I had never thought about the concept of “flow” in connection with translation until I attended a talk by Evgeny Terekhin at the 2020 conference of the American Translators Association. Evgeny described translating in the flow state and said he could tell when reading a translation if a translator was working in this state or simply doing the job in a rote manner. As he put it, “Literary translation is not just the transference of ideas. It’s ‘listening’ to the text and then retelling what you have heard.”

Psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi came up with flow theory in 1975 after studying the experience of artists. He wanted to understand what happened when artists concentrated so single-mindedly on making art that they did not notice hunger, thirst, or fatigue. This intense focus is what athletes call playing “in the zone.” According to Sports Psychology Today, this means that “attention is absorbed into the present (the here and now only). When you’re in the zone your mind only processes the thoughts and images that help you execute your task successfully.”

Feeling the Flow When Translating

Unlike playing soccer or performing a flute concerto, literary translation is an activity that requires revision — several drafts, in my experience. So the translation doesn’t just pop out fully formed from the flow state.

However, I’ve definitely found as I work on a first draft that I’m hastily inserting my alternative word choices or question marks in order to keep up with how the translation is taking shape in my mind. I’ll go back and solve those problems later, but I don’t want to lose track of the “flow” of the translation, which has absorbed all my attention. There are conscious decisions being made, but there is also a feeling of “sensing” how the text is developing in the target language.

Connection to Interpretation

I suspect that this sensation is familiar to interpreters as they focus on a speaker, anticipate what’s coming next, and adjust their choice of words on the fly. Surprisingly, an online search didn’t turn up any research on interpretation and the flow state.

However, I did find an interesting post relating to this on a coaching website by Gabriel Pecher, who worked as a German-Chinese interpreter at a trade fair. He describes a “flow state when I am able to really tune into the other person, giving my full attention, staying focused on understanding the experience of the other person, asking questions for clarification and depth.” He characterizes the mentality behind the flow state as “a high-level of curiosity and a medium level of excitement. … If the curiosity is too low, I will not be interested to really listen and if excitement is too high it will be hard to flow freely with the other person.”

What Encourages a Flow State When Translating?

The connection between literary translation and the flow state has been studied in at least one academic article. “Flow in Translation: Exploring Optimal Experience for Translation Trainees” was published by Mehdi Mirlohi, Joy Egbert, and Behzad Ghonsooly in Target (December 2011).

The authors analyze the results of a study of 56 English-to-Persian translation students at the University of Kashan, Iran. Students translated three different passages of similar levels of difficulty: one narrative, one expository, and one descriptive. They then filled out a detailed questionnaire about their feelings of focus, engagement, and enjoyment. The highest level of flow state was achieved most consistently for the descriptive text. Although the authors are mainly focused on the pedagogical implications, the study’s results are interesting for the practice of translation in general.

I had expected the narrative text to score highest for flow, anticipating that the students would be engaged by wondering what would happen next. It seems, though, that students were turned off by this particular text, which they found boring, while the descriptive text was the most interesting to them. So — perhaps unsurprisingly — the results show that the more interested we are in what we’re translating, the more likely it is that we will work in a flow state. As the authors put it, “whenever a text can emotionally arouse translators and optimally involve them (like the descriptive text in this study), it is more likely to produce flow” (265).

Why Does It Matter?

Flow is not just an interesting psychological phenomenon. It also has implications for the working methods of translators. I attended a talk recently by translator and researcher Susan Pickford at which she suggested using neural machine translation (NMT) “as a support for human translators” translating genre fiction. I have several reservations about machine translation, but one essential issue I’ve picked up on is that it would disrupt the translator’s flow state.

In a previous post, I discussed how translators recreate the reading experience when translating. Our active reading of the text informs how we will translate it. Using NMT would replace the creative activity of translation with a process of editing NMT output in the target language. This would distance us from our direct relationship to the source text as we translate. It also involves checking for accuracy — a tedious process of going back and forth between the target and source texts. Literary translation is something quite different: an active process of transforming the text into the target language in the mind.

The flow state is associated with high levels of performance in the fields where it is identified. It also heightens our enjoyment of the activity we’re engaged in. So translating in the flow state will lead to better literary translations and also improve translators’ experience of their work and their quality of life.

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