On Translation

Or when you realize that writing sometimes is not just writing... 

By Mina Witteman

Translation

Last week, I wrote about writing in another language than your native tongue. The challenges of doing so can be daunting, but, for me, the joys of playing with new words, of exploring new grammar and spelling rules, of finding a new voice make an exciting novel world. 

Translation is a whole different tale. Since few acquiring editors in the US, where I settled more than eight years ago, read Dutch, I started helping my Dutch publisher by translating excerpts of my middle grade novels into English for them to offer at international book fairs. The relative ease with which I wrote in English completely disappeared when I tried to translate my own work. It seemed impossible to nail my protagonist's Dutch voice in English. I quickly realized translation was a whole different form of art. How is that, you ask yourself? I have just the right person for us to shed some light on this. 

Let's Hop Over to Amsterdam

And hear what a professional translator has to say! Laura Watkinson translates from Dutch, German and Italian into English. Her translations have won many, many awards and honors. Laura was born in Britain and has lived and worked in the Netherlands for over twenty years. Laura was the founder of SCBWI The Netherlands (now SCBWI Benelux). Hi Laura, good to have you here! 

LW: Hi, Mina! Good to be here.

 

MW: My first question: How did you become a translator? And what is it that pulls you to the art of translation and to languages in general?

LW: I’ve always been fascinated by languages, ever since I discovered as a little girl that there were other languages out there, not just English. My mom had a dictionary with a list of foreign expressions in the back, and I remember trying to pronounce them when I was about seven years old. I focused on languages at school and university, so translation was a natural step for me. It helps that I also love reading books and experiencing different countries. Translation is the perfect portable career.

 

MW: Perhaps a silly question, but how important is reading across borders? 

LW: What better way to find out about how other people and cultures tick? Reading about others’ lives helps us to develop empathy and understanding. Reading stories that originated in other cultures reminds us that there’s more going on in the world than what’s happening in our own little corner. Translation also gives us more stories and different voices. Reading across borders is of vital importance today, just as it has always been. What I’m saying here might sound like clichéd, but that’s because it’s so true.

 

MW: A study of the Index Translationum, the Unesco-managed database of translations from a diverse array of literary, academic and popular genres, shows us that over the period 1979-2007 more than half of the translations had English as source language. Next were French, German and Russian with, respectively, 10%, 9% and 5%, followed by Italian, Spanish and Swedish, each with 1 to 3%. All other source languages, including world languages like Chinese, Arabic, Japanese and Portuguese, represented less than 1% of the international world of translations. It shows that translations from the English are dominant. It also shows that it’s probably hard to get books translated from the more peripheral source languages. Can you shed light on how books get chosen for translation? Is there anything a writer can do to advance their chances?

LW: My experience of the process of choosing books for translation has largely involved publishers and book fairs. The most important book fair for children’s book is held in Bologna, Italy, every year. Publishers from all over the world attend, with the aim of buying and selling rights. A publisher who’s selling rights for a book that’s not in English will typically take along some publicity material and an excerpt of the book translated into English, as English is the closest thing to a common language for most publishers. That package will be presented to potential buyers from all kinds of different countries during meetings at the fair, and with luck the book will make its way from there into various other language territories.

It can help if you’re writing in a language that has funding available for translation costs. As an author, it’s worth checking that your publisher is aware of any such grants and subsidies, so that they can use that information as part of their sales pitch.

            The books that have had a lot of buzz in their home countries are often the ones that are most likely to sell to foreign publishers. The publishers keep a record of positive reviews and pull positive quotes for translation, so that potential buyers can see that the book has already had a good reception at home.

            Writers and translators sometimes attend book fairs too, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll get a meeting with publishers. For me, it’s more about the atmosphere and the chance conversations (and gelato) that you have with fellow publishing professionals.

The Art of Translation

MW: Let's explore some of the nitty-gritty of the art of translation and, specifically, the matter of my initial inability to nail the voice of my protagonist Boreas in English. What are your thoughts about finding the voices of the characters whose words, thoughts, and actions you translate? And how does the voice of the author relate to the voice of the translator?

LW: I think if the voice of the original character is strong, that will come through in the translation. When you’re reading, you enter into that world for a while and develop a feeling for the characters. It’s that feeling that you’re aiming to convey, so that the character has the same kind of impact in the translation as in the original. Sometimes that might mean shifting away from a closer translation, in order to create the same kind of impact.

 

MW: What is your process when you translate? Do you have a certain work order? Books and/or dictionaries that you can’t do without?

