12/02/2026
Our translator questionnaire continues! 🧐
This time, we’re featuring answers from Markas Aurelijus Piesinas, a valued member of the Vilnius Review team.
Enjoy his responses below 👇
🔎What is the biggest challenge of translating?
It surely depends on the translator and the source text. Generally, any movement between analytic and synthetic languages, like that from Lithuanian to English and back, is a challenge in itself. But if we’re talking specifics, I would think in terms of two loosely defined categories: technical challenges and cultural challenges.
Technical challenges pertain to stuff like rhymes, rhythms, consonances, assonances, or the semantic value of morphemes. Consider a passage from Ričardas Šileika’s flash prose: “Bus gerai: bus nurašyta į nuostolius, į nuomones, į nuotaikas ir į nuodėmes.” Here is my translation, published in the second volume of the Baltic literary journal No More Amber: “It’ll be fine: it’ll be written off to losses, views, moods, and vices.” First of all, I should’ve kept the preposition before each word like in the original – what a waste. But notice how in Lithuanian each word begins with the prefix “nuo-”: it can mean “off,” “(away) from,” while if used independently as a preposition it relates to distance, direction, timing, or origin. So in the original, all the different words coalesce phonetically, which in turn implies a semantic connection; can we find four nouns in English that all mean the same things and share one prefix? I couldn’t.
But for the last several decades it has been pretty much the consensus in theory that translation inhabits the domain of culture and not merely linguistics. The concept had been brewing at least since the late eighteenth century before maturing by the turn of our millennium. Scholars like Alexander Fraser Tytler, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Gideon Toury, and Lawrence Venuti approached the issues of translation and concluded that this movement between cultures is usually divisive, challenging, problematic, or even violent. One theoretical example frequently thrown around refers to the most appropriate way of translating certain passages of the Bible into Asian cultures. It has been posited that “our daily bread” ought to be replaced with “our daily rice,” and the argument here is rock solid – a culture where bread is not a staple food cannot recognize “bread” as a symbol for all basic needs of life. On the one hand, this would imply that the apostles ate rice, contradicting the source text. On the other, persecuted Christians in Japan did in fact substitute bread and wine with rice and sake in liturgy.
🔎Most difficult Lithuanian author to translate.
So far I’ve only translated a handful of authors, so it’s really hard to say… As a novice, I translated some of Vidas Morkūnas’s short stories from the book Pakeleivingų stotys. I found them quite difficult because of the narrator’s voice, which blends matter-of-fact observation with irony that not only witnesses the bad and the ugly of the world but also projects a strange kind of acceptance for it. How does one carry all of that over to another language? Even still I’m not sure whether I did it right. Ramūnas Liutkevičius’s poetry is difficult because he strings lines together by inflecting words in a pattern that doesn’t work quite the same way in English.
🔎Do you read translations or only originals?
I used to think: “what’s the point in reading a translation if I know the source language?” It makes sense if you consider yourself as a reader. But part of the translator’s job is to observe language and the literary polysystem as they continuously develop. Reading a translation with knowledge of the source language is a kind of work in itself. There’s no other way to engage in translation critique, which as a practice is very valuable for the development of the discipline. In 1967 the great Czech theorist Jiří Levý defined translation as “a series of a certain number of consecutive situations – moves, as in a game – situations imposing on the translator the necessity of choosing among a certain (and very often exactly definable) number of alternatives.” And everyone knows you learn to play the game by watching others do it.
🔎What is the oddest thing that ever happened to you while translating?
Nothing odd ever happens.
🔎What is a ritual that helps you in the process of translation?
I’m a translator, not a priest. There are no rituals. You just have to sit down and do the work.
🔎What is a drink that increases the translator’s work potential?
Coffee or an ice-cold Sprite? A nice, fresh glass of pointy-tasting water goes a long way too.
🔎When the editor corrects your translations, you are…?
Grateful. Doesn’t mean I have to accept the corrections though.
🔎What is a translator’s worst nightmare?
An author who doesn’t know better but thinks they do. A client who keeps adding new stuff to a translation draft. A table that’s either too high or too low. A bad chair. Inflation.
🔎Will AI take your job?
Yes. Yes it will. Translation is susceptible to AI like any other human endeavor. It’s true that LLMs are still only able to handle basic stuff on their own, and that AI companies are bloated cash-grabs riding on the promise of an AI-saturated future. But that future is inevitable because of the paradigm shift that is already happening all around us. People are now using AI to generate product photoshoots, handle spreadsheets, write theses, and even get relationship advice. Chatbots help people spiral into psychotic episodes and encourage them to murder their family members. Even the lousiest artificial literary translation will be good enough for someone. Horrible, right? No. The true horror is that this lousy translation will never get lousier – it will only keep getting better. At least as long as people keep throwing money at it.
Translators should know: all their future clients have already caught on to the fact that artificial translations provide the raw labor of a human specialist at a fraction of the cost. First – if you’re not really good at what you do, get good or find a new job. AI will push bad and average translators out of the market, if it hasn’t already done that. Second, the emerging position of the “humanizer” will grow in demand exponentially. The nuanced quality of the human touch will not become obsolete but instead find itself in the domain of a “machine whisperer” who supervises and corrects the machine. What’s interesting is that the best of these whisperers will be the ones who have a background in translation, because they will have a working understanding of what the machine is supposed to do. I can hear you arguing: “what’s the point in hiring a human to edit a machine’s translation if you can ask them to make one from scratch?” I’ll see your situation and I’ll raise you a situation. The year is 2032. You’re a translator who insists on doing everything on their own and you’re losing projects left and right because the time-effective purity of the machine has shrunk the average deadline to a point where you cannot keep up with the whisperers anymore. Your flesh is weak. Your bills are unpaid. A state-of-the-art chatbot generates a meme. It’s a picture of you holding a cardboard sign that says, “Will Translate Poetry 4 Food.” It shares the meme to a group chat made up exclusively of other chatbots. They all laugh and call you a fleshbag.
