Lawrence Schimel

We had the opportunity to interview author, translator and anthologist Lawrence Schimel who has published books in a wide range of genres and has translated books for Eerdmans. Among other His picture books have been selected for the White Ravens catalog from the International Youth Library and have been chosen several times for IBBY’s Outstanding Books for Young People with Disabilities List.

He started Spain’s chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and served as its regional advisor for five years. He was also a juror for the 2010 James Tiptree Jr. Award and for two SCBWI-Bologna Book Fair conferences.

EBYR: How did you become a literary translator?

LS: I fell into translation by accident. I had already been publishing fiction and poetry as an author, and grew up speaking Spanish at home, even though at school I started studying Latin and Greek. One day a publisher I knew needed someone to take over immediately as translator for a graphic novel, since the translator who had originally been scheduled to work on it had had an accident. And I was able to juggle my other deadlines in order to take it on. So it was literally because of an accident that I started translating books!

EBYR: How long have you been translating, and how did you enter the field?

LS: I’ve been translating for 27 years now, although for many years I focused more on my own books and did very little translating. It’s only over the past decade or so that I’ve begun to translate so much, and it’s been a bit of a revelation. It gives me intellectual stimulation, I find it fun and creative, but without being as exhausting as creating my own work can sometimes be. I used to play a lot of sudoku, but now I channel that sort of creative play into translating, which has the result of helping bring great books to readers in other languages.
I entered the literary field as a reader, and still consider myself first and foremost a reader. But when I had read everything I could get my hands on, I started to write my own stories. And I started submitting them to magazines and anthologies, when I was still in high school. In fact, my parents had to sign the contracts for my first acceptances, because I was under 18 and couldn’t yet legally grant the publication rights in exchange for money on my own.
I have lived in Spain for over 20 years now, and write in both Spanish and English. And I translate in both directions, as well. I’ve published over 120 books as an author or anthologist, for readers of all ages, and have probably translated an equal number of books as well.
Niños Poems for the Lost Children of Chile picture book
NIÑOS: POEMS FOR THE LOST CHILDREN OF CHILE, written by María José Ferrada, illustrated by María Elena Valdez and translated by Lawrence Schimel

EBYR: What is the book translation process?
LS: Every book is different, which is one of the exciting things about translation. Also, it keeps me from getting bored! Every new book has its unique challenges to recreate the reading experience (which is always my goal) in the target language.
Sometimes the challenges are more technical (for instance, if a book is written in rhyme). Other times, it’s specialized vocabulary I have to learn (in either the source language or the target language or sometimes both!). If I’m translating a book about pirates, say, I need to know not just pirate slang but often all sorts of nautical terms and even maybe specialized names for weapons or things like that. Or if it’s a book about books, but there are all sorts of plays on words in the titles, I might have to re-invent different titles in the translation, but ones which are just as playful.
But even when I have to fall back on strategies I’ve used in the past, translating each book is a unique project. (And translating a sequel means I have to look up how I translated things the first time, to be consistent! Because it has often been a year or so since I last worked on those characters, and in between I will have written or translated many other books!)

EBYR: What is a typical workday like?
LS: I am a sprinter rather than a plodder. So while some writers or translators will try and meet a daily quota, whether it’s 500 words a day or 2500 words, I tend to binge and translate, say, 4000 words for three days in a row, and then collapse and do no translating for a week.
Being a writer or translator is not just the actual writing or translating, though. So there’s revising proofs, dealing with contracts, doing PR work (pre-publication or post-publication), and so on. So there are lots of writerly/translatorly thing I do, even on days I am not actually translating.
To give you an idea of my workflow, during the first two months, January and February, of 2021, I’ve translated:
Into English: 2 poetry collections for adults, 2 graphic novels, 1 middle grade non-fiction book about neuroscience, 1 picture book, and around 200 pages of poetry (extracts from 4 different collections for adults)
Into Spanish: 2 board books and 1 picture book
Into Galician: one of my own picture books
And that is just what I translated during those months, not including going over the edits or proofs of books I translated or wrote previously. So every day is different–as I am always juggling different projects.

