a character’s gender. Choices, choices, choices.
Translation studies is a growing field, at least in the US, even if the publishing world doesn’t necessarily reflect this. Translators, whether they’ve studied the craft in an academic setting or learned it over the years through practice with a variety of texts, are held to a very high standard, by themselves, by readers, and by publishers. So we can rest assured that most of the translations we read these days are of a very high quality, done by people who work often for little money but because they know how important it is for stories from around the world to make it into Anglophone readers’ hands. And they love translating. Translators are cultural ambassadors and are key to enriching our culture by infusing it with ideas and images and stories from other cultures we in the often insular Anglophone world wouldn’t otherwise know much about.
I started this website in 2016 as a way to continue Lavie Tidhar’s World SF Blog, which ended in 2013. That blog ran in tandem with the release of the Apex Book of World SF series (5 books over 9 years). In his introduction to the first anthology, Tidhar spoke about…English. His discussion of how English has become the latest lingua franca was a way of explaining how, these days, much speculative fiction circulates around the world. Authors who can write directly in English don’t need to pay a translator or have their publisher pay a translator; they don’t need to take the time to find a translator and have their text translated. Of course, English, is different around the world: as Tidhar notes, “English evolved differently in different parts of the world, borrowing from local languages, even creating different pidgin or Creole languages…that borrowed the vocabulary of English to form new distinct languages.” So even “English” needs to be explored when we pick up a book from the Philippines or Kenya or Israel or India. We should be aware and attuned to the fact that this book or story, yes, is in English, but how is the English being used? In what new and interesting ways is it being written? I don’t know about you, but I find this stuff fascinating. Remind me why I didn’t study linguistics?
The Apex books were the 21st century’s turn to introduce Anglophone readers to speculative fiction from around the world. As I’ve written here and elsewhere, the effort to recognize and discuss SF around the world is much older than we might think–it began in the mid-20th century and picked up steam in the 1970s with the founding of the World SF organization and the publication of its newsletter. In that organization, world SF and SFT were discussed as if there were little difference, and I suppose that’s to be expected when the effort was to formally introduce a new world of SF to readers (even though SFT has been around since Verne and before).
World SF includes SFT, but one shouldn’t collapse them into one thing, because the English texts will often dominate the discussion. That’s what it’s like with a lingua franca. It wasn’t always English, but it is now.
There are people in every region of the world who write, promote, and translate speculative fiction. Of the translators, some are translating it from English into their language, or from their language into English, or from their language into another language. Don’t even get me started on the texts that have been translated into another language and from that language then translated into English (see Lem and Săsărman, for instance). SFT is circulating in multiple ways in multiple places, and has for a very long time. For example, so many texts have been circulating since the 20th century in an Eastern European pool that Anglophone readers don’t have access to. Then again, those works of SFT we do have access to in the English-speaking world are often of one kind, depending on the source language: these days, it’s magical realism/the fantastic from Spanish-language SF, science fiction and horror from Japanese-language SF, etc. Back in the 1970s and 80s, it was mostly French and Russian hard science fiction.
In that introduction, Tidhar takes time to discuss how some of the stories in the first anthology were turned into English stories: some were translated by the authors themselves, some were translated by others. Pointing this out is crucial to maintaining SFT’s profile in a world inundated every year with piles and piles and thousands and thousands of books that no one could read in three lifetimes.
Speculative fiction is written around the world. Some of it is written in English but not in America, the UK, Australia or Canada. Some is written in another language and of those, some is translated into yet another language. Keeping these distinctions clear allows us to see more clearly what it is we’re discussing. World SF isn’t homogenous; it contains multitudes.