LW: My first draft is a ‘quick and dirty’ one, so that I know what’s in store for me. The second draft is where most of the work is done. If I spot certain challenges in the first draft, I already start turning them over and over inside my head and looking for solutions, which often arrive when I’m in the shower or when I can’t sleep in the middle of the night. After the second draft, the text is fairly tidy, but then I go through the book again and again, tweaking and polishing and sorting out the details. Sometimes publishers want an early peek at the first few pages of a translation, and that’s something that I find tricky to do, as my translations aren’t usually finished until the deadline, and there might be a few patches early on in the book that still need work even at a fairly late stage.

 

MW: As you know, I translated my novel from my native Dutch into English. As I described above, that was not the easiest task I set myself. Do you ever translate into other languages than your native English? If a writer wanted to do this, do you have any advice? 

LW: I’m full of admiration for people who can translate in both directions, but that’s not me. I only ever translate into English. It would feel like a different task to me if I had to translate in the other direction – and it wouldn’t be a fun one! I’m very envious of children who grow up in bilingual – and trilingual – families. What a blessing to have a sense of ease and proficiency with more than one language! 

I wouldn’t give advice to writers on this subject, though. I think it’s something you have to decide for yourself. Literary translators are writers, but it’s fair to say that not all writers can be – or want to be – translators.

I Want to Become a Translator. Where Do I Go?

MW: My final question is for all SCBWI-members out there who aspire to be a translator. Where and how can they best start? What is, in your view, absolutely necessary to become a good translator?

LW: I’d say that it’s important to explore the business first and to find a place for yourself there. Contact publishers and other professionals. Publishers may be looking for people to translate excerpts and publicity material. Some publishers have trusted readers who write reports on foreign-language books, and that can be a way to make contacts at publishing houses. Get in touch with funding organizations for your language combination and find out if they have any opportunities for emerging translators. Explore the world of literary magazines. Always make sure that you’re getting paid a fair rate for your work. Never translate an entire book unsolicited, in the hope that you might be lucky and find a publisher. That’s really unlikely. Organizations like the UK Society of Authors and the SCBWI can help with advice. Read books of the kind that you want to translate, in your source and your target languages, so that you keep up to date with what’s being published and the sort of language that you might want to use. Talk to other translators. They’re a good source of advice and opportunities, and you might be able to steer them in the right direction, too. Find kids’ books that you love – and you’ll always have fun!

MW: Thank you, Laura! That was a wonderful and very insightful conversation. I am tremendously looking forward to reading many more of your translations. All photos in this post are covers of some books Laura translated. Go check out them out! You want to know more about Laura and her life as a translator in Amsterdam? Follow her on Instagram. 

F(o)UN(d) in Translation – a Guest Post by Lawrence Schimel

While it's a cliché to talk about what is "lost in translation" I prefer to think of all the things that are found thanks to translation. And for me one of the best things about being a translator is to help people find stories they couldn't otherwise access because they didn't speak the language.

I define myself first and foremost as a reader, and while some of the books I translate are projects that publishers come to me with, quite a lot are books I read and fall in love with and want to share with more readers in one of my other languages.

The Fun of Translation

There are plenty of articles that talk about the CHALLENGES of translation, and while there are certainly obstacles and hardships, having to do with both the nature of the work itself and also the business-side of the profession (badly paid, lack of credit, etc.), I think there isn't enough emphasis placed on how FUN translation can be. Even (or especially) the literary challenges.

So I asked some fellow translators to share some of what is fun about what it is we do.

Gili Bar-Hillel Semo

Gili Bar-Hillel Semo is a translator from English into Hebrew, and also the editor of YA publisher Utz Books. She loves Diana Wynne Jones and all things Oz, and is perhaps best-known for having translated the Harry Potter series into Hebrew; she just finished a new Hebrew translation of The Catcher in the Rye.

She said:

I guess what I love about translating is that it can sometimes be like solving a crossword puzzle or a riddle. You just know there has to be a clever way of solving something, and when the idea finally springs on you it's immensely gratifying. This is particularly true for wordplay and rhyme, of which there are plenty in children's books.

And then I go around for awhile very pleased with myself because I found a way to translate this impossible thing that seemed untranslatable. Which can probably only be appreciated by other people capable of translating those languages...

Laura Watkinson

When I first approached Laura Watkinson, award-winning translator from Dutch, German, and Italian into English, with this question, she quipped: "It's all fun. Except for the admin!"

But like Gili, she also enjoys the challenges of wordplay. Laura said:

It's also fun – and often a challenge – coming up with translations that involve puns and jokes that require a little more freedom in translation. And funny poems for children too. You have to work with the rhymes and keep it fun but the meaning may change a little so that you can keep the same kind of pace and rhythm. That's always interesting. I sometimes go and sit in cafes to do that kind of work, as it helps me to escape the page a little.

Oh, and picture books with funny pictures can be a real laugh too. Sometimes the pictures will suggest a translation that wouldn't have occurred to me if I'd only seen the words.

