Following on from our previous interviews about the Room to Read translation mentorships, today we hear from some of the mentees – Joni Chan, Teresa Breton, Femmy Syahrani, Richard Prins and Mamta Nainy. Many thanks to Room to Read for providing the artwork we are able to share today.

World Kid Lit: Why did you decide to apply for the Room to Read translation mentorship?

Joni Chan: I wanted to work on a socially impactful translation project while receiving mentorship since I haven’t had professional translation experience. I’m also very interested in picture books. Room to Read met my needs for mentorship, social impact, and offered the type of material I’m interested in.

Teresa Breton: I applied to the mentoring programme because even though I had some experience translating into English, I felt there were still skills that I could develop further, and the help of a mentor seemed like a great idea. I had also worked with Room to Read in the past, and it’s always a fantastic experience.

Femmy Syahrani:  I’ve been translating from English to Indonesian for almost thirty years, but I’m fairly new to translating into English and to the Anglophone publishing world. So when the opportunity arose to work with Room to Read, I quickly took it. I also thought it would be fun and inspiring to work with another translator on a book, since translation is often a solitary endeavor.

Richard Prins: At the time I applied, I had been translating Swahili literature for less than two years, so I was trying to translate as broadly as possible to expand my horizons. I had worked with classical poetry, song lyrics, and different genres of fiction – and liked the idea of adding experience with children’s literature. After all, having two kids means I read a lot of children’s literature, and in the past I have found working with young poets as a teaching artist inspiring to my own poetic practice.

Mamta Nainy: When I heard about the mentorship programme from Room to Read India, I immediately thought it would be an excellent opportunity for me to get to interact with experienced translators, listen to and learn from their creative practices and push myself in linguistic directions I may not have charted before, while also finding a community of fellow translators from all over the world. I think one of the biggest challenges of writing and translating, or any creative practice for that matter, is to be objective about one’s own craft; to figure out where one is on their creative journey, and how to keep growing. Oftentimes, it means seeking an outside opinion from fellow creators or industry professionals and I thought this mentorship could provide me with the right kind of guidance to try out new things and develop a sharper eye and ear for what works and what does not.

WKL: What did you enjoy most about the mentoring?

Joni: My mentor was knowledgeable and gave advice on how to approach translating picture books and rhymes.

Teresa: The best part about the mentoring was how warm and amazing my mentor was. He made sure to give critiques and suggestions in a way that built my confidence and further developed my skills. I felt trusted in my ability but guided through the whole process in a way that allowed me to learn.

Femmy: I’ve translated for a long time so, while each project presents its own challenges, it’s nice to tackle a new kind of challenge, which is translating picture books into English. It gave me an opportunity to sharpen my skills further as a translator. I’m glad to have Daniel Hahn as my mentor, who encouraged me in facing this challenge and enlightened me about the difference between translating for children and for adults.

Richard: Reading the translations aloud in a small group was especially productive – that attention to sound, the spoken word, treating the text as poetic. Afterwards, talking more broadly about how we came to the world of literary translation, and how we might navigate it, was also very informative.

Mamta: My interactions with my mentor, Daniel Hahn, who is such a wonderful translator from Portuguese, Spanish, and French and a promoter of translations, have been greatly enriching. From our first conversation, it was clear (and no surprise considering his accomplishments) that learning from him was going to be a super stimulating, immersive experience. He gave me complete freedom to try out different things and offered suggestions that were precise and pointed but always constructive and encouraging. Learning from Daniel has been a profoundly humbling and vastly rewarding experience—and I know I will be bringing this experience to the books I translate in the future.

WKL: Has working on these texts changed the way you think about translation?

Joni: Yes, I learned to look at the images and use language that conveyed the emotions and energy that the pictures were trying to convey. Whenever I got stuck on translating rhyme or concepts, I’d get inspiration from the images instead.

Teresa: I believe it cemented even further how much I enjoy translating and how I will probably never stop learning and improving. And that is a good thing because it never gets boring.

Femmy: About translating picture books, yes. I learned that it’s less about transferring the literal meaning of the source text, but more about conveying a story that’s harmonious with the pictures.

