We are delighted to welcome Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp to the blog.  Ruth is the translator of b small publishing's How Do Bridges Work? written and illustrated by Roman Belyaev.  Here Ruth provides an insight into translation.  Many thanks to Sam Hutchinson from b small publishing for the opportunity.


How long have you been a translator and how did you get started?

I qualified as a professional translator in 2004 when I finished an MA and postgraduate diploma in translation, but my first taste of freelance translation was during my third year abroad, when I spent 4 months in Dresden. I translated some texts and marketing videos for an eco tech company at Dresden Environment Centre - a really fascinating experience. 


This new book from b small publishing, HOW DO BRIDGES WORK?, was originally written in Russian. Tell us about your connection to the Russian language.

I started learning Russian aged 16, when I was lucky enough to do Russian GCSE alongside my A levels. I fel in love and went on to study Russian and German language and literature at Oxford University, spending every summer in Moscow and St Petersburg, traipsing around the many wonderful writers' house museums. I associate Russia with music and singing with friends around the kitchen table. About 10 years ago I taught Russian A level at a local school and it was a delight to devise grammar activities based on classic Soviet rock songs! 


 HOW DO BRIDGES WORK? contains some quite technical language to do with architecture and engineering. How do you tackle this?

I have a background in literature and history, not science and technology, and yet over the years I have translated a few popular science books. Part of the essential toolkit of a translator is excellent research skills and also a reliable network of expert friends to ask about terms and concepts when in doubt! I also think self-doubt as an underlying principle is important in translation: you need the confidence to tackle texts that are sometimes out of your comfort zone, but the self-doubt to check and double check everything! One thing I love about translation is the excuse to read books and texts about a vast range of subjects. You never know what you're going to be asked to work on so the best preparation for a translation career is to read constantly and read widely. 


Do you do any preliminary work to find the voice of the original author or do you like to approach the text without preconceptions?

It depends on the text and the target readership, and where on the spectrum the book fits: should it be written in a neutral nonfiction style or a more chatty, personal style, for example? With this book, it was most important that the text was clear, concise and accessible to younger readers, so at times I need to restructure a sentence or a paragraph to express the same ideas in a way that would be clear to young English readers. 

As a fan of foreign languages, are you learning any new languages at the moment? What’s next?

To say I love exploring foreign languages is an understatement! I was 24 when I started learning Arabic, and for the first decade or so I had to focus on that alone - Arabic is many languages in one, after all, when you consider how much the spoken dialects vary. But in recent years I've allowed myself time to dabble in other languages again. I'm slowly working on my Norwegian on Duolingo, as we have family in Bergen; as I'm a linguist I fear they're expecting me to be fluent by our next visit! I got a bit distracted by Yiddish after watching Unorthodox on Netflix - I'm instantly gripped by a language that is similar to one I already know well, and Yiddish is very close to German. I have family links to Malta and I was astonished when I started listening to Maltese podcasts and realised I could understand a lot because it's very close to colloquial Arabic, particularly the Palestinian and Syrian dialects I'm most familiar with. 


Foreign languages don’t always have the most consistent spot on the Curriculum, particularly in primary schools. How would you encourage children to take an interest in foreign languages?

This is a particular passion of mine and I'm working with the Stephen Spender Trust to develop teaching resources for primary schools, exploring creative translation in the classroom. These activities give pupils the satisfaction of codebreaking and working out how to read a creative text in a language they have no experience of, and then translating it as they would approach any creative writing task: writing freely but with certain constraints. Pupils discover language skills they didn't realise they had and make discoveries about English at the same time. 

Another way young people can explore our multilingual planet is to get involved in #WorldKidLitMonth, which is happening now in September. On social media, this is an initiative aimed at encouraging kids and adults to read beyond our shores, and to explore children's and YA books in translation from other languages. There are heaps of resources on World Kid Lit blog, a website I co-edit, including reading lists and maps for different age groups, and you can search the site by language and by country. We aim to make it easier than ever before to pick a place in the world and fly there by book! 


