Translating the Language of Love

You might be forgiven that the title of this post refers to the cliché of how Anglophones often view French, the language from which I translate. And in the end the basis of that cliché may become clear. But what I am talking about is representations in literature of what lovers say to each other, how we describe feelings of love and how this is translated. Since this is an enormous subject, and, let’s face it, found in millions of works of literature across time and space, I’ll concentrate on one example I have found interesting, in the hopes that you will too. I made this translation myself, and directly encountered the occasionally cringe-inducing cultural differences which stand in the way of a text making its true declaration of/about love.  

The short comic by Charline Colette, L’Amour. . . Ça Gratte!¹ or Love is Itchy! is a fascinating example of the ironic and playful use of love clichés. A little girl called Chouki finds a caterpillar in the school yard, names it Camille and rubs it against her cheek affectionately. Unfortunately, her older sister notices that Camille is an urticating caterpillar, which stings when touched or disturbed. Chouki is distraught and itchy and must leave Camille forever. However, she soon finds happiness with a nearby hedgehog.

When thinking about how I might translate this pretty simple, gently humourous comic, the way Chouki talks to Camille the Caterpillar proved a subtle challenge. She calls the caterpillar “Ma douce”(my sweet), and is told later by her sister that “Mais il va falloir t’en separer” (But you will have to separate from it). It felt as if the mixing of phrases usually used between lovers with those used between children playing at mothers and babies was what made the comic so charming and funny. To express something of this atmosphere of first love, I used a similar strategy, but had to adapt. The difficulties of translating for or about children are well documented² but my feeling was that Anglophone children express different attitudes towards the aforementioned language of love. In my translation, when Chouki cuddles the caterpillar, she says “Little cutie” and when her older sister has to say that most difficult of things, it turns into “But you know you can’t bring her home”, which blurs the line somewhat between the ironizing of the language of adult relationships and the reality of the situation, without making the former uncomfortably overt. I found myself considering and then rejecting options involving friendship or maternal play as appropriate but missing the point.

The double meaning of the title is clear and adds a mischievous edge to the whole story. The truth is, it is no less subtle in French than it is in English, but could be differently received according to cultural differences. Due to the importance of the title to the humour in the story and even the idea of an older sister passing on important information to a younger sister, I did not make any change to it (well, apart from translating it!). Lastly, and very importantly, I tried to translate in a style that suited the pictures. The interplay between words and pictures in a comic gives very specific information about character and the world of the comic. The speech in this comic needed to make sense, correspond with existing pictures. I hope that in my translation Chouki is still innocent and very affectionate, and that her sister is exasperated, yet kind.

 

 

1 Colette, C. (2014) L’Amour . . .Ca Gratte! http://grandpapier.org/charline-collette/l-amour-ca-gratte?lang=fr#page1

2 See Oittinen, R. (2000) Translating for Children, Oxford: Taylor and Francis.

 

 

Anna Bryant is from County Meath, Ireland. She translates from French into English, and also occasionally from Irish. She is currently enjoying studying on the MA in Literary Translation course at the University of East Anglia and can be contacted at anna.bryant@uea.ac.uk

Theatre Translation and the Suspension of Disbelief

All theatre requires us to suspend our disbelief. If we didn’t, we would be forever asking questions like: “How is it tomorrow already?” and “Why did these people come here to have their argument, in front of loads of spectators?” We accept these dramatic conventions; they do not trouble us when we watch a play.

Translated drama – or any drama that is set in a country with a different language from the language of the play – requires an additional suspension of disbelief, if we are not to ask:

“Why are all these Frenchmen speaking English?”

 

Our unquestioning acceptance of this situation is partly to do with ‘transparent’ language. When people speak the same way we do, we don’t tend to analyse their forms of speech. When they speak differently, we notice. When characters in a Shakespeare play speak in Elizabethan English, we accept it because it conforms to what we know about when the play was written and when it is set. If characters in a David Hare play started throwing I-do-beseech-thees into conversation, we’d be puzzled (and if they talked about ‘maidenhead’, we’d assume the play was set in Berkshire).

This leaves the translator with two potential problems: time and place. If s/he is translating a 17^th-century play, what kind of language should s/he use? Shakespeare’s? Difficult to master, and would sound like pastiche. Today’s? Probably easier for the audience to accept, but they might get upset if there are knights and ladies going round saying “OK” and “awesome”. Most theatre translators end up opting for as neutral an idiom as they can manage (modern-ish but avoiding any expressions that too obviously come from the last twenty years or so), which makes the play more acceptable to the audience’s ears, but does run the risk of losing some of the colour of the original.

Translators of contemporary drama are not saved from these dilemmas. If I am translating a play set in northern France, and it is an important fact about the play that one of the characters comes from Marseille, how do I translate her/his accent? I can’t just arbitrarily make her/him a Scot. The introduction of dialect is the point at which an English audience might well start thinking, not “Why is this Frenchman speaking English?” but

“Why is this Frenchman speaking with a Scottish accent?”

Bill Findlay (2006) has written, referring to his experiences translating a Goldoni play into Scots dialect, that the translator runs the risk of using a kind of invented “Costume Scots”. Since Scots as a full language was dying out by the 18^th century, when Goldoni was writing (in Venetian), a ‘matching’ contemporary idiom is hard to find. For Findlay, this was made easier by choosing a play with a “narrow social and linguistic focus” (2006: 53) – a broader range of social classes would have been harder to render in Scots.

Findlay’s translation retained the original setting, whereas other modern Scots translations have tended to translocate the play to Scotland. (Findlay 2006: 54) Translocation makes the language consistent with the setting, but creates a whole new set of problems: can one milieu really be equivalent to another? Is the play’s message the same if it is set in Northern Ireland rather than the Spanish Civil War? And is this still a translation?

The question of translocation arises during almost any drama translation process, since there will invariably be elements that suggest a certain location. Should names be translated? English names will be easier to say on stage. But if my characters are now called Peter and Millie rather than Pierre and Amélie, what are they doing in Paris? Wholesale translocation requires a great deal of thought, about the setting but also the events of the play and the characters – are they all compatible with the new location? Partial translocation, where, for example, names are translated and cultural markers such as food removed or changed, without explicitly moving the action elsewhere, requires a further extension of the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

Part of the difficulty comes from the tendency to ‘domesticate’ in English translation – that is, to force the text to fit into the English language and context, rather than extending the English language to meet the demands of the text. We have grown used to a very English Chekhov, for instance, and tend to think of him almost as one of our own. Translocation is therefore tempting, as a way of making the play seem more relevant and immediately acceptable to an English audience; but it is only by maintaining the ‘foreignness’ of a play that translation can really extend and enrich the English drama.

