I had a conversation about translations with an actual author, some things I learned from him * It is not possible to specify in advance how a good translation

I had a conversation about translations with an actual author, some things I learned from him * It is not possible to specify in advance how a good translation looks like, it is one of those "I know it is good when I see it". Naturally this assumes that the author can read the destination language reasonably well, otherwise they don't have a clue. * When authors can read the translation, they tend to feel very strongly about it. An author payed a large sum of money for a translation, hated it, binned it and payed another translator to start from scratch. * Many good translators (by whatever good may mean here) are not authors themselves. WRT Nabokov, some of his works were originally written in English - Lolita for example. He then went ahead and translated Lolita to Russian.