A Breath of Fresh Air in Translation for Children in the UK

In the same period in the UK statistics from experts show a similar trend for translated books for children with the US. In 2005 Philip Pullman⁹¹ introduced the book by Deborah Hallford and Edgardo Zaghini Outside In, an innovative project dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of translated books for children. As an award-winning writer in the UK, his point of view focused on some aspects also shared by Roxburgh as discussed in 1.3.1, starting from figures stating that “[O]ut of the 3% of all books published in the UK each year that are translated, only 1% are children’s books.”

(Pullman, 2005: 5) Pullman addressed his foreword mainly to the English-speaking public, providing some reasons for this isolation/hegemony of the English language in the field of children’s literature. First of all, English is a flexible language, a “mongrel”

in Pullman’s words, which spread throughout the world absorbing bits and pieces from other languages. The media favoured this absorption process, which resulted in “the impression we [the English native speakers] needn’t bother with anything else, with the different, the foreign, the strange: what can books in foreign languages possibly say to us? What do they matter? Why should we bother?” (Pullman, 2005: 6-7) Second of all, the contrast between large publishing houses and independent ones became crucial,

91 Renowned British writer for children, whose most famous work is the trilogy starring Lyra Belacqua His Dark Materials.

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particularly in the 21^st century. Pullman also touched upon the economic aspect by saying that the business of large publishing houses does not conceive translations as a worthy practice because it costs money and very few people are experienced enough to do it well (2005: 7). The consequence was that even fewer translations make it to the market, depriving the public of an invaluable tool to measure the difference and uniqueness of each culture.

Nevertheless, Pullman mentioned a positive event between the end of the 20^th century and the beginning of the 21^st that led to a growing awareness of the limited number of translated literature for children available on the UK market, in the hope to reverse this trend. It was the institution in 1996 of the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation, attentively analysed by Lathey (2010)⁹² from the vantage point of view of initiator of the award. The Marsh Award is biennial because “too few translated books are published to justify an annual prize, and the first Award panel of 1996 accepted submissions backdated to 1990” (Lathey, 2010: 155), thus confirming the limited number of foreign writers that reach the UK market for children each year.

Moreover, the Marsh Award committee worked in active collaboration with the Translators’ Association to best manage the awarding process, where the judges were given a copy of the original book plus the translated copy in order to cross check references in the source and target texts. Lathey emphasised this aspect because the process focuses on the result of translation with a direct reference to an original, one of the criteria for eligibility to the Marsh Award⁹³. To recognise the professionalism and competence of the translator as mediator,

The founding committee was also insistent that the prize money should go to the translator, and that the Marsh should in all respects be a translator’s prize. It is the

92 The Award is funded by the Marsh Christian Trust and supported by the Arts Council of England. From 1996 to 2007 it was administered by Roehampton University, from 2007 onwards by the English-Speaking Union in London.

93 For a full list of criteria, http://www.esu.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/25071/Marsh-CLT-2015-Eligibility.pdf (last access 9/03/2015)

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translator who is the honoured guest at the presentation party and receives the Award from a presenter with an interest in and commitment to translation for children. (Lathey, 2010: 155)

Lathey concluded her discussion on the Marsh Award with a special mention to Hallford and Zaghini’s book list Outside In published in 2005. This list offers the points of view of several professionals in the field of children’s literature, with attention to printed books divided in categories by genre and age range. In her concluding essay, Hallford regretted the near absence of Greek and Italian authors in the list of books provided, with a complete disappearance of Spanish authors or from the Baltic states.

She made a bitter concluding remark about translators, and their intermittent existence in the eyes of the public:

With a few exceptions the translator is generally invisible. [...] Some books do not acknowledge a translator at all; others are mentioned in the minute print in the bibliographical information. More enlightened publishers credit the translator on the title page along with the author, however, only a handful provide biographical details of the translator. (Hallford, 2005: 127)

This invisibility was also detected in the survey of advertisements and reviews for the present research where the name of the translator was, more often than not, omitted in the description. From the list of winners of the Marsh Award presented by Lathey (2010: 156) the most translated languages were German and French. By adding the winners of 2015, the list includes 4 books translated from German, 2 from French, 1 from Hebrew, 1 from Dutch, 1 from Italian, and the most recent winner from Spanish (the original book was in Basque). Apart from Hebrew, it should be noticed that the winners are all European, a result reflected by the results of the survey of source languages shown in Figure 12. The survey was carried out on Carousel for this last

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period⁹⁴, the natural continuation of Books for Your Children but focussing more on very young children and books with a link to television shows and gadgets. From the survey of advertisements, the most translated languages are shown in Figure 12:

Figure 12. Translated literature for children in the UK as advertised in the three periods surveyed

The total number of books shown above is very small: ten books advertised by nine publishing houses overall, an average of one book advertised a year. German still held the first position as the most translated language, followed by Dutch; Japanese and Italian disappeared from the issues analysed for the period between 1996 and 2011, showing a preference for European languages that reflects the winners of the Marsh Award for the same period.

The most productive publishing houses that still offered translations between 1996 and 2011 were Puffin and Andersen Press. Figure 13 shows their preferred source languages:

94 Books for Your Children ended its publication in 1995 after almost 30 years on the run. Carousel is published three times a year: the official website for this magazine is http://www.carouselguide.co.uk/

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20

German French Swedish Danish Italian Japanese

No. of books in translation

Source Languages

1959-2011

1959-1974 1979-1992 1996-2011

UK

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Figure 13. Most active publishing houses in the UK and their preferred source languages.

Puffin released two translations from German, one in 1998 and the other in 2003.

The first, Gudrun Pausewang’s The Final Journey translated by Patricia Crampton, won the Marsh Award in 1999. The second also won the Marsh Award in 2003, Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Where Were You Robert? translated by Anthea Bell. Swedish is present with a classic reissued in 2000: Astrid Lindgren with Pippi Longstocking but no translator is mentioned for this edition.

Andersen Press followed suit with the German bestseller Christine Nöstlinger.

Her two books Conrad: The Factory Boy and But Jasper Came Instead appeared in 2000, both translated by Anthea Bell. The first was a reissue of the original Konrad who won the Batchelder Award in 1979, the second a reissue of a 1986 original version, thus showing the conservative approach by Andersen Press focused on a well-known writer from an equally well-known language to the English-speaking public.

Other publishing houses advertised only one translation and not in consecutive years, although their choice often resulted in award winning translations. For example, the attention to German children’s authors is evident in the publications by Egmont: in 2002 appeared Reinhardt Jung with Bambert’s Book of Missing Stories, before the publication in 2006 of The Flowing Queen by Kai Meyer both translated by Anthea Bell.

0 1 2 3

Puffin Andersen

No. of books in translation

Publishing Houses

German Swedish

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The latter won the Marsh Award a year later for her work on Meyer’s text. The French author Daniel Pennac was published by Mammoth, translated in 2003 by Sarah Adams with Dog and Eye of the Wolf, the latter winner of the Marsh Award in 2005.

As the survey for translated books in the UK in the 21^st century has shown, a limited selection of authors and languages entered the market for children. Even fewer publishing houses continued to invest on translations, with less books advertised to the public at large. These results seem to confirm the arguments put forward by Pullman at the beginning of this subsection, where the British public seemed to have become more and more indifferent to anything foreign.