References

Findlay, B. (2006) ‘Motivation in a Surrogate Translation of Goldoni’, in Bassnett, S. and Bush, P., The Translator as Writer. London: Continuum, 46-57.

 

Livvy Hanks translates from French to English. She is currently translating a poem every day, and blogging about the experience, at http://www.napotramo.blogspot.co.uk/

She can be contacted at om.hanksATgmail.com

Comics Translation and Zombies: Uncomfortable Issues

I’ve known people who read and love comics, but I have never been into any comics myself. It was simply a lack of exposure, I think, because I’ve come to respect and appreciate the art form ever since I’ve been exposed to it in Case Studies this semester. Yes, like painting, sculpture, graphic design and all the rest, comics are a form, a way of presenting art. But it is also a form of writing, of literary and narrative effort. Since reading McCloud’s (2006) book Making Comics and making myself break the threshold of comics with an issue of Fables, I appreciate comics and see their entertainment value, but more importantly their readability—their multiple layers of characters, narratives and themes. I did not particularly like Fables itself, but I could see how complex comics could be. I learned how enjoyable they can be to read, though I admit I read quickly through the text and overlooked much of the art. I think comics, like drama, straddle different art forms, and like zombies which are both living and dead, indefinable forms are often difficult to accept. (Appropriately enough: The Walking Dead) It is difficult to read them, at least I found it so, because a person reads differently than he or she looks at art. Art you look at as a whole then read in parts; literature you read then look at as a whole (see Ernest Gilman, The Curious Perspective, (1978)).

I think people who don’t like comics have not found the right comic yet. I say the same thing of poetry. I haven’t found the right comic for me yet. I admit I haven’t started reading comics, but I do search for them. I think I have a difficult time, because my narrative style and artistic style are at odds. My literary tastes are in realism, or at furthest magical realism; my art tastes lean toward the abstract. A gap has not been bridged thus far, but I will find a comic some day. Recommendations welcomed. But it does take both to appeal to someone, both an appealing narrative or literary side and inviting artwork. That is the risk of such an art form. With the freedom to display your ideas pictorially comes the responsibility of displaying your ideas pictorially in addition to text. But the rewards, as I have heard from friends, are highly worth it.

In my experience attempting to translate for comics, I found brevity the most difficult issue. I constantly overwrote in German, and I doubt my translation would have been accepted anywhere for publication due to its length. It would not have fit in the speech bubbles. Translating for comics takes a similar, though certainly more extreme, amount of brevity as subtitling. Both are limited in space, but if the subtitle is a tweet of 140 characters, the speech bubble is half a haiku. Space is at a premium.

Cole Konopka is a translator of German to English, a writer, painter. He can be contacted at colekonopka@gmail.com.

 

Translating Arkady Gaidar’s The Blue Cup: the complex nature of children’s literature

For the past few weeks, I have been absorbed in the translation of children’s literature. Before looking into this area of translation, I wouldn’t necessarily have expected it to be easy to translate children’s literature, as any literary text will pose its own particular set of problems, but I certainly hadn’t expected it to be one of the most challenging and complicated areas of translation.  

First of all, defining what does and doesn’t constitute children’s literature is problematic; should we define it as literature that has been written for children? Or as works of literature that children choose to read for themselves? What is a child? Can we come to a complete definition of a child, and therefore firmly conclude what children’s requirements are with regards to literature? Furthermore, when we translate cross-culturally, what may be considered appropriate for children in one culture may not be considered appropriate for children in another, how can translators deal with such instances, while avoiding the manipulation of their readers?

I have been working on a translation of The Blue Cup by Arkady Gaidar, a children’s story written in Soviet Russia.  Many aspects of the text have been heavily influenced by the Socialist Realist doctrine of the time; it presents the reader with idealisations of work, industrialization, the Russian countryside and of the Red Army, for example, and some could consider such a text unworthy of translation into English for Western children, as the underlying ideology of such a text is not fully convergent with the ideology of Western culture, and may therefore be considered harmful and manipulative.

However, what prompted me to translate this particular text is its fragmentary nature; despite being heavily influenced by the ideology of its time, this text is predominantly subversive and, I would therefore argue, valuable for children. The Blue Cup is a story about a Russian family (a mother, father and daughter) on holiday at a cabin in the countryside. The mother takes to nagging the father and daughter (Svetlana) about all kinds of chores, not allowing them to play and enjoy themselves whilst on holiday.  The final straw comes when she accuses them of breaking her blue cup and in an act of defiance they decide to leave for an adventure across the Russian countryside. It is through Svetlana and her father’s close relationship that this text comes to be subversive, as the father introduces Svetlana to the emotional complexities of the adult world; through allowing his daughter to come into contact with a variety of people and discussing issues such as war and anti-Semitism, and by confiding in her his doubts with regards to the mother’s love for him. Furthermore, and most importantly, in their defiance of the mother, the father teaches Svetlana to challenge over-bearing authority.  In these instances I therefore paid particular attention to the nuances of the language used by Svetlana and her father when addressing each other.

It was extremely difficult to decide how to deal with aspects of the text that were conventional for its time, as children would not be aware of the socio-historical context and could consequently be open to manipulation; I had therefore considered changing or even removing some aspects of the text. However, I have come to the conclusion that it would be short-sighted to alter or remove these aspects. Precisely because Western children will lack the socio-historical context that would allow these images to be understood as part of a certain ideology, these idealisations will be no more harmful than the idealisations of work and the British countryside in children’s stories such as Thomas the Tank Engine or Postman Pat. Furthermore the underlying ideology will not be consistently supported by surrounding discourse; and therefore these depictions will do little more than allow children to come into contact with ‘the foreign’, displacing them for a short time from their own culture. I have come to believe that translating a variety of children’s literature is therefore necessary and vital to encourage a multiplicity of world views within children, and not to simply limit them to the confines of their own.

 

Hannah Collins studied Russian and French at the University of Nottingham. She works as a freelance translator and is currently studying on the Literary Translation MA at the UEA. Her email address is Hannah.Collins@uea.ac.uk.

Translating a Tom Stoppard Play on Words into French – and yes, pun very much intended...

