Sarah Timmer Harvey
WRITER & WRITER: Taking Up the Translator’s Baton: An Interview with David Colmer
STH: Speaking of language, you are, of course, originally from Australia and speak an English that is neither British nor American, but uniquely somewhere between the two. Do you have a default form of English that you use when translating or does it change depending on the project?
DC: This is a massive question! It’s so difficult to disentangle your own language influences and produce something that won’t set off any alarms in a reader from a different background. And certain backgrounds are privileged, of course. You can play it safe by veering towards a university-educated metropolitan usage, but that might not always be appropriate for the character or book. Besides geographical origin, you have generational and class factors too.