Laura also had a unique experience in that one of the books she translated was made into a series and she got to visit the set:

It was great fun going to the Czech Republic to see some of the filming for the Netflix series of The Letter for the King. Fascinating to see some of the words that you've written coming out of actors' mouths. I also came up with a few "translations" of the characters' names, just small shifts generally, to capture the same sounds and sense in English as in the original, and it was good to see those names attached to actual people.

Sometimes translation can be not just fun, but also glamorous, even if it is often borrowed glamour (our work is in some ways a reflection of the author's original).

Like Gili and Laura, some of the "tricky" challenges of translating are the parts I enjoy most--like working on rhyming picture books. The words that rhyme in one language won't necessarily rhyme in the other, and the translator doesn't even have complete freedom to invent new rhymes because they can't contradict anything in the existing artwork.

But for a word nerd like myself, these are not simply obstacles in my path to be surmounted, but are the kind of puzzles I'd do in my free time: basically, I'm getting paid to play wordgames! And the best fun can be making up new puns!

Very often you can't translate puns literally but in order to recreate the reading experience you need to come up with a new pun in the target language that serves the same function.

For instance, when I was translating into English the middle grade bibliofantasy novel The Wild Book by Mexican author Juan Villoro, I got a chance to make up lots of new puns and twists off classic titles. 

At one point, the protagonist's uncle goes through a culinary obsession, and there are lots of jokes with food twists. When the original used Sobras completas as a book title, it was so perfect because that pun plays off Obras completas (or the Collected/Complete Works of an author) and "sobras" which are leftovers. I love brainstorming this kind of thing, and in the end I wound up using A Room with a Stew to evoke both a literary classic and to fit the scene (where everything is being tidied in the kitchen and more or less thrown into the pot). 

It's definitely more fun for me to translate works like these, with a playfulness and a sense of humor, than a dry academic text, say. (Actually, all that latinate jargon translates fairly straightforwardly, so even if you don't know what it means, you can often accurately translate it without even needing to look things up.)

The research can be its own kind of fun. Not so much tracking down quotations that are quoted in your text in translation but were originally written in English (or another language but where an English translation is already published and widely-known). But for instance, when I translated the middle grade novel The Treasure of Barracuda by Llanos Campos, about a pirate crew that learns to read after discovering that the famous treasure is his memoirs, I got to basically spend months of Talk Like a Pirate Day!

And one of the things I value about even some of the purportedly "boring" kind of translations is that I get to learn about all sorts of things. I no longer have a physical encyclopedia set like I used to consult at the library–or at home (although we never bought the whole alphabet's worth of the encyclopedia subscription, so I could only read the early volumes)–when I was a kid, but translation gives me a chance to (temporarily) get lost down a rabbit hole investigating things like locomotives or crystal formations or bonsai–and it's all legitimate and necessary research for work, so it's not even like I'm slacking off in letting my inner geek get to play for a while. 

But I agree with Laura, all the admin is a chore!

***

Lawrence Schimel is a bilingual (Spanish/English) author & anthologist who has published over 120 books in many different genres. He won a Crystal Kite Award for his picture book Will You Read a Book With Me?, illustrated by Thiago Lopes, and his books have also been chosen for the White Ravens and by IBBY for Outstanding Books for Children with Disabilities (three times). His children's books featuring rainbow families, Early One Morning and Bedtime, Not Playtime!, both illustrated by Elina Braslina, have been published in 46 editions in 37 languages, including Romansch, Welsh, Icelandic, Changana, isiZulu, and Luxembourgish. He is also a prolific literary translator, both into Spanish and into English, of more than 130 books. He lives in Madrid, Spain, where he founded the SCBWI Spain chapter and served as RA for the first 5 years. 

A Guest Interview With 3-Time Batchelder Award-Winning Translator Laura Watkinson

Laura Watkinson, Translator Extraordinaire 

By Avery Fischer Udagawa and Lyn Miller-Lachmann 

Laura Watkinson, founder of SCBWI Netherlands, has wowed the children’s book world by translating three of the last four winners of the Mildred L. Batchelder Award.

The Batchelder—awarded in the same series as the Newbery and Caldecott—goes to the publisher of the best children’s book in the U.S. that first appeared in another language overseas.

In children’s literature translation, it is the Oscar Award. 

Laura Watkinson 

Laura answered questions from Lyn Miller-Lachmann and Avery Fischer Udagawa about her winning translations from Dutch.

For SCBWI members new to your work, what are the titles and authors of your Batchelder winners, and what are they about? 

Bibi Dumon Tak’s Soldier Bear (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, illustrated by Philip Hopman) won the Batchelder in 2012. It’s based on a true story about a bear who became an army mascot in World War II and all the adventures he and his fellow soldiers had.

2012 Batchelder winner Soldier Bear, with photo of the real bear taken by Laura’s mother-in-law in childhood, at the Edinburgh Zoo.

