Lucy Moffatt - Translator of the Month
Our Translator of the Month for August is London-born Lucy Moffatt, who has been translating professionally since the mid-1990s, first from Spanish, later from Norwegian. Since 2017, she’s translated nearly twenty Norwegian fiction and non-fiction titles for publishers in the UK and Canada. Authors she’s worked with include Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, Andreas Tjernshaugen, Are Kalvø, Bjørn Berge, Dag O. Hessen, Hilde Østby, Nina Brochmann and Ellen Støkken Dahl.
Lucy has won two John Dryden prizes for her translations of Hans Herbjørnsrud (2015 and 2025), and received NORLA’s annual Translator’s Award for her non-fiction work in 2020. She won the ASF’s 2025 Wigeland Prize for her translation of an extract from Bjørg Vik’s novel Små nøkler, store rom (Small Keys, Big Rooms). Her translation of a passage from Kyrre Andreassen’s Forøvrig mener jeg at Karthago bør ødelegges (Furthermore I Consider that Carthage Must Be Destroyed) recently appeared in Granta Magazine’s Scandinavian edition. Her fiction and non-fiction work have appeared in Words without Borders and Comparative Critical Review.
Lucy also works with Norwegian publishers on sample translations of upcoming books and liaises with overseas publishers to alert them to novels or non-fiction titles that may be suitable for their lists.
How did you start translating Norwegian literature?
During a visit to Telemark in 2009 to see my old pal, translator Juan Cristián Gutiérrez, I met a delightful Norwegian and fell in love. Ånon’s job as a musician and academic wasn’t very portable, so I decided, with the consent of my very understanding daughter Rachel, to move to Norway once she’d left home. I’d worked as a financial translator in Mexico during the 1990s but had moved over to editing when I returned to the UK in the 2000s. I missed translation a lot and I’d always really wanted to translate books anyway, so I decided to take the hint the universe seemed to be giving me and dived into learning Norwegian, with the ambition of reinventing myself as a literary translator. Ånon fed me with Norwegian fiction and shepherded me through the language-learning process with the patience of a saint. Translation was part of that process from the start. One day he presented me with a book of short stories by the late great Telemark author, Hans Herbjørnsrud, and that’s when things caught fire. The writing was so extraordinary and lush and challenging that it had a galvanising effect on my translation skills, and a translated excerpt of one of his stories ended up winning me a John Dryden prize. That put me on NORLA’s radar, and opened the door to the wonderful, generous world that is the Norwegian translation community. I feel incredibly lucky.
Your colleague Nichola Smalley passed the Translator of the Month baton over to you:
The reason I want to hear from Lucy is that I’m fascinated by her research skills! Lucy’s a brilliant and sensitive translator, often working on really challenging non-fiction texts that involve a lot of fact-checking on her part. I’m lucky to count her as a friend and even view her as a collaborator or sorts, as I regularly turn to her when I have some query over a specific Norwegian word or phrase I can’t get my head around. Not only does she often know the answer, but she often sleuths her way to which text I’m working on or where a given quote has come from.
So my question to Lucy is:
What’s the secret to your brilliant research skills? Please divulge the tricks of your trade!!
I’m flattered by Nicky’s conviction that I’m some kind of research genius! I’m not sure if I really am or if it’s just that almost all the non-translation jobs I’ve had involved chasing down and checking information in some way or another, so I’d had a lot of practise years before I ever started translating non-fiction. Since some of those jobs predated the internet, the skills I’d already acquired got an incredible boost when I went online in the mid-1990s. I quickly became a dedicated user of search engines, learning early on that the quality of the query is key to the result. That still holds. As for the habit of double- and triple-checking the answer you get, that has only become more crucial in the now sadly degraded online environment.
Faking it: Translating non-fiction is fascinating because with every book you have to teach yourself to sound like an expert on a subject you probably know nothing about. It helps to read around the topic as I translate to get a clearer understanding of context. And not to be afraid of asking my author stupid questions.