Sarah Adams: “It ain’t what you lose, but how you gain it in translation...”
Maybe contrary to popular opinion – or do I mean unpopular opinion? Either way, it’s not like I’ve carried out a survey – the pun is a challenge I always relish when faced with a new translation; in fact, I would go as far as to say: the more the merrier.
There are many reasons for this, as I see it, but mainly it is because I have very much come to believe in Sarah Addams’ above philosophy. I also take Lena Kaarbebol’s point, the Danish writer of children’s stories. She translates her own books into English: “Translation is impossible,” she states, but “Transformation is not.” She sees translation as one more re-write; or a “writer’s tool”, with which she is able to “gain new insight into what my characters might say or do” – she sees the story afresh! More importantly, she says: “Language is bound up with the way we see the world. And despite teasing similarities, even the most closely related languages do not match, word for word. A switch in language means a switch in perception.”
Indeed, it is armed with these last two sentences that I approach any play-on-words. And while I do not normally adhere to the concept of believing that the original author is sitting beside me – ‘this is what the author would have written, here, today, were s/he writing in English’ – I believe that translating the pun is where we, as translators, shouldn’t feel too guilty in allowing ourselves that romantic privilege – all translators do it in spite of themselves, I am sure.
Without resorting to a dictionary, or another quotation, I need firstly to ask just what a pun is and its intention. Actually, I prefer to think of a ‘play-on-words’, for such a title offers me at least two clues to go at: ‘play’ and ‘words’. Having fun with words, then? This, however, should not distract me from the pun’s possible intention, which could be anything from comical confusion – staged farces couldn’t live without them – to corrosive satire – extract the puns in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and we’d be left with half a book.
But I do believe that Lena Kaarbebol’s wise words offer that handy “tool” with which to approach the pun, which either works by a rare literal translation, or by creating another pun – all depending upon its satirical importance. Or it doesn’t work at all, in which case I might look to ‘compensate’ with a preceding or subsequent sentence – gain something elsewhere in translation, as Sarah Addams might put it. After all, as Phyllis Zatlin rightly points out: ‘A pun that is not translated as a pun stills yields its information content.’
Bearing in mind Laurence Venuti’s very valid concerns about the status of the translator today – which isn’t a good one – I guess what I’m trying to say is that a translator should strive to get as much fun out of translating as possible. Language is bound up with the way we see the world, and conceptual metaphor, the proverb, the pun, are all ways in which we have the possibility to delve right into the spirit of the text – why not imagine the source text author is looking on with a smile?
As for the pun, then, my strategy is a simple one: if nothing comes to mind immediately – which is rare; I tend to work quickly – then I move on, leave it to the subconscious process; something will come along in the next 24 hours, rather like the source text author might work.
For Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love, I did just that: met with my first ‘hurdle’ on page 3 and decided to move on:
AEH: ‘[...] There are places in Jebb’s Sophocles where the responsibility for reading the metre seems to have been handed over to the Gas, Light and Coke Company.’
The salient word being ‘metre’ – either poetic beat or something we might once have put a shilling in.
My response was:
« Il ya des parties dans le Sophocle de Jebb où la responsabilité concernant la scansion semble avoir été mise en place en accordance avec les mesures de sa taille. »
My gloss is:
‘It there has parts in the Sophocles of Jebb where the responsibility concerning the scansion seems to have been put in place in accordance with the measurements of his waist.’
What is the purpose here of Stoppard’s pun? Primarily to make the audience laugh. One doesn’t put money in a ‘metre’ in France exactly, so I chose to play with ‘mesure’ – ‘measurement’ in English – which can be used for poetry as well as clothes sizes. If I’ve managed to keep with the theme, yet chosen to play with a different word, then perhaps I’ve attained my goal with part compensation. I believe the translation works equally well.
A pun I was actually able to put to the test earlier this year, on a real live French boy, was my translation of a chapter from children’s author Roald Dahl’s The BFG – now here’s a writer who enjoyed his word play! And rightly so: nobody appreciates a pun more than a child; I think it’s the thrill of getting it. My daughter loves this one in particular:
‘Meanings is not important,’ said the BFG. ‘I cannot be right all the time. Quite often I is left instead of right.’
The translation I tested on the French boy reads:
« Les signifiances n’avons pas d’importance, dit le GGG. Je ne peux pas toujours avoir des raisons. Des fois c’est plutôt des raisins. »
Here is something of a part back/part literal translation:
‘Meanings has not any importance, said the BFG. I cannot always have reasons. Sometimes it’s more like grapes.’
The ‘left’ and ‘right’ wordplay was out of the question, but again I was able to work with the same sentence, and add to the theme of food: ‘avoir raison’ – translating as ‘to be right’; literally ‘to have reason’ – and ‘avoir raisins’, literally ‘to have grapes’. Once more, if something was lost, something else was gained – Roald Dahl is one of those writers I can’t help but feel is sitting beside me! As for my little French friend, well, his mum tells me he now uses it at parties.
Very free rewriting is better than omission, I have heard said somewhere, I just can’t remember where... And as I sit here writing this blog, keeping in mind all I have said, I arbitrarily turn a page of Lewis Carroll’s The Annotated Alice and meet with:
“Why did you call him tortoise, if he wasn’t one?” Alice asked.
“We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle angrily. “Really you are very dull.”
Still looks scary out of context, doesn’t it... but that’s all it is, out of context. I must have a go at translating the book one day.
Bibliography:
Sarah Addams and Lena Kaarbebol quotations taken from a copy of Outside in, Translating Children’s Literature
Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, 1997, Faber and Faber
Roald Dahl’s The BFG, 1996, A Ted smart Publication
Phylis Zatlin quotation taken from her Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation, 2005, Multilingual Matters Ltd
The Annotated Alice, Lewis Carroll – chapter provided by BJ Epstein

Biography of Chris Rose:
After graduating in French Language and Literature with subsidiary Spanish from The University of Sheffield, I have mainly taught English, in London, on the south east coast of England, and in France, where I lived for nearly eight years. It was in France where I also began to write, completing a novel as well as a number of short stories. I’ve also dabbled in children’s stories – not the easier option some might believe.
I am currently reading for a Masters in Literary Translation at The UEA, where I am able to combine just about all my language interests in the one package; it is a course I’d recommend for any budding novelist/poet/ translator...

Belay the translator!

One of the things I have enjoyed about studying Literary Translation is being given texts that I have never been faced with before or would never have thought myself capable of doing. From nonsense rhyme to a psychological thriller, we have had a wide range of texts put in front of us. But there has been one genre that I knew was going to be quite a challenge for me: Drama. Everyone who goes to school in England will have had their fair share of Shakespeare. I completed my secondary education in Turkey and we did not study English Literature. The fact that I have never studied the genre I’m translating may not be such an issue; I can read the play and get a sense of what is going on and the style it has been written in. But no, the play in question is Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love. For all I know I may as well be translating Carroll’s Jabberwocky again! But at least those were made up words. This is nonsense in a language that I can actually speak. I have never really felt at a disadvantage before when translating from or into English. But this time I’m not so sure of myself. As for the references, those are a completely different matter.

I start translating the first two lines into Turkish and already there is a problem.

Charon ‘Belay the painter there, sir!’

