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Some have suggested that we translate our stories into multiple languages to expand our market.  This is a fantastic idea and we’d love to try, but we are wary of the perils of mistranslation.

As an opera singer, I do a lot of translation of song texts, and I know very well how easy it is to make a mistake.  Sometimes one letter is all the difference between what you mean to say, and a dirty word.  Other times, a colloquial phrase that is popular in the States might transform into a hideous insult in another culture.

Just for fun, we plugged a few of our books’ phrases into Translation Party, a fun site that will translate any given English phrase into Japanese, then back to English, then back to Japanese, etc. until the phrase reaches “Equilibrium” (meaning the software is finally able to accurately reproduce the exact same phrase in both languages).  The results are fun and exactly what we don’t want to happen when we finally do translate our books.

First, a line from “What Animal Are You?”:

Roar, you great lizard and stomp through the floor.

轟音は、大トカゲや床まで踏みつける。

Roar, to the floor and trample lizards.

轟音を踏みにじるトカゲは床としています。

Trample lizards are rumbling and the floor.

踏みにじるのトカゲと鳴る床があります。

Final: There are sound and floor-stomping lizards.

The next phrase from “If I Were Big” took a little longer to reach equilibrium:

She’d have long legs and go anywhere

彼女は長い足があるんだけど、どこにでも行く

She has long legs I have, go anywhere

彼女は、私の長い脚をしているどこにでも行く

She will go anywhere to have my long legs

彼女は私の長い脚をしている任意の場所に移動します

She will move to any location on my long legs and a

彼女は私の長い脚を任意の場所に移動すると

She moved to any location of my long legs

彼女が私の長い脚の任意の場所に移動

Her to move anywhere in my long legs

彼女のどこにでも私の長い脚に移動する

I long to move the legs of her everywhere

私は長い脚を動かすには彼女のどこ

I have to move to where her legs are long

私が彼女の足の長さを移動する必要があります

You must move the length of her legs I

あなたが彼女の足の長さを移動する必要があります私は

Final: I need to move the length of her legs

Ours were fun, but my favorite came from the lyrics to Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl”:

Start – Hey where did we go, days when the rains came, down in the hollow, playing a new game.

Final: Or here is a small hole in the rain, I, or, if necessary, you must create a new game.

…

when you find a lizard in your house. Last week I found a tiny lizard skittering up the wall next to the fireplace. Fortunately we were able to catch him in a paper cup before the cat had any idea of what was going on. I tried to take a picture of him, but it was dark outside and he was rather camera shy. I think he might have been a Mediterranean Gecko. It must be lizard-hatching season or something because another baby lizard had taken up residence in my fern for a while. He was a little less camera-shy:

Well, I’m just beginning work on a new book project, so I probably won’t be posting much by way of art for quite some time. I’ll give out more details about the book when I’m closer to finishing and when the title is finalized and such. In the meantime, here are a couple of illustrations I painted for Spider last year. The (true!) story was about some beavers that found a bag of stolen money and used it to construct their lodge. I was particularly pleased with the way the water turned out on the second piece:

By the way, if you happen to be in a bookstore check out the September issue of Highlights. I painted a rooster to accompany one of the articles!

A recent e-newsletter from Kane/Miller, the wonderful, small, independent publisher of books that (in their own words) “will make children say both ‘wow, that’s just like me’ and also ‘wow, that’s different’” has called my attention to a fascinating online photo gallery of images from the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio (Ten Speed Press, 2005). The book, “a unique photographic study of global nutrition” shows portraits of 30 families, in 24 countries, surrounded by a week’s worth of groceries:

On the banks of Mali’s Niger River, Soumana Natomo and his family gather for a communal dinner of millet porridge with tamarind juice… In the USA, the Ronayne-Caven family enjoys corndogs-on-a-stick with a tossed green salad.

Utterly insightful and educational, its potential for curriculum tie-ins is great: the rich photos and essays will help students compare, contrast, and make generalizations about our “hungry planet” when learning about world cultures, international economic and political conditions, the process of globalization, and more…