Uncovering the true craft of translation
EVERY year on September 30, the global literary community marks International Translation Day, celebrating the craft of translators who carry stories across borders and grant them second lives in new tongues. To many, translation appears straightforward: an author writes, a translator replaces the words, and a foreign work arrives neatly bound on our shelves.
Often, our attention remains fixed on the plots and characters within those pages. Yet the journeys behind local translations frequently hold stories every bit as fascinating as the literature itself.
Revisiting established classics is a vibrant part of the Malaysian publishing landscape. National Laureate (Sasterawan Negara) A. Samad Said's masterwork Salina (1961), for instance, has been translated into English three separate times: by Harry Aveling in 1975, Hawa Abdullah in 1991, and Lalita Sinha in 2013.
Naturally, when readers encounter a new translation of a familiar classic, they assume it is a retranslation, a fresh effort to interpret the original text for a contemporary readership.
Yet that assumption is not always accurate. Consider Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's 1943 French masterpiece, Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince). Malaysian readers can choose between two Malay translations: Putera Cilik, translated by Ezzah Mahmud (Peanutzin, 2015), and Putera Kecil, translated by Azzah Abdul Rahman (Biblio Press, 2021).
Because both share the same target language and derive from the same French tale, Putera Kecil seems, at first glance, to be a retranslation.
Beneath the surface, however, an important distinction emerges: neither translator worked directly from the French original. Instead, both relied on an intermediary language – English – a widespread practice known in Translation Studies as indirect or relay translation.
Crucially, the two translators did not consult the same English version. Ezzah Mahmud translated Putera Cilik from Katherine Woods's 1943 English version, which defined the prince's voice in the Anglophone world for five decades. Azzah Abdul Rahman, by contrast, worked from Ros and Chloe Schwartz's contemporary 2010 English translation. In translation scholarship, a work is strictly classified as a retranslation only if it shares the immediate source text of its predecessor. Because Ezzah and Azzah drew from two distinct English renderings, the two Malay editions do not actually share the same immediate parent text.
If the genealogical lineage of a translation can take unexpected paths, the titles chosen for translated books tell an equally captivating story. Titles serve as the front door to a narrative, framing our expectations before we turn the first page.
Take Joseph Conrad's debut novel, Almayer's Folly (1895). Translating Conrad's title is notoriously difficult because he chose a word with an intentional double meaning: first, "folly" as foolish delusion, referring to Kaspar Almayer's doomed obsession with finding mythical gold in the Bornean interior; and second, "folly" as an eccentric architectural structure, referring to Almayer's half-built riverside mansion, mocked by the local community.
Capturing both dimensions in a single Malay word is nearly impossible. When scholar and writer Rustam A. Sani first translated the novel for Oxford University Press in 1967, he titled it Istana Impian ("Palace of Dreams"). Rustam embraced the architectural metaphor: the physical ruins of a dreamer's home standing as a monument to collapsed European vanity. At that time, OUP editor Asraf Abdul Wahab actively championed the modernisation of the Malay language, and scholars have noted that foregrounding Almayer's decline against resilient local figures resonated powerfully with the anti-colonial, nationalist aspirations of post-independence Malaya.
Nearly 50 years later, in 2016, the novel was translated into Malay a second time by Hamidah Hassan and Morne Hashim for Institut Terjemahan & Buku Malaysia. Released alongside director U-Wei Haji Saari's cinematic adaptation, Hanyut, this version represents a genuine retranslation: both Rustam in 1967 and the 2016 translators worked directly from Conrad's 1895 English prose.
Yet the 2016 translators chose a radically different title: Kemudi ("Rudder" or "To Steer"). The back-cover blurb of the translation informed readers that Conrad had submitted his manuscript in 1893 under the working title "Kamudi", a reference to his maritime roots.
There was just one twist: "Kamudi" was never the book's title. It was actually Conrad's pseudonym. Anxious about how British critics would receive an unknown Polish sailor, Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski submitted his manuscript under the pen name "Kamudi", the Malay word for rudder. Decades later, that was mistaken for a working title, steering the author's secret alias straight onto the cover of the Malay edition.
These stories remind us that literary translation is far from a neutral, mechanical exchange. Behind every book on the shelf lies a series of human decisions, cultural contexts, and historical quirks. This International Translation Day, when you next browse a local bookstore, take a moment to look past the cover. Inspect the copyright page, read the translator's preface, and think about the unexpected journeys that delivered those words into your hands!
* The writer is an Associate Professor in Translation Studies at the School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia. She can be contacted at