Translation is Writing Without the Writer's Block

The title of this posting is a line that I often tell people who are interested in studying translation. It always gets a warm response because people who are drawn to translation usually love writing.

Translation and writing have much in common, but in translation you don't have to expend all that creative energy developing your idea and helping it find its shape in print. Instead you leave that part to someone else, and you just do the writing.

If you are going to be a translator you have to love writing and you have to be able to do it well.

Translation is writing.

Translation is writing without the writer's block (TM Naomi Elbinger 2009!)