A is for Asterix

Where else would you start with a canter through children's literature in translation?! The Adventures of Asterix by Goscinny and Uderzo recently celebrated their 50th anniversary and are still going strong. Asterix, Obelix and the rest of the village of indomitable Gauls have been thumping the Romans since their first publication in France in 1959. While it was ten years before Asterix the Gaul appeared in English, they have had the same English translator ever since. Taking a somewhat loose approach to historical fact, and playing on all kinds of national myths and stereotypes (Asterix in Britain is instructive in how the French see us...), they have travelled the world, meeting such figures as Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, and spreading mayhem and merriment in their wake.


The series was certainly one of my first conscious encounters with books in translation and it must have been the same for countless other children around the world. The Official Asterix Translation Exchange reckons that the books have now been translated into 107 languages and dialects, while their current UK publishers, Orion, put it at 111:

"Asterix is the world’s highest-selling book series, and has sold over 350 million copies worldwide."       Source: http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/promotions/asterix

Reading Asterix in English was also, although I didn't know it at the time, my first encounter with the great Anthea Bell OBE. Working with Derek Hockridge for many years, and then on her own, she created the names and jokes that were a big part of my childhood, even if a lot of them went over my head. They have produced elegant solutions to the problems of translating humour, topical references, visual gags and puns, many of which have literally become textbook examples, and in this interview she explains some of the processes involved and how it all got started in the first place.

Asterix was also one of the first real books I read in French - school text books don't count. The familiarity made it a good starting point and the pictures provide plenty of clues to help with the meaning. Lacking an understanding of the topical references and so on - I only discovered from reading Anthea Bell's interview, for example, that the Roman official Preposterous in Obelix and Company is based on a young Jacques Chirac - I was convinced that the books just aren't very funny in French. This misconception certainly increased my respect for the translators and their punning.

So let's raise a gourd of magic potion to Asterix and Anthea Bell, and a real tour de force of translation!

"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

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