Check the research: If my author cites a research paper, I’ll track it down and read the abstract as well as the part that’s directly pertinent to the translation. As a non-science person, this has been particularly useful when I’ve worked on popular science books like Extraordinary Insects or The Wonder Down Under. If the paper isn’t available on the website of the institution where the authors work, I’ll look for it on Jstor.org, where you can read up to 100 papers per month online with a free subscription. For my current project, Hardråde by Tore Skeie, I’ve added a paid subscription to Academia.edu to my arsenal.
Bilingual abstracts: The abstracts of research papers in Norway are often presented in both English and Norwegian, so they can be a treasure trove of terminology. Although that’s most useful for people translating between Norwegian and English, it could still be helpful for other translators because it may be easier to find the right word in your target language by going via the English rather than Norwegian term.
Quotations: The non-fiction I translate is often packed with quotations from non-Norwegian texts that the author has translated. If I’m really lucky (looking at you, Bjørn Berge!), my author will have sent me a file containing all the quotations — both the original and its Norwegian translation, but that’s unusual. In most cases, footnotes will lead me to the text I need to consult.
Source texts: If, as often, the quotation has been translated from English, I’ll need to go looking for the original book or paper it comes from, preferably in digital form so it’s easily searchable. (If the quotation was translated from another of my working languages I’ll go to the original text to double-check the sense or to an English translation of the work if there is one.) For slightly older source texts I’ll look for a digital version on Internet Archive (archive.org), a fantastic online library without which I doubt I could do my job. Searches within the text are a bit clunky but functional, and the website keeps track of the books you’ve borrowed while you’re working on a project so you can easily find your way back to them. For my current book, I’ve also subscribed to Scribd.com where I found many of the books I couldn’t locate on Internet Archive. Although I don’t use it all that often, Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) can sometimes be a helpful source of digitised texts. As a last resort, I may give Google Books a try, but it’s as good as useless these days. If all this fails, I’ll see if a physical copy of the original book or paper is available in Norway and order it via interlibrary loan.
Finding the actual quotation: If the author has given me a page reference, it’ll be easy to find the quotation. If they haven’t, I’ll have to use a process of trial and error to guess my way to it. The most reliable method I’ve found is to choose the least usual word in the Norwegian quotation, ideally a word that can only be translated into English one way, and then I’ll search the book for that English word. Take this phrase, for example: “ingen brakte våpen til byen eller forsøkte å ta seg inn uten de riktige dokumentene”. I’d probably search for the equivalent of “dokumentene”—“documents” or perhaps “papers”. I could look for the English equivalent of “våpen” — “weapons” or “arms”, but since this is a book about Vikings, I’d get so many hits it’d take me half a day to work through them all. Of course, this only works with digital searches. If you have no page reference and only a physical book it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Places and Buildings: We’re all so used to using Streetview that I imagine every translator regularly uses it to research places that appear in the books they’re working on. I came across a slight refinement on this theme a few years back when my friend Rosie Hedger was finding it tricky to picture the inner courtyard and stairwell of an Oslo apartment building that was mentioned in her current translation project. She asked a bunch of us if anyone knew the place. None of us did, but an apartment from that same building turned out to be listed on the website of an estate agent… complete with pictures of the courtyard.
What would you be if you weren’t a translator?
One of my favourite ever jobs in my pre-translation years was in the PR office of a local UK TV station. It was such fun. People would call us whenever anything unusual happened locally, like the time there was a minor earthquake in central England and we were deluged by calls from elderly people who were convinced they were losing their minds when their furniture started shaking. I really enjoyed dealing with the correspondence and phone calls on often slightly eccentric matters. Forty years on, I still remember one repeat caller whose sole interest in life appeared to be Prisoner Cell Block H, an Australian soap famous for its shoddy acting, improbable storylines and ramshackle sets. We’d hear from him at least twice a month with some minutely detailed question about a given episode and I always relished the challenge of digging through the files to find an answer for him. People would often ask us for publicity shots of actors who’d appeared in the company’s TV shows, and those were the best days because no one else in the office could get their head around the filing system in the photographic archives, which had been set up by some long-gone former employee. That gave me carte blanche to spend a couple of hours up to my ears in negatives and contact sheets instead of attending dull departamental meetings. If translation hadn’t called, I could happily have done that job for the rest of my life.
