What do translators do?

Howard Curtis, winner of the Marsh award for children's literature in translation, explains that translation is about more than putting words from one language into another
Howard Curtis
Howard Curtis, winner of Marsh award for children's literature in translation. Photograph: Howard Curtis Howard Curtis/PR

What do translators do? Of course, they take words written in one language and put them into other words in another language, trying to give the same meaning. But it isn't always as simple as that. Languages work in different ways, we don't say things the same way in different languages.

Here's one example. In English, we only have one word for "you". But many languages have two words for "you", one that you use when you're being polite or formal with someone, and another when you're being friendly or informal. So you wouldn't use the same word for "you" when you're talking to a friend or a member of your family as you would with someone you're meeting for the first time.

What happens, then, if in a book a character switches from one form of "you" to the other, because he feels that another character is now his friend? How to translate that into English, how to get across that change in the relationship, when you only have one word for "you"? Obviously, you have to find other ways.

In the Sea there are Crocodiles, is the true story of a young Afghan boy who left his country and travelled across Iran, Turkey and Greece until he finally found refuge in Italy. There, he told his story to an Italian writer, who made it into a book. In translating the book, I had to remember that this was a story told aloud by someone talking about their real experiences, not a carefully written story in which every word had to sound perfect. In other words I had to find the boy's voice. And I think that's really what translators do: they find the voices of the characters in a book and get them across to the readers in a way that sounds completely natural.