Antonis Papatheodoulou

Hello.

Hello.

Thank you very much for being here with us.

I thank you.

First of all, we’d like you to tell us what your relationship with Spanish and English is and how translation came about.

Translation didn’t come out of my involvement in the language, it rather came out of my love for children’s books. I like the children’s book field, I write children’s books, I admire a lot of children’s books by foreign authors I really like, so the passion to translate their work can be traced there. I translate from languages I feel comfortable with, English, which I learned from a very young age and later continued to do so, and Spanish, which I’m still studying to this day through Spanish literature courses at the Hellenic Open University. It’s a language I love very much. I like to choose which books I want to translate. When a publisher wants to publish one of them and I’m confident regarding the language, I translate it.

Based on what criteria do you choose who to work with or what to translate?

Do you mean, for example, which publisher I will work with?

Either which publisher you’ll work with or how you will translate… Are these two different questions?

As far as collaborators are concerned, a publisher is usually one, either the author who wrote the original text or the publisher I’ll collaborate with. Usually it’s the other way around. A publisher has chosen and bought the copyright of a book from an international book fair, e.g. the Bologna Fair, the London Fair or the Frankfurt Fair. Greek publishers visit book fairs, see which books interest them and choose which ones they’d like to publish in Greek. Some of them happen to interest me as well, and either a publisher suggests something to me or I say, “I want to translate this!”. That’s how our collaboration comes about.

You talked earlier about children’s books that you admire. In terms of translation, is there a translator you admire or hold up as a role model?

There are many translators I admire. Regarding those who translate into Greek, my favorite is Maria Angelidou. She’s also the translator who first taught me the secrets of translation. I became really interested in translating children’s books in one of her seminars. She gave us very difficult things to “play with” and I saw them as a challenge. I remember she gave us as an exercise – this was ten years ago – to translate some poems by Edward Lear. I loved him so much that this year a collection of his poems translated by me was published. This had started in that seminar. And I admire Maria very much, because she translates, too, among many other things, of course, a very short form of texts. Verse books, books we call picture books, that is, books with a very short text that are paradoxically much more difficult to translate than those with a longer text.

Are there any difficulties in translating children’s books in comparison with literary books? What are these difficulties?

I will talk about children’s books, because I haven’t translated literary books. I’ll say what the difficulties of translating a children’s book are, but not comparatively, because I really don’t know, I haven’t translated literature for adults. It’s quite difficult, because many times there are elements of humor, rhymes, there’s this strange communication between discourse and image… I mean, in illustrated books the story is usually created somewhere between the image and the discourse. It is born therebetween and you have to transfer it unchanged. And a lot of times that’s at the expense of the discourse, because you can’t change the image. A book is already illustrated. So if there is a rhyme with a word and you want to pick another word that is a perfect equivalent, but you see the original word illustrated, there’s nothing you can do. All these various features make this genre special and quite difficult to translate. Also too many puns. And the answer to how you translate something is always why you translate it. When this translation is meant for children, it has the difficulties that any text for children has. When a text, let’s say in Spanish, makes children laugh out loud, the text in Greek also has to make children laugh out loud. And in the same way that the Spanish-speaking author chose to do it. This is a particular difficulty. And that’s what I like about it. That’s why I’m involved in translation. If someone gave me a huge literary book to translate, I don’t think I could handle the work it takes. On the contrary, when something is too short, but it’s a challenge to get it translated, I like it very much. I see it as a game, that is.

Would you say that you can make a living from that alone?

No. No, I can’t. But I’m not a typical example, because, as I said before, I choose to translate short texts. And the fees for these translations are de facto very low. Even good fees for such translations are a very small amount. It’s not the fee that one would get for a 500-page book, for example.

Are you a member of a translators’ association?

No. No, because, as I said, my involvement in translation rather stems from my love for children’s books. I’m a member of various children’s book associations, but not of a translators’ association. I do it because I love children’s books. And I really like to translate some of the foreign ones myself. So when this meets a publisher’s intentions, I do it.

The field of translation is obviously quite difficult, even for professionals, which means that some mistakes are likely to be made.

Sure.

How do you think the quality of translation in general can be improved?

