Rachel Ward

Rosalba Hojer talks to translator Rachel Ward.

“Stories on the move – Making translation in children’s literature visible” is the objective of this year’s Action Lab Project by Outside in World and the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing. As an intern searching for material to benefit the project, I have interviewed ten different translators and publishers whose answers will offer you a peek behind the scenes of translated children’s books.

In our interview, Rachel Ward covers the challenges of historical translation and sounding too British, the characteristics of different languages and different ways of approaching cultural differences when translating. Keep reading if you also want to know more about her translation process and why children might be the perfect audience for translated literature!

What is your favourite children’s book you ever translated and why?

That’s really tough because I’ve loved most of them, but if I had to pick just one, I’d say Zippel (Alex Rühle, illustrated by Axel Scheffler) because it was so much fun with all the wordplay and rhymes – just up my street. Plus, the thrill of it being illustrated by Axel Scheffler and a really sweet story.

Which children’s book was the most difficult to translate and which challenges did it involve specifically?

The Edelweiss Pirates by Dirk Reinhardt because it features some upsetting scenes involving teenagers not much older than my older son. I had to tackle those sections a little at a time. I also found that there were a lot more typos and homonyms in them than in the rest of the book when I was reviewing the translation at the second draft.

Which book you translated has changed the most due to the translation, i. e. design, illustrations, cover, even the content, and how? And what was that process like whilst translating it? (Or why did you not change so much?)

Red Rage by Birgitte Blobel was published jointly by Annick in Canada and Allen & Unwin in Australia. For the Annick edition, they wanted to relocate the story to a generic North American high school, and this involved a lot of cultural changes. A&U then used that version for their copy edit as there had been some timeline errors corrected, so I then had to spend time putting the beer, mopeds and Berlin Wall back in. (I’ve written about this in detail here:

What was the most unusual book you ever translated, culturally or in terms of the concept?

Not a children’s book, but I translated a book about Armenia by a German author which was fairly odd.

Has there ever been a book you translated that you thought was quite niche but was surprisingly successful once published?

I don’t know enough about the sales figures to be able to answer this, I’m afraid!

Could you give me an overview of the different steps within the process of translating a picture book?

I haven’t ever worked on anything where there needed to be consideration of the pictures particularly, or graphic/typographic elements, so on the whole it’s much the same as any other translation. I do a first draft and find where the sticky parts are, highlighting them to come back to. If it needs to rhyme then this takes a lot of time and attention, but I haven’t done a fully rhymed book for publication. If there’s anything that needs clarification from the author, I’d save up all the questions until this point. Then it’s a question of working through until all the queries and tough parts are resolved. I always read a picture book aloud to make sure it’s not going to trip up the person reading it to a child.

What is the most interesting feature of each language that you translate into English and how does it change your process when translating?

I don’t think it changes my process very much. My main working language is German, so the word order is completely different and sometimes you have to split sentences or completely reshape them to keep the same flow of information. This is mostly fairly intuitive but sometimes it takes a lot of redrafting before it works. Sometimes German words can be very compact and need a lot of unpacking in English. Other times it’s the other way around and it’s possible to be a lot more concise in the translation.

I would love to know a little more about your translation of The Edelweiss Pirates, do you mean there were typos and homonyms in your translation or in the original? Was it also difficult to find the right vocabulary, given the context of the book?

In terms of The Edelweiss Pirates, I meant that there were mistakes in my translation – it was as though my brain hadn’t wanted to linger over the text in the first draft, and so my eye had skipped over them on a skim reading before I went back to polish up the second draft. I hope that makes sense! The tricky aspect of the vocabulary was making sure that it wasn’t anachronistic, and also trying to avoid sounding too British, or using words that were too American as the characters needed to sound like German teenagers in WW2, yet be written in English. The OED online is very helpful for this as it gives dated citations so you have an idea of when a word was first used.

Why is it so important to have translated literature, but especially translated children’s books in your opinion?

The importance of translated literature is a big question! I think it opens up the world, helps us see where other countries and cultures are similar or different to our own, enables us to read more widely, and so on. But also, it is just as important to enable people to read a good book – whatever genre – that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. This is particularly true for children, partly because it helps create empathy and partly because children are often already more open to this kind of thing than adults – they just accept that a book comes from another country without having any preconceived ideas about what translated books are like, or else they don’t even notice that it’s translated, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Do you think it is necessary/important to have the translator’s name on the book cover as well as the author’s and illustrator’s names?

I think having the translator’s name on the cover is a “nice to have” – in an ideal world, it would be there, but it isn’t a deal-breaker for me. There are other things that are more important to get right in a contract – pay, deadlines, copyright, and fair terms. Some people think that getting translation more visible through things like names on the cover will help in the fight for the other aspects, but I’m not totally convinced of that. Different publishers also have different views on the issue, and I’m not going to fall out with someone who is brilliant to work for in every other respect over this one…

September 2022

The interview was conducted via email by Rosalba Hojer, a German Erasmus+ scholar studying French in the UK and intern working for Dr Sophie Heywood from the University of Reading.

Rachel Ward is a translator from German and French to English. Reviews of the YA novel Red Rage by Brigitte Blobel, and The Edelweiss Pirates by Dirk Reinhardt, as mentioned by Rachel in the interview and Traitor by Gudrun Pausewang (1928-2020), one of Germany's most celebrated writers for young people, also translated by Rachel can be found on the OIW website.