From the introduction I already know that someone is approaching the bank of the Styx. I look up what ‘belay’ means and it turns out to be a term that means to fasten or secure. So there’s a painter approaching the bank of the Styx and Charon is ordering someone to moor the boat. After having translated about a page or more I realise that this person is not actually a painter, but a Professor with a possible personality disorder. And that the reference to ‘the painter’ is the Victorian art critic John Ruskin who appears a few lines down in the play. There are many more references to Oxford and mythology in the text which makes it especially difficult when translating for a Turkish audience. I do not want to under mind them but I doubt they would get the references at all. What do I do then? Do I try and find an equivalent, or do I just leave it as it is? The setting of the play is so particular I think I need to leave it as it is, plus there is no equivalent that I can think of. Another aspect of the text that I thought might be a problem was the use of Latin and Ancient Greek. This is where I feel at a disadvantage on behalf of my Target Culture. I am afraid of having already alienated them with my references to Oxford and now they have to struggle with dead languages. But wait, Stoppard has saved me the trouble and has provided translations in English. All is not lost after all!

Of course there are many other issues related to the translation of Drama. I have to think about the target audience of the text. Is this going to be read by an academic or am I translating for the purpose of a performance? Does the dialogue flow as well as in the original? Should I just trust my language abilities and leave the rest to the audience?

After all this complaining I am glad I got given this assignment. As translators we may not always (or never) be lucky enough to pick what we want to translate and should be willing to give different genres a go. However hard I found the translation of this play, I have not thrown the towel in yet with Drama. Although next time I might start with something a bit easier!

Selin translates from French and Turkish into English. She is currently studying the MA in Literary Translation at UEA where she did her undergrad in Modern Languages. Her literary interests include magical realism and crime fiction and she occasionally translates Turkish poetry.

The Mystery of Translating Crime Fiction

It is my view that in order to translate a literary text, it is necessary to have some understanding of its genre. Given that conventions can differ between cultures, a translator should ideally have read a number of texts from that particular genre in both the source and target culture before beginning to translate.

Crime fiction is a genre which has been hitting the top of the bestseller lists for a while now and novels of this kind from Scandinavia in particular have seen an impressive rise in popularity. Translated crime fiction, therefore, currently fills the shelves in bookshops and in libraries. So it seemed to me, as an aspiring translator, important to consider the characteristics of crime fiction and some of the challenges involved in its translation.

What did I already know about crime fiction before I began reading about it academically for the Case Studies module? As a library assistant, I know only too well that crime books are extremely popular. Not only that, people who read crime fiction do not generally pick up one book with a yellow ‘CRI’ sticker on the spine and then head for a different section of the library. They select a stack of crime books. They read an entire series from start to finish. They read every book ever written by one author then move on to the next author ‘who writes like’ the first. Crime fiction is addictive and this I have learnt from experience. I was brought up to read about and indeed watch Hercule Poirot exercising his “little grey cells” and have recently devoured twenty novels about M.C. Beaton’s middle-aged amateur detective, Agatha Raisin. And this was all before I was introduced to the unputdownable chilling thrillers by Sophie Hannah.

In fact, crime fiction has long been criticised for its formulaic nature and as a result has traditionally been classed as ‘low’ literature. However, as I have already identified, crime fiction is a popular genre and I would even argue that this could be due to its formula as readers step into the detectives’ shoes and attempt to solve the riddles, which they know will undoubtedly be solved by the end of the final chapter. It could be that readers are most attracted to the charismatic nature of the hero or the gripping plotlines with their anticipated unexpected twists and graphically violent scenes.

Or perhaps the popularity of these works of fiction stems from the honest and often brutal portrayal of real life. As B.J. Epstein discusses in the article ‘Girl with the Dragon Translation: Translating Thrillers and Thrilling Translations’, through the portrayal of crimes and the reactions to them as well as the specific language used by crime authors, the reader is given an insight into the ideology and mindset of the culture in which the novel is set as well as those of the author. The boom of Scandinavian crime fiction has previously been put down to the loss of faith in the welfare system and at a recent conference called ‘Crime across the Continent’, Dr. Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen similarly mentioned its “emphasis on social realism and critique” whilst Barry Forshaw, who has written extensively on the subject, talked about the fact that Scandinavian crime writers are now regarded as “social commentators.”

As crime fiction is so deeply rooted in and reflective of a specific culture, the translator is faced with a number of difficult decisions to make such as those regarding names, places and cultural references. The language of crime fiction has been discussed at great length, for example by Epstein, because the use of slang, dialects, swearwords and jargon feature heavily in such novels and the usage of such language varies between cultures. Should the source culture be reflected as closely as possible in the translation? Surely this would enable the target audience to learn about different cultures and ideologies whilst remaining faithful to the original intentions and voice of the author. On the other hand, the translator could change aspects of the original text in order to make it more accessible to the target audience but with the risk of losing in translation elements of the source culture which are important to the text. However, in this case, what is likely to be gained instead is an insight into the ideologies of the target culture and indeed the translator. In addition to cultural and linguistic aspects, the translator must also take into account the translation of suspense whilst being careful not to provide the target audience with any additional hints which did not appear in the original.

It is safe to say that the translation of crime fiction is challenging as I have learnt from my own attempt to translate a section of The Point of Rescue by Sophie Hannah into German. However, it is also extremely rewarding to solve the puzzles we are faced with in such translations. In fact, I believe that translating crime fiction is of great importance because, as Porter suggested, the novels which are popular within a certain culture can tell us a lot about that culture and, as a reader of crime fiction, I hope that it could help the so-called ‘low’ literature of today become the classic literature of tomorrow.

Fiona Hayter translates from German, French and Spanish into English. She is currently studying the MA in Literary Translation at UEA where she is also undertaking an internship at the British Centre for Literary Translation. You can contact her at F.Hayter@uea.ac.uk.

History and Translation

We have nearly finished this year’s Case Studies module of the MA, and it seems to have gone alarmingly quickly, in the way these things do. We have looked at translating children’s literature, drama and crime fiction, but have also touched on the translation of historical fiction. I found this particularly interesting, as I’m currently working on a (sample) translation of a Dutch historical novel, and being mentored in the process by a much more experienced literary translator, which is nice!

In a talk to the class about historical fiction, Philip Wilson mentioned the phrase ‘the tyranny of fact’. What this means for the translation of a historical novel, for example, is that the story cannot be relocated, which would not apply to translating some other genres of fiction. This fact was revealed to me in my translation when I tried to change the name of one of the characters – doh! Carelessly, I had changed ‘Cathrientje’ to ‘Catherine’, thinking this would be easier to pronounce for an English reader. My mentor pointed out that it was ‘unusual to change names in this kind of novel’, which is of course true, as Cathrientje would have been a real person.