EBYR: What is your favorite thing about being a translator?
LS: I am a voracious reader, so helping readers in another language have access to a great story or wonderful poems—that is definitely my favorite thing about being a translator. Also, I am able to earn a living and still have time to read lots. In 2020 I read 403 books (!!!): 139 novels, 222 poetry collections, 22 memoirs, 7 non-fiction books or essays, 5 graphic novels, & 8 short story collections.

EBYR: Can you tell us a little about Niños: Poems for the Lost Children of Chile? How was your experience?
LS: I’ve long been a fan of María José Ferrada’s work, so it was great to be able to have the chance to translate these poems. The context of the book is terrible and terribly moving–the children who were killed or disappeared under the Pinochet dictatorship. The poems, on the other hand, try and recreate the lost childhoods those children were deprived of. So the book is so complex and full of different emotions simultaneously. With an especially emotional ending. (I cried when I translated it, and again when I re-read the galleys. But happy tears!)

EBYR: What languages do you speak?
LS: I love languages, and love learning bits of languages, and especially words that don’t exist in the languages I speak fluently. For instance, I was in a poetry workshop in Slovenia, and was fascinated to learn that Slovene has a dual case, you and I, and even though neither English nor Spanish, my two primary languages, have that, ever since I became aware of it as a possibility, I am always aware now if a we is an “intimate we” (just you and I) or a more general we (a group of three or more).

As I mentioned, when I was in high school, I studied Latin and Greek, and in college I studied Old English and Old Norse. I will sometimes work from Portuguese or Galician or Catalan, but those are not active languages for me.
I create in both Spanish and English, and love that I can create things that are “untranslatable” in each language.

EBYR: What has been the highlight of your career thus far?
LS: There are so many and there continue to be new ones all the time, so I can’t pick just one.
Maybe the thing that made my mother proudest was when I translated George Takei’s graphic novel memoir They Called Us Enemy into Spanish. She has been a Star Trek fan since the very beginning!

EBYR: Why do you think reading books in translation is important for children?
LS: Children live in the world, and I think it is important for them to have a chance to see the many different realities that exist in the world. Just having access to a single culture is to deprive them/us/oneself of many experiences, emotions, moments of understanding and empathy, inspirations, etc.

On September 11, 1973, a military coup plunged Chile into seventeen long years of dictatorial rule. Only the return of democracy could reveal the full horrors of Augusto Pinochet’s regime: 3,197 people dead or disappeared—including thirty-four children under the age of fourteen.

This book is a stirring memorial to those victims and to the cost of extremism. Thirty-four poems—one for each child lost—consider the diverse hopes of these fragile young lives. From Alicia to Jaime, Héctor to Paola, Soledad to Rafael, they were brave and creative, thoughtful and strong. In these pages, some children watch for the changing seasons. Some listen for new sounds on rainy afternoons. And some can’t wait for their next birthday.

Featuring gentle, emotive poems and soft, pastel-toned illustrations, Niños is an unforgettable tribute to the children of Pinochet’s Chile and all those threatened by political violence across the world.

An interview with author and illustrator Debbie Ohi

Q. How many languages do you speak?

This is an interesting questions. I only create in two languages (English and Spanish). However, I’ve actually translated myself and been published in two other languages (Galician and German). But I’m not able to create in either Galician or German, even though I’ve translated myself into them.

Translating, I am most comfortable working between English and Spanish. Although I can work (laboriously, with a dictionary) from a few other related languages as well (Portuguese, Italian, etc.) but usually only do so for poetry or children’s books, and preferably where I have contact with the authors directly to be able to go over questions, doubts, or issues that arise. When I was in school, I studied Latin and Greek and Old Norse–none of which I can actually speak, and which I’ve mostly now forgotten over the years.

