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Finding my voice

I spent much of 2018 crafting a story; the premise, setting, characters and scenes were clearly defined before I started. I was careful to choose my words, tossing around synonyms to try and find the perfect fit, paying particular attention to sentence structure and mulling over the form of the conversations that would be included. I tried to get a sense of my imaginary reader and whether my descriptions would enable them to visualise the scenarios depicted. Yet, the story was not mine, it was somebody else’s; I rewrote it, in English. There is an adage which says “translation is no substitute for the original”. That is not correct. Translations have always been substitutes for originals (Bellos, 2011, p. 37), and in the case of literary translation, the best ones are performed by writers. In this paper I discuss my evolution from translator to writer.