Sharjah24: At the 44th Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF 2025), award-winning translator Prof. Lisa Dillman of Emory University led a lively and insightful session titled “Say What? What Do Translators (Really) Do?”, offering visitors a deeper understanding of the invisible craft that enables stories to travel across languages and cultures.
“Translation is everywhere, and yet its operations are invisible,” she began, prompting the audience to consider the decisions that shape international literature. Drawing from 25 years of teaching and a career translating more than 35 works of fiction from Spain and Latin America, Dillman guided attendees through Russian linguist Roman Jakobson’s theory of the three kinds of translation: intralingual, which takes place within the same language; interlingual, which moves between languages; and intersemiotic, which transfers meaning across different systems of signs, such as turning a sentence into an emoji or adapting a novel into a film.
Through interactive examples, she demonstrated how translators work with meaning, tone and cultural nuance rather than simply replacing one word with another. To illustrate this, she explored how the informal English expression “Say what?” might be rendered in Arabic as “shuu?” or in Tagalog as “Anong balita,” each carrying its own cultural inflection. “All translation is interpretation,” she noted. “There is never one right answer—only what works in context.”
Cultural nuance and translation purpose
Dillman also introduced the audience to Skopos theory, developed by German linguist Hans Vermeer, which emphasises the purpose of a translation as the guiding force behind its form. She explained that subtitles, for example, are concise not due to carelessness but because the medium demands brevity. “You translate for readers, not for words,” she said, underscoring that translators must make choices that serve meaning rather than literal equivalence.
She added that being bilingual is not enough; translators must be bicultural, able to navigate humour, tone and social nuance. One example she unpacked was the Southern U.S. expression “Bless your heart,” which can range from sincere affection to sharp condescension, depending entirely on context.
Towards the end of the session, Dillman used the American campfire dessert s’mores to demonstrate how translating a recipe involves more than converting measurements. It also requires capturing cultural context—especially with foods tied to memory, tradition or emotion. “We don’t just carry the literal meaning across,” she explained. “We carry intention.”
As the session concluded, attendees left with a newfound appreciation for translators, whose choices shape how the world’s stories speak to one another.
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