Welcome to Talking Translation, where we go behind the scenes and between the lines to learn more about the process of translating Australian children’s books. Today we meet Christiane Duchesne, the French (Canadian) translator of Piano Fingers and Maya & Cat, by Caroline Magerl.
Why talk about translation?
Children’s and YA books make up over 54% of the international rights sales of Australian literature. They are vibrant agents of cross-cultural exchange and exciting contributors to the arts economy. And Aussies love an international success story! So, by all means, praise the authors! Praise the illustrators! But do remember that none of this success happens without exceptional translators, who deftly manipulate words to ensure new audiences can enjoy the same reading experience as the book’s first readers. In the age of AI it’s never been more important to celebrate these gifted creators who do SO much more than swap one word for another. Let’s make our translators visible!
Talking Translation with Christiane Duchesne
Christiane Duchesne has written over 90 books for young readers, and translated more than 700 titles in her extensive career. Before providing fascinating, detailed answers to my questions, she chose to quote Lori Saint-Martin, a prominent literary translator:
We are all, when faced with the multiple languages of the world, ignorant people who hold the book upside down. It is the translators who, through their work, turn it right side up.
In: Un bien nécessaire, éloge de la traduction littéraire, 2022.
Q: How many Australian picture books have you translated in your career?
A: It’s hard to say how many! I have translated over 700 titles since 1979 — texts from English Canada, USA, UK and a few from Australia — and I can’t remember which ones were Australian. What I can tell you is that I remember a few books with a very special humour.
More recently, I had the pleasure of translating Imagine a City and Adelaide’s Secret World by Elise Hurst, both of which are absolutely wonderful.
Q: Do you notice similarities across the Australian books you’ve worked on that pose challenges to translation?
A: I have not translated enough Australian books to be able to relate the different translation challenges.
For me, the challenge is different with every book and with every author, regardless of nationality. Of course, sometimes you have to deal with regionalism or something that the audience here is not familiar with. I have already had problems with Marmite…!
The similarities I notice in the few Australian books I have had to translate are a beautiful poetry, a wonderful imagination and a great creativity. If I dare to make a comparison, I would say that they are similar to some Quebec books, which are very different from English-Canadian books. Some publishers in English Canada have told me that my work is too poetic for them (in the sense of not being down-to-earth enough) and that it would be better for me to be translated in England or… Australia!
It is interesting to note the differences between the two translations of the same book, one done in France and another one here, by myself. A professor at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve has done a comparative study of my translation of Chris Van Allburg’s The Garden of Abdul Gasazi and that of a French translator. Generally speaking, the translations done in France are more “pointed”, less flexible in a way than those we do here. They often lose the tone and colour of the original, whereas the Quebec translations give the text its full texture. This is only a personal observation, shared however by my two main publishers, D’eux (who publish Caroline) and Comme des géants.
Q: For Piano Fingers, specifically, can you identify some of the challenges you faced? Are there particular pages or lines of text that were hard to render into French?
A: Piano Fingers is one of the most difficult books I’ve had to translate, if not the most difficult. Since I had already translated Maya & Cat, I was somewhat familiar with the atmosphere of Caroline’s books.
In Piano Fingers, I would say that everything happens BETWEEN the words. Fortunately, Caroline understood and sent me a very long email explaining the context, the links with her childhood, her relationship to music. This was essential for me to enter the text through the right door.
The biggest challenge was to find the meaning of the word brummed. I consulted my translator — who translates my books into English —, she had no idea, she even called her British and Australian colleagues, until Caroline told me that she had invented the word. I then twisted the meaning of a similar word in French to say that Isla [the character] brumait.
The simplicity of the words was also a nice challenge.
For example:
Bea came from a big musical family. They play big musical things.
It becomes:
Béa venait d’une grande famille de musiciens. Tous jouaient d’immenses musiques.
It sounds simple, but it’s not!
We wouldn’t normally write immense musique, but that’s what I felt in this case.
The challenge was not to translate Caroline’s text specifically for local readers, but to render it in simply impeccable French, with all its whims and nuances.
I translated it not only for Quebec and French Canada or even French-speaking America, but for the entire French-speaking world, since D’eux distributes its books in France and Europe.
