I've moved!

Given the trouble I've been having with Blogger over the last few days, and the fact that Google's answer appears to be to switch from Firefox to Chrome, I've moved my blog.

Come and find me at a discount ticket to everywhere in its new home!

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

City of Literature - Update

Norwich skyline from Mousehold Heath

A while ago I blogged about Norwich's bid to become England's first UNESCO City of Literature. In case you missed the anouncement, it was confirmed on 10 May that the bid was successful: see here for what UNESCO say about it. At the time, I was rather pre-occupied with the Blogathon so I didn't get round to posting an update.

While largely agreeing with him, I was amused by this part of Sam Jordison's post on the Guardian Book Blog:

"On a more personal note, I can vouch for the fact that Norwich is a good place for writers. (...) [T]here's also a thriving community of writers and journalists living here. When I made the move, I thought I was a pioneer, but it turns out I was just enacting a cliche. Half my neighbours seem to have a novel in the pipeline, a newspaper column, a job in publishing, an eccentric authorial uncle ..."

Clearly he lives in the Golden Triangle - I can't imagine quite so many writers in our neck of the woods.

For more information on what this all actually means, see the Writers' Centre Norwich website. I'm already looking forward to the International Centre for Writing though - it sounds lovely, even if it is at least 3 years away...


Photo by soapbeard, used under Attribution License

Wordle Day

Today is Wordle day on the 2012 Blogathon so here's a word picture of my blog...

You can make your own at www.wordle.net - let me know if you do, I'd love to see it!

Haiku Day and Beautiful Blogger Award

I was very flattered to be nominated for a Beautiful Blogger Award by Suzanne at The Tales of Missus P - thank you!

So, this is what happens when you’re nominated:

• You write seven facts about yourself
• You link to the blog of the person who nominated you
• You link to seven bloggers who you think deserve the award
• You let those bloggers know they have been nominated

So, here goes...

1. I still really, really enjoy colouring in...
2. I have spent most of my life in south-east England but...
3. I spent three months with a family in the Central African Republic and a year in Saarbrücken, Germany.
4. I was an extremely picky eater and now so are my kids - what goes around comes around!
5. I grew out of it so, hopefully, so will they...
6. I can never pick my favourite book because I have so many.
7. I'm not very good at poetry - see below.

Today is also Haiku Day on the WordCount Blogathon. I'm not very good at poetry - reading it or writing it - but here's what I came up with.

Outside, cold and grey:

I open another world -

lost in a good book.

Inspired by that thought, here are seven lovely blogs where we can discover new worlds:

Yes, I'd rather be there than here today!
Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

1. Lindsay at The Little Reader Library - a really pretty blog and a wide range of interesting reviews.
2. Sandra Hume at Little House Travel - a fellow Blogathoner, writing about all things relating to the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
3. Sarah at Norfolk Bookworm - thoughts of a book blogger local to me.
4. Katy Derbyshire at Love German Books - a fellow (but much more prestigious!) German to English translator, based in Berlin - insights into the German book world.
5. OK, so it's not book-related, but Venetia is a fellow translator and her Dolcis in Fundo food blog really is beautiful and inspires me to cook!
6. Desperate Reader also highlights fascinating books.
7. Karen at Euro Crime posts snippets on British and other European crime books, TV and film.

Now I'm off to let them know and tomorrow we'll get back to the A-Z!

"Like being at home in a strange land" (Philip Pullman)

Image: Surachai / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So here I am, at the beginning of the Blogathon and having picked a theme with plenty to write about. But why children's literature in translation? Partly because I know about it, partly to raise awareness of it, partly because there's more of it out there than you might think.


Translating children's books shares the same challenges as translation for adults when it comes to tricky cultural references, "untranslatable" words and concepts, ambiguities, grammatical structures and so on. It also brings extra dimensions of its own, however. Two factors pointed out by Riita Oittinen in Translating for Children are that children's books are often illustrated and often intended for reading aloud. I stumbled across both these issues in my early forrays into translating for children.

For a student project, I worked on a translation of Janosch's Post für den Tiger (German link). When the Bear and the Tiger invent postboxes, my reaction was to say "and they painted them red" instead of yellow - the books aren't set in any particular country and red would be more familiar for British children. But turn over the page and there's a lovely big picture of them putting little yellow boxes all over the forest. So yellow they had to remain.