Richard: Translating for children involves a heightened focus on the reading experience – partly because the reader is likely to be so mentally different from yourself, and partly because you are likely to have two (or more) people reading the book at the same time, an adult reading the words while a child “reads” the pictures. This gave me a more multidimensional way of thinking about audience – in terms of the physical and cognitive act of reading – for any translated work.

Mamta: I think my relationship with language has grown more intimate. I have now become a more sensitive reader and I am conscious of the choices I make while translating—I try to work out the whys and the wherefores in my head before choosing one possibility of the text over the many others.

WKL: Did you have any specific challenges with the texts that you can tell us about? How did you resolve them?

Joni: Coming up with rhymes in English was challenging. I had to use words with different meanings altogether, but had the same emotion. For example, when the text said “larvae”, I used “bug” because it had more whimsical rhymes.

Teresa: The text that I worked on had some nature-based spirits called “Los Dueños” in Spanish, which would directly translate into The Owners. However, this didn’t convey the role and importance that the spirits had and I spent several days trying to figure out a name to call them that seemed more appropriate. In the end, I landed on naming them Keepers since their role was to watch over and protect nature. It seems small but it was important and my mentor helped me rule out several options before we landed on something we both thought would work.

Femmy: In one of the books I translated, I had to create a translation that rhymes for the narration. I’ve handled rhymes before, in poems that appear here and there in novels, but this was my first book where the rhyming texts take center stage. I needed to make sure that the rhymes sounded natural and worked with the accompanying pictures. I found that the only way to resolve this was just keep working on it and never give up until I was satisfied with the result – trying out synonyms, changing sentence structures, creating new lines. The pictures actually helped inspire new ways to express the story.

Richard: When we translate, we translate both language and culture, and both can pose immense challenges. As one example from the language front, I translated a book about the butterfly life cycle titled Peo Pila – “peo” from the Swahili word for butterfly “kipepeo” and “pila” as a Swahili pronunciation of the second half of the word “caterpillar”. (“Peo” was also the name of the main character). So I wanted to translate the sound in a way that would capture the alliterative fun, but also provide a suitable name for the protagonist, and ideally reference both major parts of the life cycle. This obviously called for the inventive rather than the literal; I settled on “Flutter-Pillar,” naming the character “Flutter”.

Richard (cont.): For a more cultural example, I translated one book where a young girl compares her mother to the legendary soccer player Pelé. The fact that I just used the word “soccer” should be a hint that I am an American and thus woefully ignorant about football. I didn’t think the name of a player who was in his prime over fifty years ago sounded natural out of the mouth of a child, and didn’t think young readers would be likely to get the reference. I asked my seven-year-old daughter if she had ever heard of international athletic stars like Ronaldo or Messi, and she hadn’t, so I was stumped, and thought I would remove the reference entirely. My daughter was born in Zambia, but lives in Brooklyn; I found myself wondering if she would know these names if she still lived in Zambia, and decided to do some research. I found a study that indicated 92% of people worldwide know who Ronaldo is, but only 40% of Americans. This put my own cultural blinders into perspective – and I was more comfortable using Ronaldo’s name as a reference young readers would be likely to get.

Mamta: In my imagination, translation is almost like a literary jigsaw, with many possible pieces that could run the gamut of how you choose to read a text to how you make micro-level word choices. And this challenge that translation throws up, of constantly exploring different choices and then deciding on one, is exactly what is deeply satisfying to me—especially in the case of translating books for children where the many different strands of spirit, meaning, aesthetics, length of the words, the equation of literature with literacy, illustrations and layout, the real estate on the page, etc., must also be considered.

Mamta (cont.): I translated six books during the course of the mentorship, out of which two were in rhyme. Translating these rhymes was tricky, for I was not just translating the content but also the form. A simple change in the meter can have a devastating effect on the flow of a poem, and it was quite challenging to find the words that would fit their place snugly, perfectly. There were times when I looked at the translated rhymes and thought to myself ‘It’s not wrong but it’s so not right’. I continued revising and made a lot of different people read the translation for me and to me. After several rounds of revision, and with help from my mentor, I think I finally had something that seemed to work.

WKL: Do you plan to continue working with children’s books?