Having established the fact that you can’t change the facts, because this is history, it's important to make sure you don't go too far back in history in your eagerness. In my translation, a character enters a room holding a candle in a candleholder. Anxious not to repeat the word 'candle', I initially had my character holding a sconce, but as my mentor pointed out, ‘this word sounds almost medieval’, and is definitely not correct for a book set at the turn of the 20th century. And I thought I was being so clever …

So, just because it’s history, that doesn’t mean we have to switch automatically to Ye Olde Englishe. However, we do need to get the period right. In my translation, I had a character studying 'oude talen' in Dutch, which I merrily translated as 'the Classics', until my mentor suggested this terminology might not be correct for the period. I rethought and decided to go for ‘the classical languages’.

Incidentally, a useful tool for getting the correct terminology for a particular historical period, and one I didn’t know about before, is the option to search in books only and to narrow by time period in Google. I found this helpful in establishing details about Liberty shantung silk dresses - wonder why they ever fell out of fashion? They would certainly brighten up the playground on the school run …

Finally, no historical research would be complete without becoming fully acquainted with the sexual practices of the day. At least that's what you can tell your partner when then happen upon you reading something dubious: 'It’s research, darling'. In my translation, I had a rather emancipated young character ‘sitting astride’ the object of her affection, but my mentor pointed out that this might be rather anachronistic. I haven’t decided what to change it to yet, but as I can feel this blog post turning into an episode of Carry On Translating, I think it’s time to stop …

Rebekah Wilson is a translator from French, German and Dutch. For more information, go to www.oxfordtranslations.net.

Translation/Adaptation: Is there a difference?

I’ve been reading a lot about drama and theatrical translation recently for our case studies class and for one of my essays. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is where ‘translation’ ends and ‘adaptation’ begins, and whether distinguishing between these two terms is useful or not. Before I started actively engaging with issues of/in translation I always associated ‘translation’ with the act of transferring a source ’text’ from one language to another or perhaps even recreating it in another language. While ‘adaptation’ I saw as being transference or recreation across media or genres (stage to screen, novel to play etc.). However, I began to find that this distinction is too narrow and several questions began to plague me, as they do: Doesn’t cinema have its own language? In which case couldn’t we argue that say that Jane Eyre, the 2011 film is a translation of Jane Eyre, the novel? And what about Omkara, Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2006 excellent rendering of Othello? To call it merely an adaptation of Shakespeare seemed limiting to me because it seemed to ignore the act(s) of linguistic translation that would have been an integral part of the process of writing the screenplay for that movie.

While I was pondering these questions I came across some definitions in one of the readings for our case studies class which I felt would be a good place from which to start thinking about some of these issues in greater detail. In relation to theatre, ‘translation’ is defined as a ‘faithful, literary rendering into another language’, ‘version’ is ‘translation that takes performance requirements into account’ and ‘adaptation’ as a term that has been ‘used to disguise all manner of unacceptable textual and staging manipulations’ (Santoyo quoted in Zatlin, 2005:79). I find these definitions interesting for several reasons. First, they use words I find problematic: faithful, literary, unacceptable, disguise, manipulation. The first three are words that are open to interpretation based on personal preferences. As for ‘disguise’ and ‘manipulation’ they are used her in a prohibitive manner and I can’t help but find the lexical choice odd given that we are talking about theatre, which at its core is based on a recognition of its own ‘artifice’. Of course, at this point I have to say that I am reading and analysing Zatlin’s translation of Santoyo’s definitions, so perhaps there is something ‘lost in translation’ (another film reference, I know!).

The second thing that I find interesting about this set of definitions is that the author posits a dichotomy with ‘translation’ (the good method) at one end and ‘adaptation’ (the bad method) at the other. ‘Version’, then, in this schema becomes a sort of practical compromise. This suggests, to me, that for the author the written ‘text’ is more important than its performance. I suppose then, that how person answers the question ‘What is drama?’ has an impact on what they view as translation and what as adaptation.

For me, drama is both the text and its performance, whether on stage or in the ‘theatre of the mind’ (to borrow a phrase used by Herbert Grabes). Even when I read a play I visualise some form of a stage and actors in their costumes entering and exiting the stage as required. So when I set about translating a play I am translating a performance, whether it is one I’ve seen or one I’ve imagined. And I have seen, on more than one occasion, a Brecht play being performed in Hindi, having been ‘translated’ to know that ‘literary faithfulness’ is not enough, for the performance to be successful. I know I need to tread carefully here, after all what is ‘successful’, but that would take me on a tangent. My tentative conclusion then is that when it comes to theatre/cinema/dramatic works of art being rendered from language to another the degree to which translation and adaptation are one and the same thing depends on the translator’s perception of drama and the degree of difference between the source and target cultures. After all that is the main difference between Jane Eyre and Omkara, one is a translation in the same culture across media, whereas the other is a ‘transadapation’ between cultures. I do also feel that ‘translation’ is at the heart of ‘adaptation’ – all forms of it. This, at any rate, is my rationale for doing the course ‘Adaptation and Interpretation’ next term, and who knows maybe I will end up changing my mind.

Anandi Rao translates from Hindi and Arabic to English. She is doing her MA in Literary Translation and is interested in theatre and women’s writing. She can be reached at anandirao88@gmail.com.

A Rant about finding books in Spanish

It's funny. When I write blog posts on my own blog, I can almost always think of something to day, but when I have to do it for an assignment, it's much more difficult. I’d imagine this also isn’t long enough anyway, and I probably can’t start it with “Today was a lovely day” like I usually do.

I've been trying to find books in Spanish to use for my two essays for Case Studies and Stylistics, but I'm having a very difficult time. It's a bit difficult to find books in Spanish when there's no Amazon in Peninsular Spanish (I'm not sure if there's a Latin American Amazon; must check on that) and Google España keeps giving me results in English.

Luckily, while I was Googling away, it occurred to me that years ago while I was still in university, I ordered a Spanish-French Larousse Grande from a Spanish bookstore and had it delivered to my university in the States. So after some more Googling (oh, how i love that word), I figured out the name of the site. Casa del Libro, or, if you prefer an English name, I suppose it would be something like "Book House" or "House of Books." I think I'm going to stick with "Book House" because then it sounds like a spoof of the Commadores' song "Brick House": 'cos she's a book house / she's mighty mighty, just letting those words come out.'

So I ordered a Spanish translation of Agatha Christie's 4.50 from Paddington in from Casa del Libro. It's my very favourite Agatha Christie book, and I thought it would be fun to write a paper about it (I've read just about all of her mysteries, and I love them). That was over a week ago. The only confirmation I've gotten was one of those automated emails saying "we've received your order," or words to that effect.