Another example: I translated Fips' Birthday before I had children. I read the translation through to myself and it sounded fine. Once fils aîné came along, though, and I found myself regularly reading it aloud to him, I realised that it just didn't flow. Quite embarrassing. I have now rewritten my translation for reading aloud, should the publishers produce a new edition.

Image: jannoon028 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

On the other hand, translating for children also has many benefits and advantages. Children are generally hugely interested in everything. They can be much more willing than adults to explore new worlds and ideas. Philip Pullman has written a foreword to Outside In, Children's books in translation, eds Deborah Hallford and Edgardo Zaghini (Milet Publishing), which can be read here: on the TES website. In it, he says that reading translated books as a child was "like being at home in a strange land":

"There are children today in this country who will find a book, or books, in this guide satisfying a hunger they didn't know they had, and exciting a passion they had no idea they were capable of feeling. We don't know who they are, and we don't know which books will have that effect; but if we DON'T offer children the experience of literature from other languages, we're starving them. It's as simple as that."  Source: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=2137315

A is for Asterix, B is for Babar...

Between the 2012 WordCount Blogathon and a random chain of thoughts fizzing around in my head, I've decided to see if I can blog an A - Z of children's literature in translation through the month of May.

At the moment I've managed to line up potential subjects for nearly every letter of the alphabet, but I'm a bit stuck on W and Z! If anybody has any suggestions, I'd be more than happy to hear them...

Edit: Oops, I mean X, not Z...
 
I don't quite know where I'll be going with this at the moment, or where it might lead, but I think it'll be fun, and it'll certainly be a challenge!

Image: sheelamohan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Should a Translation Improve on the Original?

I very much enjoy Peter Rozovsky's blog Detectives Beyond Borders and his take on crime fiction from around the world. However, I was taken aback by a recent post on Amateurish prose in a translation from Japanese, specifically this bit:

"But I'm reminded again that a translator is not just a translator but also a writer, with all the demands that entails. If the original lags, the translator should have made it better."

I have don't have much difficulty with the first sentence. It's nice to get some acknowledgement that translators do more than just churn out words in a new language. Yes, we're writers too but is it really our duty to improve on the source text?

Discussing the reluctance to match dialect for dialect in Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (Particular Books, London, 2011, pp. 200-201), David Bellos argues that:

"Grammatical mistakes, malapropisms and other kinds of 'substandard' language must not be seen to be the translator's fault."

and that:

"Translation always takes the register and level of naturally written prose up a notch or two. Some degree of raising is and always has been characteristic of translated texts - simply because translators are instinctively averse to the risk of being taken for less than fully cultivated writers of their target tongue."

 This relates to perfectly well written prose or dialogue that happens to be in non-standard language such as dialect or slang. What if the text is just not very good though? Who decides? Surely it's the height of arrogance to feel that we can do a better job than the original author? Isn't our role to capture her style, to reflect his voice? But then, on the other hand, isn't our job also to write as well as possible in our target language - doing justice to the reader? And what does improving a text actually mean? My idea of an improvement might be your idea of a travesty!

A rather fundamentalist evangelical of my acquaintance once suggested, at least half-seriously, "improving" a text on the Galapagos by replacing references to Darwin with references to an "intelligent designer"... Rest assured that even had I wanted to do something so unethical, there are all sorts of contracts and checks in place to prevent it! Obviously this is an extreme example, but it shows how subjective the whole idea is.

For some of my recent translations, I have been lucky enough to have a good working relationship with the author, meaning that where I had a problem with the text, I could ask her advice, check that I'd understood correctly or query continuity errors for example. This has not been my usual experience, however. Normally, as a translator I've been on my own with just the text to go on. Of course there are many resources for translators online too. I can also discuss such issues with other translators on internet forums, blogs or Twitter, for example. Ultimately though, it seems to me, all I can do is my best; I will write as well as I can, seek advice where I can get it and trust in my own instincts. Let the reader understand.

For more debate on the subject see also:

Publishing Perspectives: When is a Translation Superior to the Original?
About Translation: Can translators ignore theory?

Domestication vs. Foreignisation via Red Rage

I'm honoured to have had the chance to write a guest post for Lisa Carter's Intralingo blog, which you can read here: Domestication vs. Foreignisation via Red Rage

Thank you, Lisa!