Joni: Yes, I learned so much from working with children’s books and I plan to continue working with them.

Teresa: It’s quite possibly my favorite genre to translate right now. While I enjoy translating other types of texts, children’s books are just so much more fun. I especially love the heart and care that go into these types of projects and knowing they can have a great positive impact on a child. And the illustrations are always so lovely!

Femmy: I’ve actually translated two English picture books into Indonesian after the ELTP and what I learned from the program has certainly influenced how I approach the translation of these books. I paid more attention to the pictures and let them play a role in my translation, and to how the text would sound being read out loud.

Richard: Although I have too many translation projects at the moment to add anything to my plate (a poetry collection, an Africanfuturist novel, and a hybrid historical project), I would like to circle back to children’s literature soon, and have identified a few intriguing middle grade Swahili novels I think might make exciting entries into English when I find the time to seriously dig into them.

Mamta: Absolutely! I think translating books, especially for children, helps me share that sublime space that is created by the coming together of reading, telling, and writing—and there’s so much joy in there!

We also asked translation mentor Antonia Lloyd-Jones to share what she had learnt from the process:

I learned the value of mentoring in groups, rather than just individually, and feel I should have done it more. When in pairs or groups, the mentees inspired and encouraged each other. In some cases they were shy at first about speaking out in front of each other, but once they gained some confidence, they definitely benefited from the group work.

My best experience was with the four Vietnamese translators, who had to translate stories told in the form of simple rhymes. I gave them a group workshop on ways to approach the translation of rhymes for children, and even though they are not used to such forms, their own language works in a very different way, and English is not their first language, they rose to the challenge and came up with some highly creative results.

Meet the Mentees:

Joni Chan is a writer and translator in Austin, Texas, USA. She spent much of her childhood between Manila, her birthplace, and a refugee camp in Bataan, where her  parents worked as ESL teachers. She earned her MFA in writing and literature at Bennington College and an MLIS from San Jose State University in California.

Teresa Breton is a translator born and raised in Mexico City who translates from English into Spanish and from Spanish into English. She studied History at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where her love for translation sparked after learning about the difficulties faced as one tries to convey messages across space, time, and culture. She furthered her translation studies through independent research and certifications. The subjects she translates range from medical texts passing through art theory, as well as educational materials and children’s literature. Her translation works include Hélio Oiticica: Parangolé published by Mousse Publishing as well as several books among Room to Read’s Peace and Equality Series, the STEAM Powered Careers Collection, and the mini book for Rebel Girls: She Creates Change Project. Her email is: teretraducciones@gmail.com

Femmy Syahrani has been a translator for almost thirty years and has translated over seventy books. Almost forty of them are from English to Indonesian, including award-winning novels like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Remains of the Day”. The other thirty are from Indonesian to English, most of them bilingual picture books published by DAR!Mizan, while the rest are short story collections and novels by various authors. Femmy has received grants from LitRi, an Indonesian government program to fund translations of Indonesian books and excerpts into English.

Richard Prins is a New Yorker who has also lived, worked, studied and recorded music in Dar es Salaam. His poetry has been published in dozens of literary journals such as Gulf Coast, jubilat, and Plougshares. His essays received “Notable” mentions in Best American Essays 2014 and Best American Travel Writing 2020. His translations of Swahili poetry appear in publications like Bennington Review, Harvard Review Online, and Washington Square Review, and his translation-in-progress of the novel Walenisi was awarded a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. His email is: rplatypus@gmail.com

Mamta Nainy is a writer and translator based in New Delhi, India. She writes in English and Hindi and has authored over thirty-five books for children, many of which have gone on to win national and international awards including the Valley of Words Awards 2022, FICCI Publishing Awards 2022, Publishing Next Award 2022, The Hindu Young World-Goodbooks Award 2019 and Peek-a-Book Children’s Choice Award 2019. Her works have been featured on several honour lists including IBBY and USBBY. She also works as a literary translator, translating in both directions, from Hindi into English and vice versa, with over forty published works of translation. Mamta is inspired by the unfettered imagination of children and is passionate about stories that are inclusive and empowering. Her email is: mamtanainy@gmail.com