I’ve also sometimes translated work into Spanish from other languages, using English as a bridge language, in poetry workshops where we dialogue directly with the poet whose work is being translated. Lately I’ve been working directly with some Latvian writers to translate them into Spanish, since there are no literary translators working in that combinations; one book of poetry for adults and one picture book are both forthcoming in Spanish next year.

Q. How did you become a literary translator?

I started translating by being a writer first, and one who writes in both Spanish and English. Even though English is my mother tongue, curiously enough, some of my own Spanish-language titles have been translated into English by other people, like my picture book LET’S GO SEE PAPÁ illustrated by Alba Marina Rivera, which was translated by Elisa Amado and published by Groundwood.

Translation, especially for poetry and picture books, can often be the closest reading of a text, and those are often the texts that can be hardest to re-create in another language. So I think that publishers often like to have poets or writers themselves as the translators, who have the sensibility to walk along the tightrope of fidelity to the original text and faithfulness to the reader in the target language, and who can take those leaps when necessary. I have recently been working with a Latvian poet to produce Spanish versions of his poems, using an English draft as the bridge language; there have been a number of times when we’ve come up with a poetic solution in Spanish that he likes so much that he goes back and corrects the English version (which were done by a direct Latvian-English translator, although a linguist not a poet).

In Spain, where I live, translators are considered “authors” of their versions, and copyright law acknowledges the authorship involved in producing their translations and protects that.

Q. How did The Treasure of Barracuda get chosen to be translated? Did the publisher approach you? Did you approach the author? etc.

The Treasure of Barracuda won the Barco de Vapor Prize from the Spanish published Ediciones SM. I have worked with SM for some years now, where they commission sample translations of the opening chapters of some of their titles, to help them sell the foreign rights. Sometimes these translations help find publishers in non-English-speaking countries, where the editor might read English but not Spanish.

Little Pickle Stories was able to read the sample, and fell in love with the book and bought the rights in English. And because they liked the sample, they asked me to continue translating the book. (This is not always the case, and that is one of the “tricky” issues involved with publisher samples, from the translator’s point of view. Some publishers have their own “stable” of translators they work with regularly, so just because you’ve done the sample is no guarantee that you’ll be commissioned to complete the book, although that is often the case.)

Now that the English edition has just been published, it’s helping the story find readers in other countries as well. (A Latvian editor who knows me, but who doesn’t read Spanish, decided to read the English translation specifically because I had translated it and contacted me just befre the Frankfurt Book Fair asking for an introduction to the Spanish publisher so they could try and buy the rights.)

Q. How does book translation work, in terms of process?

There are so many different paths to publication in translation. Sometimes an agent or the rights department for a publisher will pitch projects to potential foreign publishers who might be interested. This is what happened in the case of THE TREASURE OF BARRACUDA, which was published by a large publisher that has its own rights department and is active at the international book fairs.

This book was also very visible to foreign publishers because of winning the Barco de Vapor prize–as well as other honors like being chosen for the White Ravens by the International Youth Library in Munich. Any such distinction is useful for foreign publishers, since not only can they use it in their sales/PR material, which helps when launching an author who is unknown in their territory, many publishers also use it as a way of evaluating what titles to pay attention to, especially if they don’t speak the language themselves and need to rely on external readers who they might pay to do a reader’s report, evaluating the title and its possibilities for their market, or if there is a sample translation they can use.

But very often a translator is the staunchest advocate for a book.

As an example using one of my own books, I took part in a poetry translation workshop a few years ago, where one of the poets involved was the Hungarian poet and translator Anna T. Szabo. Even though we worked on our poetry at the workshop, since we both also write and translate children’s books, I showed her some of my own picture books, she loved one (THE BOY AND THE SPY) and did a translation of it and offered it to one of the publishers she works with regularly, who offered us a contract. (In this case, the artist was someone I know directly and the Spanish publisher of the book had only bought rights in Spanish, Basque, Catalan, and Galician; we still held all other rights ourselves.)
From Gatheringbooks.org

I know that I’ve certainly done the same thing, championing books that I love and want to see published in English (or in Spanish). One year at the Bologna Book Fair, I fell in love with the stories produced by Fatmeh and Zahra Sarmashghi, two sisters who write and illustrate together, and whose books are published by Shabavitz in Iran. I brought the editor of a Guatemalan publisher I work with, Amanuense, to show them the titles, and she fell in love with them, too. I was able to act as interpreter/intermediary to help them negotiate a deal to buy rights to one of the books, and then I translated the text into Spanish, which was published as BALLENA NEGRA.

