Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

Rosalba Hojer talks to translator Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

“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 my interview with Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, she talks about the story of a magical bookshop and the wholesome tale of a young blind girl which will make you want to curl up in a blanket and just keep reading her recommendations all day. Ruth also goes into the details of her translation process and includes many fun examples of the intricacies and challenges some translations entail.

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

Kathrin Rohmann’s Apple Cake and Baklava, because of the themes, the balance between the two main characters - Max and Leila - and the clever way that their stories intertwine. It’s a story that originally emerged from a filmmaking workshop, and I think Kathrin’s perception of it as a film plot really shows in the pacing and development of the characters and their dilemmas. I’ve read it several times and love it more each time!

I hope you don’t mind me copying and pasting, but this is what I wrote about it in another interview recently:

“With loveable and convincingly flawed theatre, it’s a perfectly structured middle-grade story of starting out in a new country and new school, of loss and of arrival. It cleverly draws a parallel between the experiences of German refugees in World War II and Syrians fleeing the ongoing conflict. My respect and admiration for Kathrin only increased when we finally met in 2021, when we gave a series of workshops, and even a theatre performance, for primary school pupils hosted by the UK charity, the Children’s Bookshow.”

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

I think the most difficult was a YA one, which is really more of a young adult/adult crossover: Trees for the Absentees, by Ahlam Bsharat, published by Neem Tree Press because it was very fantastical, or magical realist, with a constantly blurring line between real events and imagined ones, or dreams. It was also challenging deciding how to word certain phrases relating to Palestinian history and culture for readers who would likely know nothing about that part of the world and the complex politics that are in the background, and which would be familiar to teenage readers of the Arabic original text. I did what I think a lot of translators do when something needs a little explanation, which is to insert a ‘stealth gloss’ here and there: a word or two to add context, but in the voice of the narrator or speaker, so that it doesn’t stand out or jar, but stops the reader from feeling lost or confused.

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?)

I think the biggest change I can think of was with Now Make This: 24 DIY Projects by Designers for Kids by Thomas Barnthaler, which I co-translated from German together with Jessica West. The original German version had 25 DIY projects but there was one which made almost no sense to us and considering it was aimed at children the instructions seemed far too difficult to follow and carry out. The editor was really supportive and asked the author to try rewriting the instructions, but in the end, she agreed that it was really too complicated and the book became 24 DIY Projects! Interestingly, the French version has 25, so I assume the French translator and editor were more technically minded than us and able to engage with the baffling air rocket design.

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

Perhaps the one I’ve just translated: The Invisible Elephant (original title: The Music of My Woodpecker) by Anna Anisimova and Yulia Sidneva, which Ekaterina Shatalova wrote about here for Russian Kid Lit blog. It’s about a young blind girl and her adventures in the world around her: learning to walk with her grandpa’s walking stick Speedy, playing hide and seek with her mama, going to concerts, art class and the zoo, riding her inflatable ‘whale’ down snowy slopes, discovering tactile books, and eventually learning – and teaching her best friend – to read braille. The wonderful thing about it is how all the illustrations are not the world as we might see it, but as she sees it through sound, through smell, through touch, and through the strange and baffling things grown-ups say!

There were some wonderful creative challenges when I was translating this playful book, for instance working out what to do with the word ‘ovsyanka’ which means porridge and the bird yellowhammer. Of course, the illustration is of a yellow bird eating porridge!

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

That’s a really good question! To be honest, I can’t think of any among the children’s books I’ve worked on. I admit I was surprised when The Children’s Bookshow picked up Apple Cake and Baklava for the roadshow: they had funding to bring the author Kathrin over from Germany and were booking us for 2 school workshops and a one-hour theatre performance about the book. Very pleasantly surprised! But mainly amazed that they heard about it, as it’s published by Darf Publishing in London, which is a tiny press with very limited marketing capacity. The event was an amazing boost for the book and a copy was given to each of the 200+ children attending.

Could you tell me about the different steps in the process of translating a picture book?