But I still haven't gotten the damn shipping confirmation form. Tis madness, I tells ya (as Russell Brand might say). Actually, he'd probably say something more expletive laden (and so would I), but I'm probably not allowed to swear in these things.

But seriously, how the flip am I supposed to get books in Spanish from the inter-webs if I can't even get a damn confirmation from the book shop? There must be an easier way.

[Edit] There is no Amazon Mexico. Why????? There bloody well should be.[/edit]

[Edit 2] Ack, it changed the font on me. Never mind, I fixed it. Damn it, now I forgot what I was going to say. Oh, wait, I remember. I found a copy of 4.50 at Casa del Libro, as I mentioned earlier, but then I was told by one of my lovely class mates that there’s a book shop in London called Grant and Cutler that has all sorts of books in other languages. I went there and got the first Harry Potter book in Spanish, and it’s a really cool shop. In addition to Spanish, I saw books in Portuguese, Russian, French, and even Japanese.

By Sabrina Steiner, Translator and Beatle Queen

Sabrina Steiner translates from Spanish to English and is an ardent Beatles fan. For more Beatle goodness, you can read her blog at http://beatles4life.xanga.com and visit her website at http://www.freewebs.com/beatles4life.

Translators should look at The Sun (but not for too long)

Leave your political hang-ups to one side, you decide which: reading the news from any source is an excitement waiting to happen for the literary translator.
While it could be argued that news journalism is divorced from fiction, storytelling lies at the heart of both disciplines. And the line often blurs: Truman Capote based Cold Blood on real events and Juan Goytisolo weaved in newspaper excerpts in Señas de Identidad.

For the literary prose translator, analyzing and practising journalistic writing is a convenient way of perfecting source language competency. And for the poetry translator, tabloid headlines are especially loaded with stylistic effects and culture-specific references.

Reporting on the UK’s biggest ever diamond heist in 2009, The Sun’s two word effort is a double entendre, heightened by a stress on the syllable where the reader expects one thing, but gets the other (see the picture here). So instead of a ‘Diamond RO-ber-ry’ we get a ‘Diamond RU – bb e-ry’, as the perpetrators wore elaborate latex masks to conceal their identities. My attempt into Spanish – Ladrones Látex – compensates the dactylic (strong-weak-weak) stress of Rubbery with alliteration. Questions of ambiguity also arise - Did the robbers steal latex and, if so, why? Are they made of latex? Why the obsession with latex? - which leave the reader (hopefully) craving more latex.
Whether sonic effect should always be preserved in headline translation, whether we as translators should concentrate solely on conveying information, or whether there can always be a happy medium is, perhaps, another story.

There is, however, scant widespread translation of tabloids (at which point I might say fortunately but I can’t because I, like you, left my hang-ups to one side). Instead, news feature publications such as Le Monde Diplomatique, and news agencies such as Reuters and the BBC specialising in both features and bulletins, receive the most translation. An effective approach to this task requires not only awareness of linguistic differences, but also the journalistic conventions of both source and target communities. To illustrate, I’ll briefly look at news feature writing in Britain and Spain.

Features in Britain tend to put the most important information in the first sentence, acting as a bait which draws in the reader. Facts are then presented in order of decreasing importance, which is often termed the ‘inverted pyramid’. Perhaps this is a throw-back to the days when stories would often be crudely cut short by the printer. Or just the realisation that many readers won’t make it to the end of an article.

In contrast, Spanish features often introduce the hook mid-way into a story, language is more flowery, and sentences are lengthier, and packed with clauses (much like this one). Consequently, news stories tend to be longer, often without the afore mentioned pyramid structure. Working into English, it is feasible to re-structure a story, to drastically cut back on the text in order to transmit the news to the British readership. Without the British readership throwing its stylistic rattle out of the proverbial pram.

--Andrew Nimmo is a translator working from Spanish, Portuguese and French into English. His areas of interest include music, journalism, fiction and film. You can contact him at this.means.nimmo@gmail.com.

Translating for theatre

As MALT students at the UEA postgraduate programme, we had the chance, in the Case Studies module, to examine some genres of literature, such as children’s literature, drama and crime-fiction and examine what is special about their translation. We focused on the challenges and several options there are for the translator, in order to have the best possible result and the same impact-effect on the target culture as the one the writer intended (although this is something that needs so much discussion that I better leave it for next time!). They were all really exciting and interesting, but personally, I have always found myself being mostly thrilled by drama translation.

Translating for the theatre is a very creative yet challenging task. It is true, though, that it has been sort of neglected by theorists. Such texts have not been much studied and there are relatively few theories dealing with the translation for the theatre.

The most creative part of a drama translation, for the translator, is the fact that they are the first actors and directors of a play in the target culture. But however, after having been through that process, one can easily see that this is not as simple as it might sound. The challenges that a translator must deal with, when translating for the stage-or a play just to be read? – are many.
First of all, as mentioned above, the translator must be aware whether the play to be translated is also to be performed or if it is just for reading reasons. Every theatrical text intended for performance, according to many theories, «carries» yet another text- Subtext, Gestic text, or otherwise Inner text. This text mainly concerns the actor, particularly in their kinesiology at the time of the performance of the text on stage.

A translator must also take into account the performability of a play. The term refers to the distinction between the written text and the physical dimension that it takes in the play (space, props, costumes, lighting, kinesiology etc.). Since the text is directly dependent on and completed when performed, it could be given different interpretations, since one show can never be the same as another. The translator must take into account the variable nature of the performability of a theatrical text and examine each time the extra-lingual parts.

But performability is utterly connected to the written text as well. A translator must be really careful when dealing with the several elements of a play. First of all, the stage directions. The translator should be really familiar with the equivalent terms in the target language, in order to avoid misinterpretations by the director and/or the actors.

Furthermore, where the play takes place and whether it will remain so or it will be adjusted to the everyday life of the target culture in order to be better comprehended by the target audience, it is of highest importance and thus, should be carefully considered.

The names of the characters of the play are another very important element of a play. The translator must take into consideration if the specific choice made by the writer has to do with the plot or the personality of the characters, therefore they should be translated, or whether it is a random choice that does not affect the plot, so they can just be transcribed.
The speed of delivery of the written text can be very tricky as well. Due to the fact that many lines are synchronized with the actors’ body language, this must be preserved to the translated text as well. If that is not possible, due to the different characteristics of every language, then the translator must work with the director and the actors in order to see if they are going to slow down the action of the play, or maybe add some more gestures and moves, or even exclude some lines, so that the text will function in the target language the same way it does in the source language.

