Emma Langley: All the better to translate you with...

Little Red Hood by Marjolaine Leray

Little Red Hood arrived on my desk about this time last year. From a scribbled mass of graffiti-esque red crayon and black ink, out walked the protagonist of our first picture book. Un petit chaperon rouge embodied exactly the kind of picture books we aim to publish:  innovative, humorous, clever and design-orientated; created by a young and supremely talented illustrator, it simply oozed style... And it was French.

A foreign rights acquisition is inevitably a different creative experience. It's a privilege to be granted the platform to publish a brilliant book in your own language. But could it work quite so well in English? Can a book ever really transcend its language of origin? We removed the French words from the pages and asked adults where they thought the book was from. 'It's not British.' was the standard response and, when pushed, 'probably European' with the most bookish guessing French. But to the children we showed the word-less pages to, this book was neither French nor English, it just was.  

This exercise was a useful step in writing a translation brief. The French text was tonally fairly neutral and did certainly not indicate one way of going. The illustrations, however, did. Marjolaine's art is stylistically at home on her native bookshelves but, to our British market, the illustrations were deemed unusually 'edgy'. As one Brick Lane-based designer put it, 'Little Red Riding Hood rocked up in Shoreditch'.  Our translation would need to reflect this accordingly. Who could cope with, much less achieve, those kinds of translation expectations? Answer: someone who can win prizes for translating Algerian French slang and lives among the slangsters of Brixton. Sarah Ardizzone was our obvious choice.

With only 60 words in the French text, Sarah on board and 'edgy' heading up the brief, it became evident very quickly that there were still so many directions this translation could take. We started canvassing  - young learners of French, local English classrooms, Sarah trialled the book on 120 Welsh school children as part of European Languages Day, French parents and their bilingual children were all roped in. We discovered that we didn't just have a great picture book on our hands; we had found a brilliant 'introduction to translation'.

Translating text is one thing, translating subtext, when by definition subtext is not defined, is quite another. We thought we had it sussed until we got to the last word in the book. We know she tricks the wolf into his demise, but did he choke or was he poisoned? Is she the savvy little scrawl who chances on the big bad wolf, or a wolf-exterminating villain with a whole range of weapons under that cloak? Did she mean to do it? 'Obviously!' said adults. 'No' said children, who proffered a whole range of alternative explanations not on our radar. Out of one word, in one of the most well-known stories ever told, we had a hundred subplots and a murder mystery of motive.

That question, wonderfully, ambiguously - deliberately - remains unsolved in English, we hope. Merci infiniment, Marjolaine, Sarah and Actes Sud. Let us look beyond our own borders more often.

Emma Langley, Phoenix Yard Books