Category: Meet the Translator

translator interview

Interview | Samantha Schnee | Translator of the Week

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I was born in Scotland and moved to the US with my family at the age of four. We lived in the heartland of the US, in Nebraska, for several years, before moving to Texas, where we settled. I became an American citizen during my first year at uni. I started learning German, took lots of Spanish literature courses, and studied abroad in Berlin, Madrid, and Mainz, but in the end I became an English major because I wanted to access the creative writing courses offered by that department. I wrote a collection of short stories for my senior project. By the time I graduated I had gorged on literature for so long that I felt like I needed to do something completely different, so I went to work for a bank. I ended up in the Latin American group of an American bank, helping companies from Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil access the US markets. I loved the clients but I didn’t love the work itself, which was incredibly demanding — I didn’t have the time or energy to read a book for three years — so I left that industry for publishing. I worked for Andrew Wylie as his assistant for a year, then for Francis Coppola, launching his literary magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, finally settling at Words Without Borders, which published its first issues of writing from Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, six months after I began working there in 2003.

When you were growing up, what books had an impact on you?
It’s so lowbrow that it’s slightly embarrassing to admit, but I loved the Nancy Drew mystery series; I read every one, some multiple times. I think what appealed to me was the girl power — that these three young women were daring and fearless in the pursuit of truth and justice was quite inspiring. The book I probably read the most times was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Little Princess. I was captivated by the character Ram Das, who would sneak across the rooftops into the little girl’s garret with carpets and firewood, pillows and blankets, to make it a more pleasant place for her to live. It seemed utterly magical to me. I suppose I’m still rather fanciful.

Continue reading Interview | Samantha Schnee | Translator of the Week

Interview | Nicky Harman | Translator of the Week

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m based in Weymouth and in London. I go to China every year on visits. I speak and read Spanish, French and Italian but I only translate from Chinese. I have two kids, grown-up now, and two grandchildren. I keep reasonably fit, cycle, walk, swim and do yoga –– but all in moderation! And I love food.

When you were growing up, what books had an impact on you?
When I was very small, my father used to read us Grimms Household Tales every day after tea, and I loved that. Rapunzel (‘let down your hair’) was a particular favourite. This only happened in winter . . . my parents were farmers, and in summer, work went on till late in the evening. In my early teens, my father tried to wean me off children’s books and introduce me to the classics, and as a result, I went on strike and didn’t read any more fiction until I was in my thirties. After that, and somewhat belatedly, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens became big favourites. I wasn’t an entirely undutiful daughter: I carried around my father’s present of a leatherette-bound box set of Austen for twenty years without ever opening them, and then had to retrieve a couple of the volumes from houses in places like Sheffield and Wandsworth, where I had somehow mislaid them years before. I never did make headway with Trollope or The Brothers Karamazov, which my father kept pressing on me. Continue reading Interview | Nicky Harman | Translator of the Week

Interview | Siân Williams | Translator of the Week

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m a translator and the founder of The Children’s Bookshow, a national tour of writers and illustrators of children’s literature which has been taking place in theatres across England each autumn since 2003. For most of my working life I was a publisher, initially founding, with three others, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative.

When you were growing up, what books had an impact on you?
The Old Curiosity Shop, Jane Eyre, Little Women, Ten Twentieth Century Poets (which I remember included poems by Auden, T.S. Eliot, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, Edwin Muir, Yeats, Thomas Hardy amongst others, perhaps I didn’t like the others!).  I also loved Longfellow as a child and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury I think it was called.  Many many more, I’ve always been a voracious reader so a list would take a book!

Later, I came to love Russian literature, so Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Mandel’shtam’s poetry in particular during adolescence.
 Continue reading Interview | Siân Williams | Translator of the Week

Interview | Peter Bush | Translator of the Week

Peter Bush is a translator of works from Catalan, French, Spanish and Portuguese to English and has recieved numerous awards including the 2009 Calouste Gulbenkian Portuguese Translation Prize for his translation of Equator by Miguel Sousa Tavares; the 1997 Premio Valle-Inclán for his translation of The Marx Family Saga by Juan Goytisolo; the 1994 Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association for his translation of The Old Man Who Read Love Stories by Luis Sepúlveda; the 2011 Cruz de Oficial, Orden del Mérito Civil, awarded by King Juan Carlos of Spain, for contribution to the creation of cultural dialogue between UK and Spain; and the 2015 Creu de Sant Jordi, most distinguished award given by the Generalitat of Catalonia, for the translation and promotion of Catalan literature.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I had a happy childhood on council estates in Lincolnshire on the edge of the Fens.
My father was a typographer, so the house was full of newsprint every day. My grandfather was a shepherd and Dad didn’t want to work on the land. My mother came from a family that lived in a tenement in the centre of Sheffield. Her dad was a sawyer from the Rhonda Valley and her mother from the Irish community on Merseyside. In the UK translation starts with class, dialect and migration..
I’ve just moved to Oxford with my family after living in Barcelona for eleven years.

When you were growing up, what books had an impact on you?
My first exciting reads were adventure comics. I got really hooked on cliff-hangers.
Then I moved on to Tarzan and Agatha Christie. At sixteen I loved Molière and Balzac.
 Continue reading Interview | Peter Bush | Translator of the Week

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