![]() Did I want to keep the 1940s feel, modernise, or try and find a more neutral, timeless tone? I opted for the last. People retain a fondness for books they loved as children, no matter how weird or wooden the translation. A peek at readers’ hostile reviews on Amazon of a third translation by Richard Howard, published in 2000 and which offered a streamlined, modern take, eliminating the quaintness of the 1940s language, set my alarm bells ringing. So my first key decision was to treat this as a completely new translation and to ignore what had gone before. I knew that if I did, they would lodge in my mind, and everything I wrote would be either be a reaction against my predecessors’ strategies, or it might seem that they had found the best solution and whatever I did would not measure up. Knowing that this work is a childhood favourite, frequently described as ‘one of the greatest books of all time’, that readers would be familiar with Katherine Woods’ 1943 translation or Irene Testot-Ferry’s translation in the Wordsworth Classics edition of 1995, I had to decide whether or not to look at the existing translations. ![]() You translated the 2010 edition of The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and your translation was even shortlisted for the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation, in 2013! Again, so cool! Could you also tell us a bit more about this experience of translating such a world-famous children’s book ?Īt first, I felt thrilled and honoured, and then I was overcome with awe and trepidation. I think my most memorable contribution was “front-loading washing machine”.Ģ. We were told to ignore the ones we didn’t know and to provide any information we could on words we did know. Every so often, they’d mail out a list of ‘problem’ terms, by snail mail. The publishers had assembled a pool of ‘experts’ – I have no idea how they got hold of my name or why they thought I was qualified. That was so long ago that I’d forgotten about it! It was in the pre-fax, pre-Internet era. So, could you tell us a bit more about this experience ? You were a consultant on the revised Robert and Collins French-English/English-French Dictionary ! That is so cool! I’ve never met anyone who has worked on a dictionary before – and I’m guessing most of my readers haven’t either.
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