Which of the (Norwegian) books you’ve translated have been the most fun?
It’s so hard to choose, but I think I’d have to go for Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson’s Extraordinary Insects. Anne is an passionate advocate for the smaller species on the planet, who delivers her thoroughly serious message in prose that’s light-footed, humorous and full of wonder. As the Evening Standard’s reviewer put it, “The stories she tells are so strange and absorbing that we don’t notice we’re being systematically educated”. And I know from the Amazon reviews that many a former insect-sceptic has set up a bee hotel in their garden after reading this book! Anne is also a dream to work with: responsive to questions, appreciative of a well-turned phrase and always ready to acknowledge and praise the work of her translators.
[Under Norsk litteraturfestival på Lillehammer sa forfatteren Ali Smith «Translation is everything. I think that a book doesn’t exist until it is translated.»
Hva er dine tanker rundt dette?]
I love Ali Smith not only for her writing but for her tireless championing of literary translators, which I’ve delightedly witnessed on two occasions. This question sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, leading me to a panel discussion at London’s South Bank Centre organised by the UK National Centre for Writing. In her opening remarks, Smith speaks eloquently about her admiration for literary translators, saying that they’re “as much writers as the original writers they translate, if not more so” and praising the generosity and ingenuity with which they handle the work. But literary translators are also, of course, very close readers of the texts they translate, perhaps the closest an author will ever have. I imagine that when she made this comment at Lillehammer, Smith was thinking about the way translation allows literature to break out of the cage of monolingualism, engaging with and prompting responses from other cultures. But I wonder if there’s also a sense in which she, as a writer, feels that her books begin to live a fuller and almost organic life when they are subjected to the ‘double-layered level of creativity’ of the reader-writer intent on producing ‘the book made new and right in its new language’. (All quotations are from the panel discussion, which you can find here: Living Translation: A National Conversation Event with Ali Smith)
[Har du en norsk favorittbok du synes engelskspråklige lesere fortjener at blir oversatt?]
There are so many authors I’d love to see in English, especially short-form writers like Hans Herbjørnsrud, Kjersti Rorgemoen and Jan Kristoffer Dale. But if I had to choose one book right now that I would kill for the opportunity to translate, it would be Kyrre Andreassen’s Furthermore I Consider that Carthage Must Be Destroyed. It’s the tale of Krister Larsen, an electrician whose life has gone into a tailspin since back problems forced him out of his profession. It’s an absolute blast and a virtuoso, utterly convincing piece of literary ventriloquism. Everything is told from Krister’s point of view in a voice so chatty, confiding and full of entertaining digressions that it takes a while to notice the self-contradictions and darkness below the surface.
We hope you’re ready to pass the baton to a colleague who also translates from Norwegian. Who would you like to hand off to, and what would you like to ask them?
I’d like to pass the baton to Alejandra Ramírez Olvera, whom I first ‘met’ on social media a few years back after we both translated Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson’s fantastic non-fiction book, Insektenes planet.
I’m always impressed by translators who make the time to advocate for our profession. Alex, I’d like to hear about your activities as President of The Mexican Literary Translators Association—a really vital job at a time when translators are under pressure worldwide. How do you manage to balance this work and your translation projects?
I see you started out professionally in AV translation. Could you tell me something about your transition to literary work, and especially if you feel there are particular skills you gained as an AV translator that enriched your practice as a literary translator?
Read more
More about Lucy on Books from Norway
Those of you who understand Norwegian can read her interview in full here [LENKE kommer når oversettelsen er ferdig…]
More interviews in NORLA’s series
Translators are our most important stakeholders when it comes to the spread of Norwegian literature in the world. Their work is of crucial significance, and in order to shed light on this, we embarked on this series of interviews, known as ‘Translator of the Month’.
You can find all of the interviews here
