Good morning, Mrs. Hilda Papadimitriou.

Good morning.

We’re very happy that you’re here with us for this interview.

Thank you very much.

Let’s start with some questions about your life and how translation came about. How did you get involved in it?

I had a record store for many years, for about 20 years, and whenever there weren’t any customers in the store to serve, I used to read. Out of my love for music I translated a book I found that I was very interested in, which is the “Bible” of rock and roll, Charlie Gillett’s The Sound of the City. I suggested it to a publisher and he agreed to publish it. I loved doing that translation. At that time, I closed the store for family reasons, so I was about to begin a new career, so to speak. And I said: translation. From now on, I will translate and listen to music. I was lucky enough to come into contact with big publishing houses – e.g. Polis, Patakis, Metaixmio – who understood what suited me and 90% or 95% of the books I’ve translated so far, are books that I would buy as a reader.

Wonderful. After all these years of experience, what does “to translate” mean to you?

I think one of the reasons I got into translation is that I love reading, I love immersing myself in the universe of a book. I think the translator is primarily a person who immerses themselves in books. Translation is immersing yourself in another person’s world, in their mind, in their thoughts, in their story, and trying to render it as you feel it and as they might have felt when they wrote it. For me, translation is to transfer a writer’s thoughts, ideas and style into my language, and make it possible for others to enjoy the book, as I did.

Great. Let’s move on to some questions related to the translation process. What kinds of texts do you prefer to translate?

I only translate literature. I’ve translated some essays too, but I like literature because, as I said before, I like to immerse myself in the world of a book. In general, I’m interested in a good book, in a good author that has things to tell, I don’t care about the genre so much. Other than that, I’ve been interested in crime fiction since my childhood, so I translate a lot of crime fiction and have acquired some sort of specialization, let’s say. But I’m also very fond of music books, e.g. I’ve translated Bob Dylan’s autobiography and Leonard Cohen’s first novel. I really like it when a translation has to do with the music field.

Do you get to choose the books you want to translate?

No. Apart from this first music book that I suggested and was published, all other book suggestions of mine have been rejected. In general, it doesn’t really work that way in Greece. You collaborate with publishers who say, “I have this book, are you interested?”. And usually you are interested. Unless it’s something… A couple of times, I happened to say I can’t do this thing. And not for any other reason, it was just too scary, I don’t know. So, yes, publishers assign me the books I translate.

Which one of the texts you’ve translated so far would you say has been most difficult for you and why?

Percival Everett’s Erasure. It’s a postmodern novel. Percival Everett is an African-American writer. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. In addition to his ideas being difficult, encased in the novel was another novel that the hero of the book was supposed to be writing, which was written in Ebonics, the dialect of African-Americans. One of the hardest things in translation is to render slang or idiolects. Very difficult. It really gave me a hard time, but it’s the book I’m most proud of.

You’ve mentioned publishers and the relationship with publishing houses, so let’s move on to translation as a profession. Are you satisfied with your financial rewards from translation?

No, no translator is.

We hear that often, to tell you the truth.

Yes. It’s a lot of work to get a result that you’re satisfied with. When you’ve been doing it for so many years and you have, so to speak, a good reputation, you want to live up to that reputation and when you love books, it takes a lot of work. Translation requires a large amount of time. And that time is not paid. I think most literary translators, because I’m talking about literature, translate out of passion for books. Otherwise they would be involved in something more lucrative. No, I’m not satisfied with the fees.

Is it possible to make a living just from this?

It’s very, very, very difficult. One would have to work 15 hours a day, without a single setback, because that’s another thing: if you are a freelancer, you will also spend a day at the tax office or who knows where, at the social security office, somewhere. You’re going to get up one day and you won’t be feeling well. And you have to work 15 hours a day, seven days a week to make it.

Besides financial rewards, are you satisfied with the status, the position that translators have today?

I think translators are now more acknowledged than 20 years ago. Of course, we went through a period in the late zeros, in ’06, ’07, ’08, when there were still a lot of newspapers with extensive sections about books, where critics were referring to translation in detail. Now that’s gone. They don’t mention it. And it’s not right, in my opinion, because it’s a lot of effort and it’s the only way of acknowledgement, to know that, yes, others have acknowledged your effort. The fees are low anyway, we should at least have that. But then I think about the editors, who are in an even worse position, and say, it’s okay, we’re fine.

