What makes translation different from writing? How is the task of the translator different from that of the author? In The Philosophy of Translation, Damion Searls investigates the essential differences—and similarities—between translation and writing: how the translator ultimately does a lot of writing too, and how the author ultimately ends up doing a considerable amount of translation. As Lily Meyer, a translator herself, writes in an essay-review for Books & the Arts: “At the end of the day, the translator’s job, the essential aspect of moving a text from one language to another, is to write a new book—and write it well.” That this book is honest to the original—that it represents it—is far more important than which specific words a translator uses: Like the writer of a book, communication—those choices of composition about what is disclosed and what is hidden—is the key to any great work by a translator. The translator, like the writer, ultimately as result also creates a text. As Searls puts it: “Rather than beginning from an assumption of two separated contexts, we should view the translator as someone in a diverse community who reads a text in one language and produces a text in a different language.” Read “The Art of Reading Like a Translator”