Truus Matti’s Mister Orange (Enchanted Lion) was the 2014 winner, and is about a young boy in New York and his inspiring friendship with the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian.

This year’s 2015 winner was another collaboration with Bibi Dumon Tak, Philip Hopman, and Eerdmans Books for Young Readers: Mikis and the Donkey, about a boy in a Greek village who teaches his grandfather that donkeys aren’t machines for doing work, but creatures that need to be looked after properly.

What are some of the special considerations in translating books for young readers, as opposed to books for adults? 

When translating books for children, I sometimes provide a little more padding to explain any new concepts, such as special holidays or customs, rather than leaving younger readers to figure it out for themselves. With books for adults, for instance, I tend to leave names as they are in the original, even if they may look fairly unpronounceable to a non-Dutch speaker, e.g. Thijs. However, in a children’s book, I may choose to substitute an “easier” name that works in both Dutch and English, generally something that starts with the same letter, e.g. Tim.

A few little stumbling blocks in a book are okay, as the story does come from a different culture, after all, but sometimes it’s a good idea to make the experience just a little smoother for younger readers.

Now that marketing is so important for authors of books for young readers, what role does the translator play? 

That depends a lot on the translator and, of course, on the publisher’s marketing approach. I enjoy helping out with publicity for books and also promoting the role of translation in increasing diversity within the children’s book market, so I’m happy to attend conferences and book launches, for example, and I’m also active online. (See www.laurawatkinson.com and @Laura_Wat on Twitter.)

How do you find books to translate? 

I work closely with publishers in both my source and target languages, writing reports on books for English-language publishers and translating excerpts of books and publicity material, too. Sometimes I’ll recommend a book to a publisher if I think it’s a good fit for their list, but most of my projects come to me from publishers.

How does knowing an author personally—as you did Karlijn Stoffels, author of Heartsinger (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)—help with the process of translation? How can it become a problem for the translator? 

Karlijn and I both live in Amsterdam, but we didn’t actually meet until after I’d finished translating Heartsinger. I didn’t have any questions for her while I was translating the book, as it’s very clearly written, but she read the translation before publication, and we discussed a few points, which was helpful. I haven’t had any problems with authors so far—touch wood!—but I have heard stories about some authors who have tried to impose their own ideas on a translation. I think it’s sometimes hard for them to let go of their “baby.”

What kinds of books are easiest to transport from one culture to another? And hardest? 

I’ve recently translated The Letter for the King and its sequel, The Secrets of the Wild Wood, by Tonke Dragt (UK: Pushkin Press; US: David Fickling Books/Scholastic). They’re absolute classics of Dutch children’s literature—and a real privilege to translate. As they’re set in a fictional medieval world, they were easy to transport into English. There were no Dutch cultural aspects to explain, and most of the characters’ names were invented by the author. The ideas also felt very natural to me in English.

Rhyming picture books are, of course, one of the trickier kinds of text to write—doubly so in translation, I think. You’re not only dealing with the rhymes, but also having to make sure the text still matches the pictures, and that you can maintain any puns. It can be great fun, but I often feel the pressure of the deadline when it comes to rhyming texts. Still, if the illustrations and the story are great, it’s a lovely challenge for a translator.

What is your favorite children’s book in translation, from/into any language? 

I wouldn’t really make a distinction between books in translation and books originally written in English. Whether in translation or in the original, they’re all stories in their own right.

My favorite children’s book is probably Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse, originally written in English, but also translated into a number of other languages. So many books that were written originally in English have been translated into countless other languages, and often the readers don’t even stop to consider the fact that they’re reading a book in translation. I’d love it if we could reach that position in English-language publishing, too, and see great books as great books, whether translated or not. There are some fabulous books out there in languages other than English, and we should be welcoming them into our language and onto our bookshelves. We are missing out on so many great stories, authors, and experiences.

What is your favorite “myth” about translation? 

It’s become a cliché: the phrase “lost in translation.” A translation and an original can obviously never be identical, as they’re written in different languages and filtered through different associations and images, but a translation should be able to stand on its own, as a text in its own right. Translators work hard to respect the essence of the original, and although some aspects may have to be sacrificed, there’s plenty a translator can add to the work to maintain some kind of equivalence. If it’s a great story in the original, it’ll still be that same great story in translation.

Lyn Miller-Lachmann (www.lynmillerlachmann.com) translated The World in a Second by Isabel Minhós Martins, edited Once Upon a Cuento, and authored Rogue, Gringolandia, and Surviving Santiago. She is a We Need Diverse Books team member. 

Avery Fischer Udagawa (www.averyfischerudagawa.com) translated J-Boys: Kazuo’s World, Tokyo, 1965 by Shogo Oketani. She is SCBWI Japan Translator Coordinator and SCBWI International Translator Coordinator: itc@scbwi.org