“Read fiction.”
That is the short answer I give whenever someone asks me how to learn translation. It sounds too simple, almost lazy, until you sit with it. But among the professional Hausa translators I have met, the strongest ones share a quiet habit: they read fiction and literature with seriousness, the way others study manuals.
There is a kind of instinct in translation that does not come from rules. You notice it when reading a translation and feeling that it sounds right before you can fully explain why. It is not accuracy alone but a sense that the translator understood more than the words.
This does not mean translation cannot be learned through method and discipline, of course it can. Languages must be studied, context must be researched, drafts must be revised, culture must be respected. These are the visible mechanics of the craft, and without them, translation collapses.
What is rarely said to aspiring translators is how difficult it is to develop sensitivity. Rules tell you what is acceptable but they do not tell you what feels human. That sensitivity grows slowly, often outside formal training, and reading fiction plays a quiet role in shaping it.
Fiction teaches empathy without announcing that it is doing so. When you read a story, you spend time inside another person’s fears, desires, hesitations, and blind spots, you listen to how people speak when they are angry, polite, dishonest, playful, or tired, and you begin to notice how meaning bends depending on who is speaking and why. This is not something a textbook can instruct directly.
Textbooks explain language but it is widely confirmed that fiction allows you to live inside it, where scenes linger and voices settle in the mind long after the plot fades. That residue matters. For a translator, it becomes part of how one senses tone, intention, and emotional weight.
I am not suggesting that every translator must read fiction obsessively, but a translator who avoids it entirely risks producing work that is correct yet hollow. Unlike professions where loyalty to procedure is enough, translation asks for immersion. To translate well, one must read widely, until the language being translated stops feeling external and begins to feel inhabited.
This relationship between reading and translation is visible in the work of many respected translators. Abubakar Imam is often cited as a master of adaptive translation, not because he followed rules more strictly than others but because he understood how to move meaning across cultures. His method was not literal transfer but cultural transformation, a practice scholars later described as Imamanci, and anyone familiar with his work can sense that it grew out of deep and sustained reading.
Ismail Bala, a contemporary poet and translator known for translating Hausa literary texts into English, offers a similar example. I did not learn this from him directly, but his translations speak on his behalf. Read his recent work, “Online Platforms and the Resurgence of Hausa Novels: A Perspective from a Publisher and a Novelist,” and you will fully understand what I mean.
Mazhun Idris is also a Hausa translator, widely known for his advocacy of Hausa localization. From my own experience training under him, I have come to believe that reading fiction must have played an important role in shaping his sensitivity to language.
Some writers, even when they are not described as translators, perform the work of translation through their writing. Chinua Achebe is perhaps the most familiar example. He did not simply write fiction in English but translated the Igbo world into it, carrying its proverbs, moral codes, and rhythms across linguistic borders. Gabriel Okara took this even further in The Voice, where he translated Ijaw syntax directly into English, bending the language so it could hold another way of seeing.
All these figures differ in style, period, and method, yet they share a common inheritance. They read literature seriously, and their work carries the imprint of that reading.
Mastering two or more languages may qualify someone as a translator, but it rarely makes them an excellent one. Translation, like any craft, has its techniques, and those techniques can be taught, practiced, and assessed. Yet something essential often remains missing.
That missing element is not discovered through rules alone. It develops through prolonged contact with language as it is lived, not merely used. Reading fiction places the translator inside voices, situations, and emotional registers that formal instruction cannot reproduce. Over time, this exposure sharpens intuition and deepens judgment.
A translator shaped by fiction listens differently. They hesitate where hesitation is needed. They sense when a sentence must bend rather than stand straight. Meaning, in such hands, is not transferred mechanically but carried with care.