Aboli Chowdhary is a Spanish teacher and StoryWeaver Language Champion. She has translated over 30 books into Spanish. We reached out to her to come on board to build curated lists of Spanish resources that are particularly in need to keep children engaged, while they are away from school due to the ongoing pandemic. Aboli instantly agreed to help us.  Read this piece by Aboli, where she shares her thoughts on translation and her experience using StoryWeaver’s Translate tool.

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Hello, I am Aboli Chowdhary from Pune, India. I am a Spanish teacher and freelance Spanish translator. I love travelling. Although I was born and brought up in Mumbai, I got opportunities to live in cities like Bangalore and Vizag (Visakhapatnam). 

Do tell us  about your relationship with Spanish - what drew you to learning the language, and then teaching it?

My relationship with Spanish goes back to 2014, when I first started learning Spanish. I must mention here that it was by chance! After working in the demanding retail sector for a few years, I wanted to learn a new language, and Spanish seemed to be one of the languages of the future, considering there are almost 420 million Spanish speakers spread across 21 countries! After completing an advanced diploma in Spanish, I wanted to stay in touch with the language and practise it, so  I started teaching.

What is your experience of teaching children a foreign language and translating for children? 

It’s fun teaching any foreign language to children! They are curious to learn not only the language but also its culture. And that, in my opinion can be best explored through stories. 

One of the biggest challenges while translating a story is ‘keeping the soul of the story’ intact. One has to be very careful in choosing colloquial expressions, while at the same time promoting cultural exchange. 

When you have been given a picture book to translate, what is your process, and how long does it usually take? How was the experience of translating on StoryWeaver?

My experience with StoryWeaver has been wonderful thanks to the friendly interaction with its members and their prompt technical support. 

For translation, I generally re-read the story and try to understand its core values and message. The next step is to find the apt expression in Spanish and then translate. I found some of the stories like ‘Ammachi’s Amazing Machines’ challenging while translating the sound words into Spanish. But at the same time, while translating stories like, ‘The Rainbow Sambar’, I had to maintain the ‘Indian essence’ by using local language words with an explanation. 

Luckily, the time taken to translate the stories got reduced due to the available translation draft. I used this feature on the StoryWeaver platform for translating several stories and made the necessary changes to the words and expressions. 

How do you approach translating the storybooks across varying Reading Levels?

Reading levels are based on the exposure to the language, rather than just age of the reader. Keeping this in mind, I use simple and easy words with occasional sound words for the earlier levels. 

What are some of your favourite books from childhood? Is there any memorable reading experience that you would like to share?

I remember reading numerous ACK (Amar Chitra Katha) books in my childhood, especially on long train journeys! The language was simple with great illustrations!

We are so grateful for your contribution towards Spanish content on the platform, especially during these difficult times when there is such a need for children's reading material. Thank you for sharing the joy of reading in Spanish!

I believe that the potential of this platform is tremendous, especially since the COVID-19 outbreak. I strongly recommend reading books on this platform.I want to translate more stories into Spanish soon. So, ¡Nos vemos pronto! (See you soon!) :-)

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This year, we published a book called 'How Do Aeroplanes Fly?' on StoryWeaver in 10 languages. The book – written by Aditi Sarawagi and illustrated by Lavanya Karthik - was recently introduced to a group of children in Kota, Rajasthan, by a colleague during one of her field visits. One of the interesting observations she had made was that the children – both boys and girls – were struck by the mention of female pilots. “We didn't know that women could fly planes,” one of them had said to her. You can watch a related video here.

 

While I'm aware of disparities existing in every corner of India, this still took me by surprise. It also made me realize that all the thinking we do, as publishers, teachers and parents – which often feels like overthinking – is most definitely a good thing. Including a woman pilot and an Indian one at that had made a difference here, after all. 

Over the last couple of years, there has been a lot of conversation around the growing need for diverse and inclusive books. And what does diversity mean, you ask. I suppose it could mean a range of things: from gender and religion, to language and ethnicity. The website We Need Diverse Books has listed down their vision as “A world in which all children can see themselves in the pages of a book." In India, initiatives like @genderlogindia and BAM! Books have actively helped keep this conversation alive.

In 2012, a national consultation involving experts from institutions, authors, editors, publishers, librarians and educators was organized by National Book Trust. 'The Good Books Guide', the document that emerged from this gathering, speaks about diversity and inclusion in its section on values. “There is a need to realize that many groups – and their world-view and perspectives – are often ignored in children's literature. For instance, girls, tribal or dalit children, children with special needs, working children and those living in urban slums, don't get enough representation in mainstream literature.”

When I think about the first set of books that were published on StoryWeaver (released digitally first), a few titles come to mind. To be completely honest though, it feels odd to be calling these books diverse. Why should a boy cooking be thought of as diverse? Why should a book featuring a single-parent household be slotted as diverse? Just because there are characters from the North-East of India, should a book be treated as diverse? Children living near a garbage dump... diverse? 