I’m still learning myself about the best way to go about it! The most important thing, I think, is to have the illustrations in front of you at all times, as it’s not really possible to think about the language and what the text is doing unless you’re also considering how the text interacts with and is contextualised or even maybe contradicted by the images.

I expect most picture book translators simply format the translation as a free-flowing text in a Word doc, marked throughout with page numbers and notes [like this]. But for five of the illustrated books I’ve worked on, I chose to work in a grid format (table) within Word, putting the source language in the left column and my translation in the right. And notes to the editor in the margin. This is because there are often so many captions and small bits of text, and I imagine it would be easier for the editor to have the texts side-by-side like this, especially for Arabic and Russian where the editor and typesetter can’t decipher the script. I’ve never actually worked out if it is useful enough for them to make it worth all the extra effort for me, though; it is very fiddly so I hope it’s useful for them!

The other most important thing about a picture book is to read it to a child, ideally of the intended target age! It’s when you’re reading aloud that you really put your writing to the test: does it flow coherently? Are the logical links clear and convincing? Is it clear who’s speaking, and how? What needs to be paraphrased to be easier to follow? Does a sentence have too much in it? Where is the stress in this sentence, and is it ambiguous? These are all things I think about when I’m translating every sentence of any text, but with children’s books, these aspects are all the more important, as children (and their parents) are critical readers and easily put off! If a text is enjoyable and easy to read, they’ll read on. I know as a parent that if the writing is clumsy, or I have to stop constantly to explain, it can be very off-putting.

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

Wow, that’s a big question! I think for all of my languages, editorial conventions are different to English, so there tends to be a lot of restructuring I need to do, to make the text flow more comfortably in English. For example, it’s common in all three languages I translate to introduce speech like this:

Nour looked out of the window and said excitedly:

“Ooh, look, it’s snowing outside.”

Whereas in English, it would be much more typical (and therefore more comfortable to read aloud) if structured like this:

“Ooh, look, it’s snowing outside,” said Nour excitedly, as she looked out of the window. (Nour’s Escape by Abir Ali)

The Magical Bookshop sounds like quite a British story and not very German at all (to a German like me) – bookish, a bit whimsical – were there still any cultural differences that were difficult to translate or any magical vocabulary that you had to be creative with?

You’re right, it isn’t very German in culture, although there are a few cultural details like the school routine and certain foods which remind you of the German setting. But the biggest creative challenge was translating the rhyming couplets uttered by Gustaf the cat, who had a penchant for cinnamon swirls and Swedish proverbs! I really enjoyed working with the editors at Oneworld on this book. At one point in the copyediting, they noticed that Gustaf didn’t rhyme all the time, and wondered why. I checked again and realised that was how it was in the German, but there didn’t seem to be a reason why he forgot to rhyme at certain points. So, with the author’s permission, we played around and came up with a rhyming couplet for every time he spoke. A fun challenge and their input and feedback were so valuable.

November 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.

Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp is a literary translator working from Arabic, German and Russian into English. She translates fiction and non-fiction and has a particular interest in history, historical fiction, and writing for children and young adults. Her translations include books from Germany, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Russia, Switzerland and Syria. Ruth is a passionate advocate of world literature for young people and diversity in children’s publishing. She is co-editor of ArabKidLitNow! and Russian Kid Lit blogs, and writes about global reading for young people at World Kid Lit, Words Without Borders, and World Literature Today.

Titles translated by Ruth can be found on the OIW Website and in the OIW collection at the University of Portsmouth Library.

Apple Cake and Baklava – Kathrin Rohmann
Darf Children’s Books (2018)
The Dot – Gulnar Hajo – Darf Children’s Books (2019)
The Magical Bookshop – Katja Frixe
Rock the Boat, Imprint of Oneworld (2021)
Nour’s Escape – Abir Ali – Darf Children’s Books (2019)
The Raven’s Children – Yulia Yakovleva, Puffin, (2018)
Trees for the Absentees – Ahlam Bsharat
Neem Tree Press, (2019)