Ö is for översättning,
which means translation and which I have totally missed in my T post.
But I was a translator before I became a children's literature
scholar, and it was translation that brought me to children's
literature. I started translating short texts for children from
Swedish, and interestingly enough, children's radio wanted fairy
tales, while a children's magazine I translated for wanted anything
but fairy tales (one of those weird pedagogical twists). And
large children's publishers didn't want anything from a beginning
translator. I always wanted to translate Astrid Lindgren, but
there was already a big fight over her when I joined the club. So my
only published book-length translations were not children's
literature. And yet my translation practice proved helpful when I did
translation studies, because if you don't know how translators work
you may sometimes pose very stupid questions about why translators
make seemingly inexplicable changes, and why two translations of the
same work look so different, and why a poor
translation is always longer than the original. By
the way, there is no such thing as ”untranslatable”. There
are just lazy or less talented translators. Try to translate my ABC
blog into your language or a language you know and see what you might
need to change. Warning: don't trust Google.
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