Dylan Mballa has written a Spanish language version with a beautiful cover that looks like a wine bottle label. It can be purchased here.
I would leave it a few days before purchasing your copy, as the final versions of the books have still to filter through: Amazon takes 3 days to verify a book before publication. I will amend this blog entry when the books are ready to go.
Both Lorenzo and Dylan are studying translation at the University of Toulon, and these books are the outcome of their 9 week academic internment projects with me acting as their supervisor. In fact it was a complete delight to supervise Dylan and Lorenzo, as they both worked hard and rose to the challenge of preserving the tone of the original English-language castle restoration blog articles that form the basis of the books.
I encouraged Lorenzo and Dylan to pick the blog articles that interested them the most, and suggested they might want to bring in editorial skills to change the content into a form more suitable for a book rather than a blog.
The positive result is that the two books are very different. There is content in the Spanish version that is not even present on the English blog that I provided to them privately from my "unpublished" cache, as the material is a little bit too racy! :-) Lorenzo, decided he wanted to work on the theme of "attractions in Scotland", so he translated a number of blog articles I wrote after a 2014 castle trip.
I tried to steer Lorenzo and Dylan to articles that had more of a literary content or told a complete emotional story, and this apparently is very different to the rather dry and technical content they are given in their translation classes. So I provided, say, 3 articles suggestions per week to given them the feel of genuine deadlines in a commercial environment and we would check up every Sunday evening on progress.
Lorenzo, Dylan and myself had a final project chat today, and they gave their internment presentations which were both excellent and interesting. They reported the highs and lows of working on the same task for 9 weeks: the isolation, the demoralisation and then the confidence that came as they made steady progress on a week-by-week basis. They wisely used their friends and family as sounding boards for their translations. As humans we need feedback.
The thing that made me most happy, was picking up that the project had been transformational for Dylan and Lorenzo, but in different and individual ways, and that the experience will inform their futures.
Of course, having 2 published books at the end of the day is brilliant, and at the start of the project it was far from clear that this "big ask" would be delivered. I was cheered by the fresh eyes and positive energy, they brought to a project that Angus Council is trying to destroy.
The French blog is here:
The Spanish blog is here:
https://tradulab.blogspot.com/
Well done to Lorenzo and Dylan!
And if you need a stocking-filler for your Francophone and Hispanophone friends...
No comments:
Post a Comment