Finally, now that many of us are having to work from home or in new conditions, tell us about your workspace!  

My workspace actually hasn't changed as I have a home office; what is new is having to share it with my husband! But as we've had the children home from school throughout lockdown, we've worked shifts and haven't been in there at the same time. From September we might have to get another chair but to be honest I'm not sure I'll be able to share with him - I think I talk to myself too much when I'm translating! I have to read texts aloud to hear how they sound and as I'm currently editing my translation of a novel I'm forever acting out scenes to check it all fits together. I think I may be banished to the living room! 

A huge thank you to Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp and to b small publishing for the opportunity.

Fighting the cause of lost words is a familiar effort in Wales where language itself is endangered. While both Welsh and English by today have equal status in the eyes of the law, over the past 150 years, we have seen the number of Welsh speakers decline from 90% of the population to only 19%. During the past sixty years or so, there have been many campaigns for the survival of Welsh, or Cymraeg as it is known in her own language. As well as official status, these campaigns have led to the restoration of original Welsh place names (and marking them with bilingual road signs), the right to be educated in Welsh and to have Welsh television and radio programmes. And things are certainly looking up, with the Welsh government recently setting itself the ambitious goal to double the number of Welsh speakers from half a million to a million by the year 2050.

This matters. Saving words and languages matters. It matters because they are more than just sounds. They are windows that enable us to see and understand the world about us. A bluebell and a dandelion may both be flowers, but without being called by their own names, they become somehow less visible, less important, more prone to be ignored ...  and eventually, more likely to vanish.

This is one of the reasons why I was so delighted to be asked to try to recast Rob Macfarlane’s spells into Welsh and project them against Jackie Morris’ extraordinarily beautiful artwork. Inspired by the original ideas, I took a deep breath and imagined my pencil into a magic wand. Together we were facing a task of great responsibility - to conjure the words of the world about us back from the brink of unbeing and place them in central sight!

Some of the challenges were obvious. If the way the three letters in the English ‘ivy’ grow to five in the Welsh ‘iorwg’ cause a conundrum, then what about how the four in ‘newt’ expand to ten over three words in ‘madfall y dŵr’?! Beyond their length, the names also sometimes focus on different characteristics. While the Welsh ‘clychau’r gog’ and the English ‘bluebell’ reveal the same ‘bell’/’cloch’ component, ‘blue’ is not reflected in the Welsh, but instead it recalls the ‘cuckoo’ that shares its May landscape. And if the regal status of ‘kingfisher’ is not evident in Welsh, here the colour blue, that’s missing from the bell flowers, is clear for, literally translated, this royal English fisherman is known in Welsh as ‘the blue of the water’s edge’.

As is the case in other languages such as French or German, in Welsh we have two ways of expressing knowing, enabling us to ‘know’ facts on the one hand, and places and people on the other in different ways. In our language we recognise that to know facts is somehow a more superficial undertaking than to know places and people; the former an act of mind and memory, the latter more an act of the heart and soul.

In working on these spell-songs, I have been allowed to meet the twenty words they conjure up and get to know what they represent beyond the mind and memory. They have become more than facts. They have become friends that need to be known by the heart and soul.

With the help of the craftsmanship and artistry of the design team at Graffeg, and the generous encouragement of Jackie and Rob, it has been a great joy to work on Geiriau Diflanedig. I can only hope that the readers will share some of this pleasure and that the Welsh version will play its part, along with its counterparts in the other languages, in calling back onto our tongues some endangered species of wondrous words.

To help ensure a copy of Geiriau Diflanedig reaches every primary school in Wales please visit: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/geiriau-diflanedig-for-primary-schools-in-wales

Geiriau Diflanedig published on 10 October 2019

Grateful thanks to Mererid Hopwood for writing this guest blog.