Here's the thing though. There aren't enough children's books, especially in India, in which boys or men are shown to be cooking. Single-parent households in children's books? Hardly. Characters from the North-East? A handful. Well, you get the point. In a world in which children are surrounded with fear, prejudice and suspicion, these stories – which include multiple perspectives and help build empathy - become all the more important. Stories with diverse characters will help them realize that 'the other' – in any regard – is more like them than they had imagined. And that even if they weren't, these differences are to be celebrated.

If we want our children to be independent in their thinking, we certainly need to give them access to rich and eclectic narratives that not only only inspire curiosity, but also show rigid patterns being broken gracefully. In Ross Montgomery's recent article on 'Why Writing Diverse Children's Books is Tough', he addresses a lot of issues that well-meaning authors are likely to run into. After all, you don't want to include diverse characters in your book just for the sake of having diversity, do you? But as he points out, “We all have to strive to create well-rounded diverse characters and find new ways of writing. The fact that it’s hard isn’t a good enough excuse: we have to step away from the established paths and take more risks. Who knows - we might even find a better one.” 

 

And while you're (hopefully) contemplating these rather baffling questions, allow us to make suggestions of a few books that we consider diverse. Please add your book recommendations in the comments section below.

Favourites from StoryWeaver & Pratham Books

Please note that all these books are available in multiple languages.

1. Bonda and Devi
In this story of unlikely friendship, Devi – one of the protagonists – is physically challenged. Set in the future, we had to make the wheelchair kind of futuristic as well. Spot it?

2. Where Did Your Dimples Go?
Langlen's father is Tamil and mother is Manipuri. It was just before this story was illustrated that one of the contributors suggested that Langlen's (formerly known as Leela) mother be from the North-East region of India, since it is hugely under-represented in children's books. 

3. Dum Dum-a-Dum Biryani
Bored of seeing only women cooking in children's books? Finally, a boy who loves to cook! Meet Basha, who loves to hang around in the kitchen as his Ammi cooks all kinds of delicious dishes.

4. A Helping Hand
Told through a series of letters, this is a moving story of acceptance and blossoming friendship. 

5. Chuskit Goes to School  

Set in Ladakh, this is the story of Chuskit, a differently-abled girl who longed to go to school but was unable to because she could not walk. But after a nine-year wait, she is finally able to go to school!

6. Freedom Run
In many tiny villages in Uttar Pradesh, small children work long hours at the looms to create carpets famous around the world for their intricate designs. This is a story about the forgotten children of India.
7. Didi Ka Rang Biranga Khazaana
Living close to a garbage dump, these children run around garbage all day, without attending school. But then one day, Didi walks into the dump, changing their lives forever. Meet Didi and her young friends in this wonderful story that celebrates the joy of reading.
8. Adikhani series (a set of 10 bilingual books)
Drawing inspiration from the challenges facing tribal education, three organisations (Pratham Books, Ignus-ERG with the support of Bernard van Leer Foundation) held writing workshops with authors speaking Saura, Munda, Kui and Juanga languages to create picture books for early readers. These charming stories are drawn from the rich oral tradition of various tribal languages and the illustrations use tribal art with a contemporary twist. The script used in these books is Odia.

9. Chipko Takes Root

Dichi, a brave Bhotiya girl, takes part in the Chipko movement to save her beloved trees.

10. Manikantan Has Enough
Manikantan isn't pleased about having moved from his beautiful village to Smart City where his every move is being watched. But he did it for Amma, who is his mother and father and all the family he had in the world.

Favourites From Other Publishers
1. 'Bhimrao Ambedkar: The Boy Who Asked Why' by Sowmya Rajendran and Satwik Gade (Tulika)
2. 'The Princess with the Longest Hair' by Komilla Raote and Vandana Bist (Katha)
3. 'The Lonely King and Queen' by Deepa Balsavar (Tulika)
4. 'The Sackclothman' by Jayasree Kalathil (DC Books)
5. 'Dear Mrs. Naidu' by Mathangi Subramanian (Young Zubaan)
6. 'Simply Nanju' by Zainab Sulaiman (Duckbill Books)

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Jaya Bhattacharji Rose is an independent international publishing consultant based in New Delhi. Her blog has had over 4.6m visitors and continues to grow. Jaya has written columns for BusinessWorld and the Hindu and her articles, interviews, comments and book reviews have also appeared in Frontline, The Book Review, DNA, Outlook The Guardian, BBC Radio, Radio France and The Independent. She has also been a judge for the Crossword Awards for Children Literature. 

Q:  Some time back the Guardian ran a piece asking "Where are the new translated children's books?" Why do you think translation is a necessity, especially in children's book?

