Native English (GB) speaker in Lymm, United Kingdom
"Playing with words across the language barrier"
Literary authors don’t just write the first thing that comes into their head to communicate an idea; they know exactly which of the many ways to say something best creates the effect they’re going for. That’s why a good literary translator will find out as much as they can about the author’s intentions, and carefully choose the exact words that will ensure that the translation recreates the intended effect. This is how I translate.
I became interested in translation as someone who loves to play with language, and I soon discovered—as did everyone who read my translations—that I have a particular knack for translating texts that require a special degree of linguistic creativity.
I especially love translating for children and tackling the unique challenges that the most creative texts for young readers and audiences entail—but my ability to translate for adults is in no way limited by this preference for creatively demanding material!
If you have a text that needs translating, which has a unique character that you don’t want to be lost in translation, I’d love to hear from you.
I am committed to human rights, and I am currently gaining experience in the translation of spoken testimonies of human rights defenders.
I am happy to discuss the possibility of working pro bono if the translation task is in the service of human rights.
This is how I solved a recent terminology, style, or linguistic challenge
When translating a piece of theatre for a young audience, which was filled with wordplay and other jokes, I found that I was right to think that translating plays for children is anything but child’s play! While a few of the Spanish jokes worked just fine with a literal English translation, I often needed to change at least half of the joke, and I often had to rewrite a line entirely so that the humour would not be lost!
Some of the new jokes just came to me straight away, but in other cases took a surprising amount of research to find out what would work best. Nonetheless, the effort paid off when I found out that I was able to make people laugh with my translation!