Bonsai Bumblings: Participated as Translator in the Asian Festival of Children's Content AFCC

Got an opportunity to participate as a translator in the Asian Festival of Children’s Content (AFCC), Build Your Book Hackathon 2023. The hackathon was organized by Pratham Books and the Singapore Book Council. The event happened on the 13^th and 14^th of May.

Pratham Books initially sent us guidelines and articles about translation. I was supposed to translate the children’s picture books in the hackathon into Tamil.

On the 13^th, the organizers, author-illustrators, and translators joined a Zoom Event. After introducing ourselves and talking about our favourite authors, the author-illustrators and translators went into separate online rooms to discuss their roles. Then the author-illustrators had to build their storyboards and the text of the story. The translators were asked to join again on the 14^th.

On the 14^th, we translated the stories. One translator each for Chinese, Malay, Vietnamese, Hindi, and Tamil participated. The MS Word manuscripts of the six stories by the author-illustrators were shared with us. And all the people involved could edit and review the documents.

We wrote the translation of each line of the picture book below the original language line. One original book was in Chinese. For the story Snooze, it was funny to invent sounds in Tamil made by sleeping animals. For the story Owen the Wise, it was a challenge to find a Tamil word for the term Ignorts (meaning ignorant people). For the story Father's Hobby, for some fruits, we retained the English names and for other fruits, we wrote the Tamil words. For the story Tara and the Magic Glass, we had to give a gender for the magic glass as the original story was written that way. I gave a male gender to the Magic Glass. We had to translate the blurbs also. After, we completed the translation, a reviewer in Pratham Books reviewed our documents.

I learned a lot from the review comments. While translating, at least in the first version, we tend to stay close to the original. This makes us bring in few literary or poetic words. The reviewer used simple words and did not use an exact match for the original words. The output was really lucid and good for children. I also made some changes based on suggestions from the reviewer.

The translators were asked to verify the final drafts of the picture books. After making a few suggestions, the translations were good to go online on the Storyweaver website.

Here are my verified/official translations in Tamil and the links to the picture books on the Pratham Books Storyweaver website.

1. https://storyweaver.org.in/stories/577822-puthisaali-owen