I used to think that reading books for my professional development must generally be non-fiction, simply by increasing my subject knowledge about historical events. Little did I know that reading novels can play an equally important role. As a translator you need to keep up-to-date with your language skills in both, your mother tongue and the language of the country you live in. If you don’t, your vocabulary becomes increasingly restricted to the topics you discuss with family and friends, and the content of the texts you work with.
According to the BBC’s Radio 4 programme ‘More or Less’, native speakers of a language typically know “15,000 to 20,000 word families – or lemmas – in their first language […] Eight hundred lemmas will help you speak a language in a day-to-day setting, but to understand dialogue in film or TV you’ll need to know the 3,000 most common lemmas. And if you want to get your head around the written word – so novels, newspapers, excellently-written BBC articles – you need to learn 8,000 to 9,000 lemmas.” (Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-44569277) For the uninitiated: a lemma or a word family is, for example, the word eat (not counting eats, eating, eaten, ate, etc.).
If I use only 800 lemmas in my daily language, the remaining 19,200 lemmas that I am supposed to know will certainly gather a bit of dust. I never realised that it could be important for my language skills to watch TV, but according to the above-mentioned findings, it is indeed. And even more important is it to read if I want to keep (or increase) at least half of my vocabulary knowledge. So, the pleasure of reading is actually something that I can count towards my continued professional development (or CPD in short) – what a delightful discovery to make!
As a member of the German Network of the Institute of Translation and Interpretation (ITI), I am also a member of a book club, together with a number of colleagues. Initially, I was wary of having to read books that I would not have chosen myself, but to my surprise, most of the choices were great reads indeed. What a treat it is to then discuss my opinions about the content, the style, and the setting with others who have read the same – how come I did not discover this years earlier?
Personally, I enjoy and I also learn a lot from historical novels if they are well written and well researched. I will list just three from the top of my list of great German novels that did more than just keep my language skills up to scratch. They helped me to better understand the wider impact of the NS regime on people of whom I would not have thought:
– Deutsches Haus (The German House) by Annette Hess, Ullstein Verlag. It tells the story of a young German woman who becomes an interpreter at the Auschwitz trials in 1963 and we learn, together with her, not only of the shock and horror of the Shoah but also about the reluctance to face reality by those who were involved or stood by or just wanted to move on.
– Deutsche Frau, am Fenster stehend, Abendkleid, blaues Licht by Alena Schröder , dtv Verlag. A family history spanning four generations, based around looted paintings during the NS regime. We see how many unanswered questions the Germans still have about their parents’ and grandparents’ past when it comes to the darkest time of German history.
– Gerta das deutsche Mädchen, by Kateřina Tučková (German translation by Iris Milde), Klak Verlag. A fascinating and shocking insight into the fate of around three million Germans who used to live in the Czech Republic, from 1938 to the end of communism. It is based on thorough research and on contemporary witness accounts. An eye-opener.
With hindsight and freedom of press, from the comfort of economic and personal safety, it is easy for me to fall into the trap of judging people and seeing the past in black and white. But books like these can help me learn more than just the facts. I can trace the complicated process of decision-making in difficult and dark times, I can get closer to the Why. Reading not only non-fiction but novels is a great way of keeping up with my language skills and my subject knowledge at the same time.