Sometimes, of course, one is just asked by a publisher to do a translation–especially once one begins to become known as a translator.

But it is also important for the translator to have an affinity with the text, I think–especially in literary translation. I’ve been asked to translate projects that I’ve turned down, usually recommending another translator who is a better match (for instance, I didn’t have the nautical background to do a good job, I felt, on one book project, and recommend a translator who is also a sailing enthusiast and already had the necessary vocabulary–in both Spanish and English–at her hands).

Q. What do you love most about translating a book?

Helping great voices find new readers in another language. While I am a writer and a translator, I am first and foremost a reader, so being able to help books I love find new readers (who couldn’t read the original) is always wonderful to me

Also, I love when there is a problem or a dilemma that I’m able to resolve or come up with a solution for in the target language

I think it’s important to re-create the reading experience in the target language, and sometimes, especially with puns or plays on word, you can’t translate the literal wordplay, but you can compensate by adding something similar in elsewhere. And when it works out, when it maintains the playfulness of the language even if all the literal jokes aren’t translated, that feels really great.

Q. What do you find to be the biggest challenge(s), when translating a book?

It sometimes takes a little while to hit one’s stride with the voice of each new book. I often go much slower at the beginning of each new project, and need to revise more heavily the opening section after having translated the entire book.

I translated into Spanish a book by a friend of mine, the Icelandic author and illustrator Áslaug Jónsdóttir and am trying to help her find a publisher for it in the Spanish-speaking world. The book presented a lot of problems that required work-arounds or other solutions in Spanish, from the very title itself: ÉG VIL FISK! or “I Want Fish!” In Spanish, there are different words for fish that is food (“pescado”) and fish that is still alive (“pez”) so I changed the title to MAR SABE LO QUE QUIERE (or “Mar Knows What She Wants”) to avoid telegraphing the plot of the book, which involves a very young girl, still with a limited vocabulary, asking her parents for fish and getting all sorts of fish-themed things (a toy fish, a dress with fish on it, a fish puzzle, etc.) but being fed everything but fish, which is what she’s asking for. I think the final result works very well, but it took a lot of deliberation to figure out how to make things work out naturally

It is a license to change the girl’s name to “Mar” (which is both a common female name in Spanish but also means “the sea”) but it adds an extra language-specific resonance which I think works well.

I think rhyming texts are also particularly challenging, since normally the same words don’t rhyme in the target language, requiring a transcreation more than just a translation.
From GatheringBooks.org

Q. What advice do you have for aspiring book translators?

Always, with anyone involved with anything creative, I’d remind them to have fun, that even though it is work and a profession, and it is important to be paid fairly for the work we do, it is also important to keep our love of language and not lose that. So don’t be afraid of working on things, just for yourself, because practice is also the only way to get better as a translator or a writer

The truth is that there is a lot of business involved in being a translator, outside of the actual work of translating. Very often, most editors won’t be able to read in another language, so it usually falls onto the translator’s shoulders to scout for books they want to translate, contact whoever controls the rights to see if they are still available, write a synopsis or sample translation (on spec or not), and on top of everything else, pitch it to publishers until finding one to take it on. And THEN you get to do the fun part, which is the work of translating the book it

It can be very hard to get a foot in the door as a translator, as in most creative professio

Doing reader’s reports for publishers is a badly-paid task that allows one to establish a relationship with an editor, for each side to get to know the other’s taste, etc. It does also show one how and why books get picked (or not) since sometimes something you love (as literature) gets turned down (for commercial reasons) or vice versa.