Speaking of editors, do you think text editing is necessary?

Absolutely. You know, you may have read a text – even if it’s only three pages – 50 times and the mistake escapes your notice, because it’s you who has written it, you’ve read it over and over, and it feels like it’s yours now, so you don’t pick up on the mistake. The editor is the second pair of eyes, which will spot the mistake. Of course, there is this perpetual contest, so to speak, between proofreaders and editors, that the editor should have enough willpower to correct only the mistake and not write what they think would be more appropriate.

Have you ever felt that you were censored by an editor?

No, never.

Nor have you ever had anything changed without being asked?

That has happened and I was very annoyed. Usually, the issues have to do with pragmatics, they might not understand something and make a correction. Now I usually ask them to contact me when some major edits are made. Well, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the conditions are such – e.g. a book has to be published soon – that they don’t contact me. But the truth is that, usually, after I translate a book, when I hold the book in my hands, I don’t read it again, because I’m afraid of what I might find inside.

And, as far as the title is concerned, do you or the publishing house decide on it? How is this collaboration between you?

The decision is mainly made by the publishing house and the truth is that many times they make the right decision. We always suggest, I mean I always suggest titles and when the title is ambiguous, I suggest three or four alternatives, so that the publisher can decide which is the best. There is something strange about the title. Sometimes you have to distance yourself from the original title and think of something else that has to do with the book, to make the title more understandable, so to speak, and more attractive. The first book of literature I translated was Heartburn. “Heartburn” literally means those heartburns that pregnant women get. I translated it for Polis Publications. It is written by Nora Ephron, who is one of my favorite authors. The editor, I think, came up with the title Thirteen Recipes of Infidelity, because there are thirteen recipes in the book. It was an amazing idea, I hadn’t thought of it. I had come up with various ways to render “heartburn” as “love heat”, because it had to do with infidelity and things like that. But, yes, it’s usually the publishers who decide on the title.

And have you ever received criticism for any of your translations? Do you think it’s important?

Yes, many times. In the old days when there were a lot of columns and a lot of print publications, I got reviews, almost always good ones. I don’t remember reading a bad review of my translation. Only somebody wrote once about a particular translation οf a book by John Barth, no, I don’t remember which book, but they thought the text was not so coherent and wrote that I just went through the motions, which is also a pejorative, but they didn’t pick up on any mistakes or oversights, so to speak. The main thing is not to be lazy. We all make mistakes. If we look back at translations we did many years ago, we’ll always find things we could have done differently. The point is not to be lazy and say “Why bother, I’ll just write this or that”, or “I’ll leave it like that, it’s okay”. When you get stuck, you have to keep digging and searching to find the best possible solution.

Are you optimistic about the future of translation in Greece?

The first thing we should ask ourselves is if we’re optimistic about the book in Greece. I think that now that we are somehow a little bit out of the worst of the crisis, we can hope that readers will multiply. And if readers multiply, there is a future for translation. Now that books are being translated from so many languages… It is very important what many cultural foundations in European countries are doing, they’re funding the translation of smaller languages, for example. A Norwegian, a Dutch, a Basque translation. This makes it possible to publish books that would not be commercial enough for a publisher to take them on. In general, I think that translation and interpreting are all the more necessary, as our world becomes more complex and we travel more and get out of our microcosm and see what’s out there. That’s the kind of times we live in, whether we want to or not. Others come here, we go elsewhere. Out of necessity, right? Whether refugees come here or we, as economic migrants, go elsewhere, one of the most important things is translation and interpreting.

And a last question. What advice would you give to a student who wants to work professionally in translation in the future?

To read many books. I haven’t studied translation, I’ve attended a translation seminar, but I haven’t studied it at university. I have a degree in Law. My education, so to speak, was the very many books I have read. The more you read, the more familiar you become with the style and the way of expression of the authors. When you read, you pick up on details, a skill which, if acquired only through teaching, is difficult to apply. Reading is both for translation and writing, but also in general, the advice I can give to everyone.

Thank you very much.

I thank you.

Papatheodoulou Antonis (Done)

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.