Finally, the dialect as well as the use of slang that there might be in the play is also essential to be preserved. The translator must be very careful when choosing whether to keep or alter the dialect in order to correspond to the needs of the target culture. There is always the risk that if the dialect is kept, there will partly misunderstand the play, while on the other hand, if the dialect is adjusted to its “reality”, the text might lose even more in terms of authenticity.
This is quite a quick view on the challenges of translating for the stage. This genre can be examined more thoroughly, especially when it comes to translating plays to be read and not performed. But I guess I’ll just leave that for my next post…

Thei Sorotou is a translator working with Greek, English and French. She graduated from the Department of foreign languages, translation and interpreting, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece, and is currently a MALT student in the University of East Anglia. She is really interested in the field of drama translation.
Contact: theisrt@yahoo.gr

'Death of a translator'

Late, the old Frenchman walked slowly around the body. So much for the Big Sleep. There were heavy shadows under his eyes, a cheap beat-up notebook in his cold left hand. A little smoke escaped his twice-broken nose. Just a kid. He looked at the cheap strap watch on his left wrist. 23:24. Well, that made two of them. His upper lip twitched, could be in wry appreciation - these English and their cheap understated puns.

An urgent and frozen wind blew torn fragments (perhaps you spot a name
- Sancho Panza) through the upstairs room. Quelle tempête! He felt it in his fingers, and in his toes. Wet. Wet, wet, the rain soon got through all this, the books, the body already damp where it lay, bleeding over 'Modern Criticism and Theory', David Lodge, ed. (London, 1988) page 167, red irony seeping into an essay by Roland Barthes (Paris, 1968, tr. Stephen Heath, London, 1977). The author was dead.

Only that wasn't quite it. This was no author, whatever the corduroy and curly hair said. Sure, he had written things down - the variations on a symbolist sonnet now blurring into further illegibility showed as much.

But that wasn't why the Frenchman had come.

Roget's Thesaurus (London, 1953 repr. 1985) and Le Nouveau Petit Robert (Paris, 2007) riffled pages hopelessly at him. This kid had translated!

And when it came to translators, the Frenchman had once carelessly admitted, some dark morning in the long back room at Frank's, maybe three fingers too many down the night's one-last-glass of pastis - when it came to translators, he knew a thing or two.

Very soon you must learn his name, this Frenchman, as he tucks his beat-up notebook into a pocket, still holding the gun in his right hand. It is Pierre Menard. He was laid to false and fictional rest by Jorge Luis Borges, who, despite failings of fact and philosophy, had the admirable ambition to recount Menard's perfect recreation of the works of Cervantes, which consists of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part and a fragment of chapter twenty-two of 'Don Quixote'. He pushes a torn scrap of sheet through his revolver barrel with a pencil, replaces the used cartridge and turns away from his translator's body.

In Menard's work Borges found infinite subtlety, something rich and strange - where Cervantes clumsily opposes his country's provincial life and chivalric delusion, Menard selects a history disdainful of the brash colour of the historical novel. But even Borges could not contemplate a living writer, when a critic alone could produce endlessly amusing interpretations of the ambiguous worldviews littering the new text. So, buried by Borges, Menard died to the world, and this new project came to be - the translation of his Quixote, those few fragmentary chapters written three hundred years too late. He is stamping outthis project remarkably thoroughly - you cannot say the Frenchman lacks style.

Style and worldview. These are the big problems, far too big to unravel here, just at the beginning of a thought about translating historical fiction (a category which, understood differently, could be broad enough to fit almost anything from a time not our own). Just as Cervantes is, Raymond Chandler is of a time no longer quite our own.

His style is sharp, hardboiled. Names or things - a sharp knee, a half-smile, the breeze - get to be subjects and then act. Objects come next, and modifiers branch right, carefully adding colour without slowing anything up too much. It's a world of decisive actors, and it happened in a simple past tense that held our attention and our sense of immediacy. Nothing came forewarned. Besides the obvious difficulties of paring any language down to that style, and the perhaps impossibility of writing in such an immediate past tense, there is Menard's question. What can it mean, to walk these mean streets, after Batman and Watchmen and Fathers4Justice? Or just with a mobile telephone?

In a moment there will be some puzzle at what's gone on here, as you've read. What tale has struggled to suggest itself; what beast, to steal now from W. S. Graham, have I sent across the space? 'For on this side / Of the words, it's late. The heavy moth / Bangs on the pane. The whole house / Is sleeping and I remember / I am not here, only the space / I sent the terrible beast across.' At first I thought Pierre Menard was the detective, in this little crime short - but that is not his character. He is not the figure of patient explanation. He is the figure of miraculous repetition. Impossible resemblance must flame amazement. Mere translation, however creative a rewriting in another language, is, next to that, the slavish piling-up of so many logs in static imitation. The perfect rewriter must murder his translator.

But -

In the end he didn't know what more he could have said, the cold barrel of the Colt pressed to the base of his skull as the firing pin fell.

Later, when Pierre Menard stepped back out into the Norwich night, he stopped. The wind blew; the leaves hissed resultant.

Every third thought the grave - that's right enough, for us prosperous few.


--- Tom Russell was a literary translator from French to English, a MALT student at UEA, and secret fan of acrostics. Contact:
tomalrussell at gmail.com

ps. Very quickly, just by the way, one dead guy to another, my postcard's on the way to Douglas Adams. (I'm not going to unravel that for you. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you might read his foreword to P G Wodehouse's unfinished book, 'Sunset at Blandings'. It's only four and a half pages long (the foreword, not the book) and you'll be wanting to drop me an e-mail to thank me for pointing it out to you.)

Attempting to translate «Η φάλαινα που τρώει τον πόλεμο» by Eugene Trivizas(Ευγένιος Τριβιζάς)

Children’s literature is considered by many as literature that is not ‘serious’ and often, people think that writing a book for children, especially a picture book, is an easy task. I couldn’t agree less. I believe that the people who say this, do not take into account how demanding an audience children can be or how easily they get bored or distracted, let alone how challenging it is to write this interesting, gripping story using a limited vocabulary, since, let’s not forget, children tend to have a more limited vocabulary than adults, especially children that will be reading-or have one read to them-a picture book.

That is why, when we were told that for the MA we had to create a small portfolio of translations of texts no-more-than-a-page-long, I thought of translating a picture book. It would be of the perfect length, it would add variety to the portfolio and it would be challenging. I had in mind a specific writer that I wanted to translate, Eugene Trivizas, an author of over a hundred children’s books who is famous for his puns, imaginative and creative use of language and made-up worlds. I chose a book called “The Whale That Eats War” (Η φάλαινα που τρώει τον πόλεμο), simply because it was the last I had read.