For children’s books, the SCBWI now has a separate category for translators, and can offer both networking and other support and advice.

Depending on the languages you’re translating from, it may be possible to find work translating samples or extracts from new books, for institutions like NEW BOOKS IN GERMAN or KOREAN LITERATURE NOW, or directly for publishers or literary agents. Many countries or languages also have schemes to help train or support new translators, especially from “smaller” languages.

There are also translators’ associations, like The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in the US or the Translators Association in the UK, that offer advice, networking, calls for translators, etc. for members.

Q. What are you excited about or working on now?

I’m working on a great middle grade novel by Mexican writer Juan Villoro called THE WILD BOOK that’s forthcoming in Fall 2017 from Yonder, the new kidzbook imprint from Restless Books. It’s a magical story about libraries and reading, and how sharing books with people you care about can change the reading experienc

Q. What are you reading right now?

I’ve just gotten back from the Guadalajara Book Fair, so I have a bunch of new books I’m eager to dive into. Two are by Mexican author Toño Malpica, whose work I quite admire and who I would love to translate (publishers who might be interested, get in touch with me!). One is POR EL COLOR DEL TRIGO (“By the Color of the Wheat”), a middle grade novel illustrated by Basque artist Iban Barrenetxea and published by Fondo de Cultura, featuring Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (the author of THE LITTLE PRINCE) as the protagonist. The other is MARGOT, a science fiction novel featuring the 8 year old girl of the title, published by Editorial Norma, whose small acts of solidarity and kindness wind up having a far-reaching impact on the fate of humanity.

Today I’m talking with author and translator Lawrence Schimel. He writes in Spanish and English and has published over one hundred twenty books in a wide range of genres. He is also a prolific literary translator.

(interview By Elisabeth Norton)

Lawrence, can you tell us more about how you became both an author and a translator?

I was and still am a voracious reader. I started writing in my teens because I ran out of things to read. I grew up speaking Spanish at home, so when I got to high school, I chose Latin and Homeric Greek as my foreign languages to study. So, translation was both a written exercise and also something I did innately at home.

I later decided to double up on languages and study Spanish as well because I didn’t have a strong grammatical basis (although because I had fluency in speaking, I actually got skipped ahead, so I am missing a year’s worth of grammar in my formal study of Spanish).

I started publishing short stories and poems when I was still in high school (my parents had to sign my first contracts since I was still a minor) and joined SCBWI back in 1992, I think, when I was at university. I had published over 25 books for adults before I moved to Spain in 1999 but didn’t publish my first children’s book (written in Spanish) until 2002. I had published stories and poems for kids in lots of anthologies and magazines before then, and also worked briefly at children’s bookstore Books of Wonder when I lived in New York City before moving to Spain.

Living in Spain and publishing regularly in both Spanish and English, I was increasingly asked by publishing colleagues or contacts to do translations, especially into English. Although I had started, back when I lived in New York, through one of those being-in-the-right-place situations: I ran into a comics publisher I knew socially who needed someone to take on an graphic novel project immediately because the translator who had been assigned to do it unfortunately had a heart attack and passed away.

Two of your books, Bedtime, Not Playtime! (Orca Book, 2021) and Early One Morning (Orca Book, 2021), both illustrated by Elina Braslina, will be released in various languages around the world on May 2, 2021 (International Family Equality Day). How did you it come about to make the book available in so many languages?

I’m both surprised and grateful that these two books, which are fun adventures of kids and pets that take place in same-sex families, are managing to reach young readers in so many different countries and languages. By the end of 2021, there will be 23 (!!) different editions of these books published around the world.

I say “editions” because sometimes there will be multiple publishers within the same language in different territories: For instance, there are three separate English-language editions being published: Orca Book Publishers (for North America), Peniarth (for UK) and Oratia (for New Zealand and Australia). Even though they’re all using my own rhyming self-translation into English, there are lots of variations among these English-language editions: whether to use “teddy bear” or “stuffie,” not to mention Mom, Mum, or Mam.

