U is for the Upside Down Reader...

...by Wilhelm Gruber. A great first chapter book for beginning readers, it's the story of Tim, who learns to read by looking at his sister's school books across the table. Of course this means that he can only read if the book is upside down. Because they think he's too little, his family don't believe that he can read until Grandma comes to stay. Then he surprises everybody by reading the station signs perfectly, but he has to stand on his head first!

Published by NorthSouth Books, the illustrations by Marlies Rieper-Bastian show a German family and a German Bahnhof with the S for the S-Bahn, yet the station names have been changed to Bristol, Salem and Hartford. (From my experience of NorthSouth Books, that might have been an editorial decision rather than one taken by the translator.) The translation by J. Alison James is slightly odd in that it refers to "Mother" and "Dad" - presumably so did the German, but personally I'd have changed it. Otherwise though, it's fine and pitched at just the right level for the target readership. Sadly, once again the author and illustrator gets biogs at the back but not the translator.

Again I had to track down a second-hand copy, but it's worth looking out for if you get a chance. Fils aîné found it very funny and instantly wanted to turn the book upside down to see if he could read it that way too.

"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

Anything by Emily Gravett

My current answer when asked for picture book recommendations is "Anything by Emily Gravett," and here's why: I haven't yet come across one of her books that I haven't liked, and they're big hits with the boys too. All her books are beautiful, as befits someone who has twice won the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration, and the stories are equally charming.

Fils cadet is particularly taken with Blue Chameleon at the moment, while Fils aîné prefers Again!

Blue Chameleon is very simple and definitely more suited to younger ones, yet it has plenty to discuss on each page. It tells the story of a little chameleon looking for a friend and adapting its shape and colour to match the various objects it finds along the way - a snail, a sock and a cowboy boot, for example. As well as spotting the colours, we can discuss the way the chameleon is feeling as it gets progressively more dejected until at last it meets another chameleon and the two walk off together in a joyful explosion of colours.

Again! introduces a scenario familiar to every parent and child at bedtime. Cedric the little dragon has one favourite story, and he wants his mum to read it. And again, and again, and again! Dragons being what they are, when Cedric loses his temper, the results are startling and very funny. Fils aîné thinks so anyway, bounding around with excitement and bellowing "again!" I, on the other hand, find myself entirely in sympathy with Cedric's mum, wearily changing the story with each repetition before falling asleep herself...

Both of these are books we've had out of the library before, and have out of the library at the moment, and undoubtedly will have out of the library again in the future, given the rapture with which they were rediscovered last week. Others that I'd particularly recommend are Meerkat Mail for older children and Orange, Pear, Apple, Bear for younger ones. But like I said, anything by Emily Gravett is bound to be good!

Watching my son learn to read...

Fils aîné is learning to read. There's nothing remarkable about that - children do it all the time. And yet it's more than remarkable - it's amazing. And it's fascinating to watch. After ages stuck at the level of recognising letters but not wanting to put them together into words, suddenly school has lit the blue touchpaper and woomph! There are the school "book bag books", his own books, library books, fils cadet's books to be read. (It's rather nice to wake up in the morning and hear him read stories to his little brother.) And there are signs, packets, bottles, letters, words everywhere:

"Mummy, that says 'can bank'. Why does it say 'can bank', Mummy?"; "Mummy, that says 'stop'!"; "Mummy, does that bottle say 'wake up naked'?" 

The shower gel in question. Apparently, it also does sky diving...

  Then the other day it was:

"Mummy, why aren't you reading your book?"
"I am reading it!"
"No you're not - you're just looking at it!"

 He's seen us reading silently hundreds of times before, but it was only on that occasion that he noticed that there was something odd about it, that it's not the way he reads. Something else has just clicked in his brain.

Watch the process of him reading is also enlightening - his eyes dart all over the page taking in the information from the pictures as well as the words. This can lead to some wrong conclusions, like the time that "I like to paint pictures. I like to use a paintbrush," accompanied by a picture of a child using pink paint became "I like to use pink paint". This also demonstrates his reliance on the first letters of a word - a bit like predictive text! All the same though, he'll go back and correct himself if he spots a mistake.

It's such a privilege looking on and encouraging him as he grows in confidence and fluency, and, of course, I'm longing for the day he can discover some of my childhood favourites for himself. After all, he's getting himself his very own discount ticket to everywhere...

By Tim Pierce (originally posted to Flickr as lost) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons