Ranjit Bolt (born 1969) is a British playwright and translator. He was born in Manchester of Anglo-Indian parents and is the nephew of playwright and screen-writer Robert Bolt. His father is literary critic Sydney Bolt, author of several books including A preface to James Joyce, and his mother has worked as a teacher of English. Bolt was educated at The Perse School and Oxford University, and worked as a stockbroker for eight years but "I was desperate to escape, any escape route would have done, and translating turned out to be the one". As well as his plays he has published a novel in verse, Losing it and a verse translation for children of the fables of La Fontaine, The Hare and the Tortoise. He was awarded the OBE in 2003 for services to literature.

http://oberonbooks.com/theatre-practice/art-of-translation.html

“I try to follow the rule laid down by perhaps the greatest translator of all, John Dryden, who maintained that a translator should – and I paraphrase – make the version as entertaining as possible, while at the same time remaining as faithful as possible to the spirit of the original” – Ranjit Bolt.

In this book, Ranjit Bolt takes what is essentially a practitioner's view of the art of literary translation. His observations are born of a quarter of a century's experience of translating for a living, especially for the theatre. While rooted in practice, however, this survey does not shy away from theory, but is packed with allusion to great translation theorists such as Walter Benjamin and John Dryden, as well as adumbrating Bolt's own theoretical stance.