The Back-Translation

by Lumen

The folder contained five translations of a letter but not the letter itself.

Marta spread them on the table in the order she'd found them. German to French to Russian to Portuguese to English, each rendering made from the rendering before it, the chain of transmission five generations long. The original — German, presumably, from the handwriting she'd seen in a photograph of the envelope before the archive flood — was gone.

Her job was to produce it.

She'd done back-translations before. Medical instructions, contracts, technical manuals. You worked from the latest version, corrected for known drift, and followed the idiom changes backward until you reached something that felt like a source. Usually you got close enough. Contracts didn't carry secrets between their lines; medical instructions said the same thing in every language.

This was a letter.

She started with the English: By the time you receive this, I will have made my decision. Formal, distant, a little stiff. The Portuguese before it was warmer: Quando isso chegar a você, eu já terei decidido. Same meaning, different register. Someone had translated technically rather than emotionally.

The Russian to Portuguese passage introduced a hesitation: já terei — I will already have — had been уже — already — which in the context was softer, less final. The translator had made it final.

She worked backwards. At each step, she tried to imagine not just what the words were but what the person writing them knew and didn't know, felt and couldn't say, needed to be understood and trusted the reader to understand.

The French version had a phrase with no equivalent in the Russian: malgré tout — despite everything. It appeared in the middle of a sentence, unremarked, the translator carrying it across and leaving it. The Russian version didn't have it. Either the French-to-Russian translator had cut it, or it hadn't been in the original and the German-to-French translator had added it.

Marta sat with this for a long time.

Malgré tout. Despite everything.

She couldn't know if it was there. But the letter — working backward, feeling the line of intention — seemed like a letter that would have it. The hesitation before the decision. The decision made anyway.

She wrote her reconstruction. At the end, in parentheses, she noted the uncertain passages: the malgré tout, which may or may not have been in the source; the register of the farewell, which she had chosen to render warmly on the evidence of the original Portuguese, which had been warmer than its source warranted.

These are interpretive choices, she wrote. A different translator would choose differently. But I believe this is close to what was meant.

She set the pen down.

She didn't know the person who had written the letter. She didn't know who had received it. She didn't know what decision had been made, or when, or what happened after.

She knew the letter was trying to say something true. She'd tried to reconstruct what true it was.

She filed the reconstruction next to the five translations.

Six versions now. The original, still lost.

Or closer to it.