Translation is very important to make literature available in its amazing variety and diversity for children. Recently, I was chairing a panel discussion at the launch of the Scholastic India KFRR report. The school children on the panel were discussing animatedly how much they enjoyed reading Tintin, Asterix and even Gopi Gain Bagha Bain by Upendra Kishore Roychowdhury. Yet they did not know they were reading translated literature. But as KFRR says "more than three-quarters of children (77%) believe reading books for fun is extremely or very important." If that is the key then introducing children to translated literature will also make them hopefully sensitive as adults to other communities and cultures too.

Q: What are the biggest challenges for translators and translated works today?

I think the challenges vary from project to project and region to region. Having worked on such projects in the past I would say that it would be translating as accurately as possible in the destination language without losing the cultural connotation and relevance. It is not always easy to find the equivalent word for the language of origin into the language of destination. A good example of this is "Apple, Bear, Pear" by Emily Gravett is a lovely simple picture book that won the Kate Greenaway medal. Immediately there were translation offers. It is a play on English words using the comma as evident in the title but in a European translation  it became a lengthy line that even messed up the layout.

But much of this is going to change rapidly and will be reduced to mere academic discourse. If you have been monitoring the news recently you would have heard of Google's Neural Machine Translation ( GNMT). This technology is going to change the game of translations in publishing just as the recent announcement by Amazon India to launch Kindle in multiple Indian languages. Once technology comes into play and moves from being a culturally sophisticated skill to a functional skill the market will explode and new unforseen and unheard of challenges will emerge, most of which I hope will be moving in the positive direction.

As reported by technology blog Tech2:

"In September, Google switched from Phrase-Based Machine Translation (PBMT) to Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) for handling translations between Chinese and English. The Chinese and English language pair has historically been difficult for machines to translate, and Google managed to get its system close to human levels of translation by using bilingual people to train the system ... Google planned to add GNMT for all 103 languages in Google Translate. That would mean feeding in data for 103^2 language pairs, and the artificial intelligence would have to handle 10,609 models.

Google tackled this problem by allowing a single system to translate between multiple languages ... When the translation knowledge was shared, curious Google engineers checked if the A.I. could translate between language pairs it was not explicitly trained on before. This was the first time machine based translation has successfully translated sentences using knowledge gained from training to translate other languages."

In other words, Google Translate's A.I. actually created its own language, to enable it to better translate other languages.

Q. Following from the above question, while we do have stories being translated from English to other languages for children, is enough being done in reverse? How many original language books are being translated to English?

This really depends on the availability of funds and human resources (skilled translators,editors, designers, illustrators, production teams). English is a powerful language and has funds available since it is a language of social aspiration, legal engagement and finance. So it is relatively easier to make literature available from it for translation into other languages. It is certainly not easy to assess how many "original language books" are being translated into English. This kind of a database does not exist in India. Remember much of the literature published in India is self-published so details are not easily available.  

Q: While there are somewhere around six or seven thousand languages on Earth today, about half of them have fewer than about 3,000 speakers and experts have predicted that even in a conservative scenario, about half of today's languages will become extinct within the next fifty to one hundred years. What, in your opinion, does a death of a language imply?

The moment there are no more younger speakers left and no literature available in a language it is the death knell. Language is always living and evolving. No language cannot be allowed to die. And this is possible by according respect to one's language and culture by introducing children to these languages and scripts via books, storycards etc. The marvellous work you do with StoryWeaver is a brilliant start.

Q. There is a huge demand/need being expressed to learn English these days, often at the cost of one's own mother tongue. What will the effect of this be on multilingual publishing and what can be done as an antidote?  

As I mentioned in the previous answer, English is the language of commerce, legalese and finance. So it has a clout like no other language in today's world. The effect on multilingual publishing will that there will be minimal resources available and yet this very same diversity will be appreciated.  

Q.You once mentioned how few inclusive spaces there were for children's books... what does it mean for a space (digital or otherwise) to be inclusive ?  

To be 'truly' inclusive is once again challenging. Pratham Books is doing a very good job by being inclusive in terms of the number of languages you are creating books in, inclusive by keeping your books affordable and inclusive by  addressing different aspects. I’ve written about ‘Literature and Inclusiveness’ on my blog.  

Q. Tell us about your childhood reads?

Oh my goodness! This is tough. I read everything that came my way. My mother told us stories including of the books she was teaching. So we were introduced to Shakespeare when we were small. But then there was much, much more. As I grew older I inherited libraries. So childhood reads would include a lot of English literature.

Q: Looking back, what else would you wanted to read but couldn’t because of the language barrier?

I am not very sure since I only read English and Hindi. I cannot possibly regret not knowing languages. If a good translation exists so be it.

Thank you Jaya for taking the time to answer our questions. You can following Jaya on Twitter here.

Ps. StoryWeaver had a twitter chat with Jaya in early December about books, translations and reading. If you missed it, you can read all the tweets here.

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