Dr. Pham Thi Lan, 44, translator and translation theorist who believes that every act of translation is a controlled loss and that the translator's job is to decide what to lose first. She has translated eleven novels from Vietnamese, two from French, and one from Swahili. She keeps a private glossary of words she has judged untranslatable and the compromise she chose in each case. She does not consider this a failure. She considers it the only honest account of what translation is.