These two books are a project I control directly with the artist, Elina Braslina, and we’ve been working with a mix of traditional publishers and other partners (sometimes a queer bookshop who recognizes that there’s a lack of books like these on the market, an LGBT organization who plans to use them as part of an educational project, etc.).

Board books can be expensive to print, especially for smaller print runs, and one thing we’ve done was to coordinate some co-printings, especially helpful for those smaller languages or territories for whom the cost of printing on their own would be prohibitive.

That started because the original Spanish-language publisher for the books got a quote from their printer that was too high (€3.75 per copy) and I said, “Let me see if I can find some others to join the project and bring the costs down.” By getting some other European countries involved, the total combined print run brought the per until price down to €1.44 per copy—even for a smaller market, like Catalan, which published only 400 copies of each book.

So, the books were originally published simultaneously in Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Flemish, Latvian and Spanish in 2018, and then in Galician and Slovenian in 2020.

This year they are being published in Hungary, Russia, and Switzerland (in German, French, Italian, and Romansh) in separate editions from different rainbow family organizations, all coinciding to celebrate IFED.

Later in the year, they’ll also be published in English (the three different editions mentioned before), Quebecois, Icelandic, and Portuguese (Brazil), with a Swedish translation forthcoming next year. (Some other editions that were scheduled for last year are still on hold because of the pandemic.)
Schimel lawrence page
Schimel lawrence page 2

Was it difficult finding translators for so many languages? What was your process for finding them?

I have a vast network of translator friends and colleagues, and also know many of the translators who’ve already translated other books of mine. Often, when foreign rights are sold, the author is not directly involved with the decisions as to who will translate a book. I write in both Spanish and English, and when I found out that one of my picture books ¡Vamos a ver a papá!, illustrated by Alba Marina Rivera (Ekare, 2010) had sold to Groundwood, it had already been translated into English by Elisa Amado.

It was fascinating to be translated into my mother tongue, and it also helped me step back and be just the author of the book and let her make decisions as translator. With one exception: I asked that they keep Papá in the title, instead of using Daddy, which they respected. It tells the other side of the immigration story, not of those going to a new country, but of the people left behind, in this case a girl in Latin America whose father is working in another country and sending money home to the family. It was published by Groundwood as Let’s Go See Papá! in 2011 and they’re now bringing out a paperback edition this May.

In this case, since I’ve been doing all the rights selling, I’ve also tended to work closely with the translators for these two books, and have often helped find the translators for the projects–especially when they’re being published by a rainbow family NGO instead of a traditional publisher (which might have its own network of translators).

Actually, sometimes it has happened the opposite way: translator friends have made a rhyming version into a language, which Elina has laid out with the art, which we’ve then used to approach potential publishers or other partners who might be interested in the project. For instance, we had a Welsh translation before we found the Welsh publisher that is bringing out the books.

Both books, Bedtime, Not Playtime!, will also have two French versions. I live in a country with spoken dialects (Swiss German and Swiss French) that differ from the written forms of the languages German and French. It is only in the last few years that I’ve seen a few children’s books published in dialect. Why do you think it’s important to have books published in dialect and not just in the formal, written form of a language? What led you and your publisher(s) to make the decision to publish more than one French version?

There are a lot of questions here so let me work backwards.

One thing that’s interesting is that for the Québecois edition published by Orca Book Publishers, the translator Raquel Martinez translated from my English-self translation that Orca is publishing, so that the two versions match closely. The European French edition, by Anne Cohen Buecher, was translated directly from the Spanish original.

(Anne had translated one of my Spanish-language books into French, and we share a special translator-relationship because we’ve sometimes translated the same books or authors, she into French and I into Spanish. Alas, we also both suffer from insomnia, and one sleepless night she translated both books which helped us with placing the European French edition.)

