Four hands to translate China

In the practice of Chinese-Italian literary translation, many are the problems translators are confronted with in their effort to produce a fluent target text while preserving the stylistic features of the source text. In coping with the great linguistic and cultural distance between the two languages, working in pairs is a precious opportunity to combine different skills, sensibilities and strategies, providing the translators with a wider range of solutions and different perspectives to evaluate them. Our ten-year-long practice in four-hand translation is here illustrated from the pragmatic translator’s point of view, in order to show how we make the most of the differences between our individualities, while blending them to avoid discrepancies in the final product.