Anne Lange translates emotions, not just words
Thursday 1st October 2026 on 14:30 in
Estonia
Estonian translator and literary scholar Anne Lange says translation helps readers connect with cultures that might otherwise remain distant. In an interview with ERR’s Klassikaraadio, she also said the quality of Estonian translations has improved in recent decades.
Lange, a lecturer and member of this year’s jury for the Estonian Cultural Endowment’s annual literature awards, has read a large number of recent translations. She said she was pleasantly surprised by how many used language well.
She suggested that greater everyday exposure to other languages and cultures may have contributed to the change. Travel, foreign television and radio channels, and English-language media have made moving between languages more common, she said.
Most of Lange’s own translation work has been from English. For her, translating literature is not simply a way to let Estonian readers access books in languages they do not understand. It can bring them closer to people and cultures they might otherwise encounter only through a language or cultural barrier.
Lange first worked in translation on practical texts. After graduating from university, she joined the Institute of Language and Literature, where she translated scientific articles from Russian into English for five years. She was drawn to fiction in part because it offered a way to get closer to people’s inner lives.
She published her book The ABC of Translation in 2008, when she was concerned about a shortage of good translators. Her view of the field has since changed.
Lange says a translator must preserve the author’s voice while making the text read naturally in Estonian. That means distinguishing an author’s stylistic choices from features that come from the grammar of the original language. A sentence does not need to retain the same structure: for example, a passive construction can become active in translation.
But natural Estonian should not mean smoothing away deliberate strangeness in an original. If an author uses unusual or dislocated language intentionally, Lange says, the translation should convey the same effect. She compares the translator’s work to an actor’s, saying that understanding a role requires more than knowing what the words mean; it also requires understanding how a character uses language.