But to answer the other part of the question, I think it is vitally important for kids to be able to have books–and especially fun books–in their own languages, the languages they actually speak. Spain is also a very multilingual country, but there is an imbalance as to what gets published in what languages and how. Some years ago, I created a set of bilingual children’s books, because I’d realized that almost all English-language bilingual editions were with Castilian, so kids who spoke Basque Catalan or Galician didn’t have access to English materials directly from their own languages, it all went through Castilian. So the four books were published in all four language combinations: Basque-English, Castilian-English, Catalan-English, and Galician-English.

I am very interested in what gets published or translated into many of the indigenous languages, and am often frustrated that these projects are often only traditional stories from that culture, usually published in bilingual editions. This is a way of publishing about them for the dominant monoculture, but not for these kids themselves, who may already know their own traditional stories but don’t have access to zeitgeist kid culture, like Percy Jackson by Rick Riordan or The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler, in their own language. (There are also so many political elements to keep in mind when publishing bilingual or multilingual books: the order of the languages, the placement of the texts, even the fonts and font sizes, all of which clearly signal who a book is really for and who’s an afterthought or secondary reader.)

But, yes, I strongly encourage and support whenever possible projects to publish kids’ books in languages or dialects that don’t often have vigorous publication programs–both translations into those languages and encouraging creators to develop stories directly in these languages.

There are some very interesting projects along lines like these, like Book Dash in South Africa and Pratham Books in India which work with local creators to create books, and make them available to be translated into other languages, both locally and internationally.

In the past couple of months there has been a lot of discussion about the need for more people with diverse backgrounds to be working as translators. Can you talk about why it is important for the translator to have familiarity with both the language and the culture of the languages they are working with?

There are actually separate if related issues to the two parts of your question.

One is the need for more people with diverse backgrounds (as creators, translators, etc.). That is a publishing-level problem, about who has access to publishing and who is being excluded (due to the insular, cliquish nature of publishing, and how institutional racism is so ingrained in the publishing world on all levels).

Linda Sue Park created a wonderful fact-based video busting the “Scarcity Myth” that giving more opportunities to “diverse” authors means taking away publishing slots from white authors, using actual data of books published in the last few years.

This lack of access, unfortunately, also holds true for translators of color as well.

Separately is the question of finding an appropriate translator for each particular project, which has many different factors involved. This doesn’t always mean only finding translators from that same culture, but definitely one of the problems of many of those possible translators being historically and institutionally denied access (especially compared to their cis, straight, white colleagues) means that often people who could do a better job on a translation than the person who winds up doing it are not having a chance to do so, resulting in a worse case situation for the author, and especially for us as readers.

The discussion has not been about who cannot translate certain authors, but instead about publishers making the effort to make better decisions with regard to who gets offered the chance to translate which books. This requires the publishing world to broaden how and where it looks for translators (and also books–which is a separate issue, and one at which English-language publishing is by and large lacking).

I’ve certainly turned down plenty of projects where I wasn’t the right translator for the job. Even though I make my living as a full-time freelancer, every time I’ve said yes to a project (whether literary or not) that I shouldn’t have, it’s always been an unpleasant experience for me (and usually it’s tied me up so I couldn’t take on a later project that was a better fit for me).

I also personally have a longstanding commitment to make sure I translate at least one writer of color per year, because I know how much harder it is for writers of color to be published in translation, and one of the ways I try to make use of what privilege I have is to be able to spend the time to do a sample translation on spec and use my connections in the field to try and place these projects. Because I never get asked by publishers to do them, they’re always books I need to go to bat for.

I am also currently co-translating a novel with a young Black translator who has published in journals but has not yet translated a book, as a way of trying to share one of my contracts to uplift through an informal mentorship.

People have cited examples of translations that did not accurately convey the meaning of the original text. As an author, is there a way for you or your publisher able to ensure that the translation of your text is true to the original intent and tone of the book?