The book is about a blue whale that goes to a specific-made up-country every year in order to eat the war. The book has really nice drawings and no more than eight lines per two pages, sometimes just as little as two lines per two pages. It is addressed to children from the age of four. It is a typical example of what makes the translation-and writing, for that matter-of children’s literature challenging. The whole text is made of short rhyming lines full of humourous puns. Trivizas has also made up some words, like the name of the country where the whale goes every spring, which is ‘Varaduay’. Also, in order to achieve rhyme every time, he has, at points, changed the syntax. Finally, and in my opinion this is what makes this book even more challenging than the rest of Trivizas’ books, because it belongs to Trivizas’ anti-war series, and it is about a whale that eats war, it is full of war vocabulary and is populated by different army officials on their special vehicles.

One is prepared to encounter funny rhymes and puns in a children’s book. The made up words and the creative and non-standard use of language is, also, to be expected in children’s fiction. Finally, if the book is a picture book addressed to four-year-olds, one knows that the language she/he can use will be rather limited. So, I guess, ways of working around the syntax to achieve rhyme could be found, and deletion along with compensation could be used in order to produce a text that has the same effects on the audience, pun wise. But, working with the special jargon of war and mentioning the names of different weapons, vehicles and ranks in the army made the translation of this book even the more challenging. And, since the book is about a whale that eats war and belongs to an anti-war series, maintaining the war vocabulary is crucial.

I find that many words used in the Greek text even though they are clearly words related to the war, are much simpler than their equivalents in English and also, happen to rhyme with common every day words, like βλήματα (missiles) and προβλήματα (problems).Another thing that poses a potential problem is that many of the words related to war in Greek, are translated into English in two words as for example,αεροπλανοφόρα and επιλοχίας that translate into aircraft carriers and sergeant major respectively and thus, having two words in the place of one, could affect the rhythm of the text.

The puns, the made-up words, the funny rhymes and the creative use of language are what make Trivizas’ books so fun to read. As a matter of fact, they are so fun that one thinks of Trivizas as a magic person who speaks that way and is always imagining amazing worlds, but, to me, it is clear that they have been written with a lot of thought; with this translation attempt, I discovered just how much thought amounts to a lot of thought. In the end, I did not translate the book, in order to avoid producing a translation that I was not pleased with. I have decided to give it another try when I will have more time and will be able to think of and make up the alternatives that will do it justice.

Avgi Daferera is a translator of English and Spanish into Greek, and Greek and Spanish into English. She just finished an MA in Writing at Warwick and is currently doing an MA in literary translation at UEA. She is interested in the translation of poetry and children’s fiction. You can contact her at adaferer@hotmail.com.

Translating L’Hirondelle by Claude Simon

Post by Samantha Christie, MALT student

In the Case Studies module of the MA Literary Translation, we have recently been examining children’s fiction and its translation. Focussing on examples of children’s literature in its original and translated versions, and the theories about both writing and translating children’s fiction, we have analysed the genre with specific attention paid to the practicalities of translating it. Amongst other things, we have considered different features of children’s fiction, intra- and extra-textual aspects which might influence its translation, challenges and problems a translator might face in translating this genre, and possible strategies a translator of children’s literature may employ.

Typical, then, that the text I chose for my first practice translation of children’s literature doesn’t contain any of the more prominent challenges for which I have a helpful list of strategies. The text is not written in dialectal language, it contains no slang, there are no ethical issues raised by racist or offensive terms, no songs or limericks, no neologisms…

L’Hirondelle (The Swallow) is a short children’s story, written originally in French by Claude Simon in 1977 and accompanied by Martine Fiere’s colourful, rather abstract images. It follows the journey of a swallow who, whilst flying over a town square, loses a feather, becomes disoriented and starts to fall. In the nick of time, she plucks a feather from the hat of a lady sitting in the square, regains her equilibrium and flies away. It’s a beautiful tale, especially when paired with the illustrations, and I think its beauty lies in the fact it reads so simply. But does a simple story mean a simple translation?

Before starting to translate, I reflected on the text and noted some general aspects to consider. Despite its apparent simplicity, the structure is, in terms of translating, rather complex. The story, at just 16 pages, is very short. As such, the author hasn’t actually used very many words, but doesn’t that mean that the ones he has used are all the more important? So a careful choice of vocabulary was required, particularly with the target audience – children – in mind. The language used is lyrical and there is some rhyme and repetition of words and themes throughout the text. Some passages of text have a certain rhythm to them, although it is not a poem and it doesn’t have a meter. I wanted to keep as much of this rhyme, repetition and rhythm as possible, as it really makes the original flow and the author clearly used that style for a reason.

I hadn’t translated a picture book before, and as the images appear over various parts of the pages, so the text itself has an irregular layout. I needed to make sure my words and pictures were synchronised. I wondered whether the images would have an effect on my translation, whether an image would subconsciously influence my lexical choice. The story also has an iconic element; the movement of the swallow’s flight is mirrored in the text which starts off distanced from the action and zooms in for a close-up before pulling back and returning to where it started.

I’ll give two examples of linguistic areas which I found particularly tricky to translate.
The first line of the text is “Dans un pays il y avait une ville”. ‘Dans un pays’ translates directly as ‘in a country’, which isn’t a very natural thing to say in English. We would normally qualify it in some way: in a different country, in a foreign country, in some country or other. However, the author didn’t need to do that and doesn’t necessarily mean a place that is not ‘this’ country, he just means any country. Introducing a qualifying adjective could technically mislead the reader. On the other hand, the location of the country has no bearing on the tale overall and is non-specific throughout, so the likelihood of this negatively affecting the reader’s understanding is minimal. A further difficulty is by introducing an extra word, the balance and rhythm of the rest of the passage on the first page is upset. This passage is repeated in reverse at the end of the story, so whatever I chose for the beginning needed to fit at the end, too.

Later in the story, when the swallow takes the feather from the hat, she does so “d’un coup d’aile”. Directly, this means ‘with a flap of the wing’, but it also calls to mind another frequently used French expression which sounds similar, ‘d’un coup d’oeil’, meaning ‘at a glance’, ‘a quick look’, and this suggestion of speed in turn calls to mind ‘in the blink of an eye’. I don’t believe the author’s use of “d’un coup d’aile” was entirely coincidental, so needed to find an expression in English that combined the two meanings of ‘with a flap of the wing’ and ‘in the blink of an eye’, which would also fit the rhythm and layout of the text.


Samantha Christie is a translator from French and Spanish into English and is currently working on the MA in Literary Translation at UEA. Special interests include translation in the areas of detective fiction and music, and the relationship between author and translator.
Contact: snchristie@gmail.com