The important thing for me, whatever the text, is to render the spirit of the text, its colour, its rhythm and its melody, and also to make sure that it is always pleasant to read aloud. I’m looking for what will make this text equivalent to the original, but with a slightly different flavour, like sweetening a dessert with honey instead of maple syrup.
The biggest compliment I get on a text I translate is when someone says, “Oh, I didn’t even notice that it was a translation,” and when it comes from a bookseller, it’s even more flattering.
Q: What are some of the challenges involved in translating picture books, in general? For example, how do the illustrations impact the way you translate the words? How do you adjust rhyming texts?
A: The main difficulties when translating a children’s book are the same as when translating songs or poems. I consider it to be a literary translation in the same way as translating great novels.
People don’t imagine that you can spend days breaking your head on a single sentence. Let me give you some examples.
I had to translate a short novel for a young readership that began with a deliberately unfunny joke that had a major impact on the dramatic line of the novel. I spent three weeks on it. The editor then told me that the author was willing to rewrite the first few pages with me. What a luxury! But that was enough to completely unblock the problem and I was able to fix it.
What about the case where it says a school of fish and the illustration shows a bunch of little fish going to school with school bags on their backs? In French, we say un banc de poissons.
There are also those albums where the text wanders into the illustration and where we have to deal with the number of characters, the place of the sentence break when it is spread over two pages, to avoid characters being “caught” in the middle of a double page.
As far as rhyming texts are concerned, I have long since abandoned the idea of making the French text rhyme. What is important to me is to infuse a French rhythm and melody, while keeping the English spirit.
Sometimes it’s a question of genre.
Music for Mister Moon, which I translated for D’eux, was obviously a problem, because in French the moon is a feminine name. This has a huge implication, because not only does the text have to be adapted, but also the character’s behaviour. Difficult, but successful!
The number of words also plays a role. In an album of 50 words on 32 pages, there is no room for error! You have to choose the right one. It’s like walking on a wire.
And then, there is always a lot of research to do when the English text to be translated is itself a translation of another language. In these cases, I always ask for the original text (if it’s not Chinese…!) because the first translator has put his or her touch on it, has interpreted the text in his or her own way, which may be very different from mine depending on my language.
An example of a fresh translation from this morning in a text for small kids:
He tried adding the sky and clouds, but the drawing didn’t capture the mountain.
I translate by:
Il y ajoute le ciel et des nuages, mais le dessin n’arrive pas ressembler à une montagne.
The verb “capture” is untranslatable here even though the image is clear.
I could have said for an older audience:
… mais le dessin n’arrive pas rendre la montagne.
Except that the meaning of rendre is not clear to a little one.
Also, I avoided the He tried, because in my opinion, verbs of intention are much more widely used in English than in French, more active, less passive.
I conclude by saying that those who believe that writing and translating books for a young readership is easy are greatly mistaken. When translating a novel or any other work for an adult readership, we don’t necessarily ask ourselves if the vocabulary is right and adapted, it is taken for granted, we consider the adult public as capable of assimilating the vocabulary and the meaning of the words.
The choice of words for little kids is very important, we must respect the young reader. Often, the English word (or phrase) is simple, but the French equivalent is not. We must therefore do some pirouetting to keep the meaning while using a metaphor.
Q: Finally, please tell us a bit about your career as a translator (background, education, experience, languages).
A: Strangely enough, my translation career took shape very slowly. It all started in 1979 when Scholastic Publishing in Toronto was looking not for a translator, but for a children’s author. I never found out who recommended me, but I started translating very small books (B&W and printed on newsprint!), Clifford the Big Red Dog, The Little Witch, and later the Benjamin series, and all the Robert Munsch books to this day. These are simple texts that I have tried to translate well. Over the years, my reputation slowly grew and I was entrusted with more and more interesting works until I started translating for D’eux and for Comme des géants texts of a very high quality.
I have never taken a course, nor do I have a degree in translation, but I take great pleasure in providing the best possible French version of wonderful texts.
I am a self-taught translator and that suits me fine, but I am above all a writer. I think that the care I bring to my translations is exactly the same as the one I bring to my books, whatever the form of writing, albums, novels, theater, poetry, or songs.