There is a lot to unpack here. As an author or publisher, a lot of this is outside one’s control, I’m afraid, although it is also important to have faith that the people who have fallen in love with your book want to publish it as well as possible, which includes the translation. A lot also depends on what level of the publishing industry one is at: There are bestsellers which sell because they are bestsellers, regardless of the quality of the work or the translation, where the bottom line is the only important factor to the publishers involved, which is different from those publishers, often independents, whose primary concern is getting great stories and illustrations into the hands of readers.

This is why when I give talks about licensing rights, I always talk about the importance of the moral rights of the creators (author and illustrator) and not just the monetary aspect of the deals. The highest offer is not always the best offer, especially if they’re not going to publish in a format or quality that respects the original. Or a smaller house might offer to publish multiple works by an author, showing commitment and an interest in trying and establish them over time, which might be a better decision than a larger offer for just one book (where the title will be somewhat disposable or just commodity).

For me, as a translator, I always try and recreate the reading experience. So if something has a fun, lively rhythm in the original, I’ll want to recreate that in the translation–even if it requires taking more liberties from the literal translation in order to be more faithful to the work.

To give an example, I translated into Spanish Little You, by Richard van Camp and Julie Flett, which was published by Orca and shows various First Nations families in different compositions. In the book, Richard is very careful never to gender the baby being addressed. So for the Spanish translation, I had dilemmas right away since all Spanish diminutives are gendered, so the title itself was a problem.

Also, Spanish uses the masculine as neutral by default, but I felt that wouldn’t be appropriate in this case.

So I actually turned in two different versions to Orca: one was an unrhymed, straight translation of the text, using the masculine singular throughout, which was literally correct and closer to the original text but not at all faithful to the spirit of the text. I also sent a gender-neutral rhyming version, which had to sometimes take a few more liberties with the text (especially since what rhymes in English is different in Spanish so I could usually keep one of the rhyme words but not both) but was much more faithful to the spirit of the project, and that is the one they published.

Many writers might not have been aware of literary translation as a possible career. What advice would you have for someone who might be interested in finding out more about careers in translation?

As I mentioned, I am a voracious reader and one of the things I love about translating is falling in love with a work and getting to share it with more readers who wouldn’t have been able to read it in the original.

I fell into translation, and am an autodidact, which is not to say that one doesn’t need training but instead that there are many different journeys to literary translation. As a possible career, I think it’s difficult to make a living solely from literary translation, so many colleagues combine literary translation with their own writing and/or with other kinds of translation.

I do think it’s important to become part of the translation community, which is one of the most generous sections of the literary world I’ve found. For newer translators, there is the Emerging Translators’ Network in the U.K. and for those focused more on the U.S. market there is the Emerging Literary Translators’ Network North America.

I also think it’s healthy for all writers (and readers) to read translations, to have a chance to see what is being written and illustrated all around this vast, diverse world we live in. To discover different narrative structures, or familiar ones!

In the children’s literary community we know all about how books can be both mirrors and windows, and one of the things translators do is to unlock windows originally written in another language.

Thank you for giving me and the readers of Cynsations a glimpse into the world of translation and international publishing. We wish you all the best with your books around the world!

Cynsational Notes

Lawrence Schimel is a full-time author, writing in both Spanish and English, who has published over one hundred twenty books in a wide range of genres. He is also a prolific literary translator.

His picture books have been selected for the White Ravens from the International Youth Library in Munich, Germany, chosen for IBBY’s Outstanding Books for Young People with Disabilities three times, and won a Crystal Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, among many other awards, honors, and distinctions.

His writing has been published in Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Catalan, Changana, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Farsi (Dari), Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Latvian, Macua, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romansh, Romanian, Russian, Sena, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Welsh translations.

He started the Spain chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and served as its Regional Advisor for five years.

Originally from the U.S., Elisabeth Norton now lives with her family in Switzerland, where she writes picture books, chapter books and middle grade novels and serves as the Regional Advisor for the Swiss region of the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI).

You can find out more about her writing and involvement in the world of books for young readers on her website .

When not reading or writing, Elisabeth can usually be found knitting, hiking in the mountains or walking along the river in the forest near her home.