To tell you the truth, I have no idea, because I don’t know the professional translation field that well. However, the short form of texts that I serve helps you spend a lot more time on what you are translating. When you have a sentence in a living room of a picture book, you have all the time you need to pay the required attention to the words of that sentence in order to transfer the atmosphere that the book intends to transfer in its original language. So the mistakes are very much reduced. What I do is give my translation to a great many people to read. And I trust what they tell me, either in a statistical or in a personal way. Listening to others is very important.

Whether they are editors or not?

When they are editors I trust them a hundred times more, because it’s their job to do that. But it’s not just the editor. The point is… Even a parent who’ll read a rhyming story to their child to put them to sleep, and can’t quite articulate what I’ve rendered as a rhyme while I’ve heard how musical it sounds in the original, that’s tremendously useful feedback for me.

Children would be the best editors of course.

It depends. It’s very cute to say that and very nice and largely true. But when you want to do a job that is also professionally correct, strict criteria of someone who reads differently from children are also required. Certainly kids are the ultimate judges and they are also very strict, because kids don’t feel obligated to like something. Just as in theater. If they don’t like the performance, they just eat their chips, whereas an older person will clap, because they know the curtain is down so they have to clap for the actors even if the performance seemed awful to them. That doesn’t happen with a child. They will drop a book that bores them, or won’t laugh if something isn’t funny, or they won’t clap if something doesn’t excite them. So it’s a difficult audience.

How do you feel when you translate a book?

I have a really good time with the books I translate.

Which part do you enjoy the most?

It’s when I’m trying to figure out how to answer a difficult translation question, which usually comes up because it’s a children’s book, it’s fun, humorous and rhyming. It’s like solving very amusing riddles, so to speak.

Are you influenced by your translations when you are writing a book of your own? Or by another writer?

I’d say it’s probably the other way around. What I’m afraid I might do – and I often do – is put my own way of writing and my own way of approaching children in the translation of a book. It is often unavoidable. And of course that’s why publishers sometimes choose me or someone else. I, too, sometimes read a book and say: this would be more appropriate for that person to translate and not me, because their writing is more in line with what the author of this book is trying to do.

Do you think there is competition between translators? You just said, “Someone else would better translate this instead of me”. Is there competition? Is there collaboration?

I really don’t know. To be honest, I don’t know the field of professional translation. In the field of children’s book translation, and especially in this short form genre, most people translate because they like it, so I don’t think there’s much competition. But it’s also an area that hasn’t got too high fees, too much money, too many projects. It’s a very specific thing; very few people do it anyway, and many times we say to each other, “Oh, how great that you translated that!” or “You should definitely translate that!”.

But even in this small field, as you said, there is criticism, either positive or negative. How do you deal with this criticism?

I haven’t really had any negative criticism. But I haven’t translated that many things.

And reviews in general, how do you deal with them?

With great interest. With tremendous anxiety, with tremendous insecurity, but also with tremendous interest, because it’s the only way to make your work better. And when criticism comes from someone who knows and from someone who – however strict – is well-meaning, it is the most useful thing.

What do you think needs to be improved in the field of translation?

Again, I’ll tell you about what I know, right? I think we need to improve – and especially in the translation of children’s books – the attention we pay to certain things and the quality we ensure in the final result. Whether we are writing or translating for children, we often tend to think that children as readers settle for something less in terms of quality and professionalism. But this is not the case; rather the opposite is true. I think that’s what needs to be improved. It’s the quality we put in the work, no matter how little it is or it may seem.

Do you think there is a future in this area?

Pardon?

Is there a future in this profession?

Of course there is. A future with no room for translation seems frightening to me. It would mean that we have stopped communicating with each other through the things we create. It is very important that there is a future for translation. Let alone for translation among small languages.

What advice would you give to students and people who want to get into children’s book translation in the future?

I don’t feel that sure as to advise anyone on these things. Ιf what they’re doing is something they love, meaning they’re doing it out of love, because they really like this work and they want to transfer what they’ve read and they want others to read and enjoy this book and wish their own work to be in there, I think they’ll do it perfectly. Everything else is technical knowledge.

You sound very optimistic about the future and the young people who want to get involved…

I’m trying! Even when I’m pessimistic, I try to sound optimistic. It helps.

It’s better this way. Thank you very much.

I thank you.