Notes on Matteo Colombo's Translation of The Catcher in the Rye

This article argues for the importance of collaborative, or team translation, particularly with regard to literary works. There are generally two forms of collaborative translation: a reader/translator whose mother tongue is that of the source text, collaborating with a mother tongue stylist/translator of the language of the target text, or a stylist/translator whose mother tongue is that of the target text collaborating with a mother tongue reader / translator of the source text. I am concerned with the latter. Literary translation in the West has generally been conducted by the single translator, expert in the language of the target audience, but varying in his or her purchase on the language and world of the source text. The assumption behind favoring collaborative translation of the second kind is that the single translator of the language of the target audience simply does not know—and perhaps cannot know—the language and culture of the source text as well as it needs to be known to get the best translation; and more importantly, the translator simply does not always know when he or she does not know. To possibly have access to this insight, the figure of the second “translator” would be one who reads as a literary critic, is of mother tongue competence, and knows enough of the language of the target text to know when it has missed something. In order to exemplify the value of this form of collaborative translation, and of the problems which arise when it is not employed, I use Matteo Colombo’s recent translation into Italian of Salinger’s, The Catcher in the Rye (in Italian, Il giovane Holden, 2014).