Karin Saner

Question and Answer

• What is your name?
  • Karin Saner
• Where do you live?
  • Germany
• What made you decide to become a translator or interpreter?
  • First of all it was a love for languages, finding out how to express my ideas somehow differently when speaking another language. During several jobs I hold I always ended up with the translation work.
    So one day I decided I would love to do just this on a daily basis while really, really concentrating on what I do. So very slowly I got better.
• List one strength that you think sets you apart from your colleagues.
  • Finding the idea behind the word(s)
• Name the one thing that you most enjoy in your translating or interpreting career.
  • Conveying the idea behind the word(s)
• We all have worked on those not-so-perfect assignments. Write about one such assignment that was not ideal and what you learned from it.
  • While doing regular translations of marketing material Italian-German for a marketing company, this client used me as a dictionary 7/24. This taught me to be more precise about the services I'm willing to offer.
• If you could go back in time to when you were just starting out as a translator or interpreter, what advice would you give to your younger self?
  • Take translation very serious!
• Name one resource – such as a phone app, CAT tool, website, and so forth – that you find especially helpful in your translating or interpreting work.
  • The Translator's teacup
• What's the best book you've read this year?
  • History of the Rain by Niall Williams

Longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That's how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told.

So says Ruthie Swain. The bedridden daughter of a dead poet, home from college after a collapse (Something Amiss, the doctors say), she is trying to find her father through stories--and through generations of family history in County Clare (the Swains have the written stories, from salmon-fishing journals to poems, and the maternal MacCarrolls have the oral) and through her own writing (with its Superabundance of Style). Ruthie turns also to the books her father left behind, his library transposed to her bedroom and stacked on the floor, which she pledges to work her way through while she's still living.

In her attic room, with the rain rushing down the windows, Ruthie writes Ireland, with its weather, its rivers, its lilts, and its lows. The stories she uncovers and recounts bring back to life multiple generations buried in this soil--and they might just bring her back into the world again, too.