We have just published a Spanish edition of one of our books, and since we did the translation ourselves rather than handing it to someone else, we spent longer than expected inside decisions that we did not anticipate having to make.
Some of them are worth writing down, because they apply to anyone translating a picture book, and because a few of them surprised us.
Names are the hardest part and they come up first
In English the cat is called Bootsie, for the white markings on his feet. That is a name doing a small amount of descriptive work while sounding like a name a person would actually use.
Spanish has an obvious equivalent in Botitas, little boots, and we took it. But the obvious equivalent is not always available, and when it is not, you have to decide what the name was for.
The other animals made this concrete. A rabbit called Ears becomes Orejitas, which keeps the diminutive warmth. A squirrel called Whiskers becomes Bigotes, which in Spanish is a slightly funnier word than Whiskers is in English, and we decided that was a gain rather than a loss. A bird called Chirp becomes Pío, which is the standard Spanish rendering of the sound a bird makes, so the name went from being descriptive to being onomatopoeic. That is a real change, and we let it stand because a small child meeting the word Pío will hear the bird immediately.
A puppy named Cinnamon becomes Canela. That one is free.
The character who does not change is Nero, because he is already a name rather than a description, and because he appears elsewhere in our catalogue.
Sentence length is not preserved
Spanish runs longer than English. Estimates vary, but a Spanish text will typically expand somewhere between fifteen and twenty five per cent against its English source.
In a novel you absorb that silently. In a picture book, where the text sits on top of an illustration inside a defined area, it is a design problem. A line that occupied one comfortable row in English can become two, which pushes the text block down into part of the image you wanted visible.
We ended up shortening sentences in Spanish that were not too long in English, purely so the type would sit where it needed to sit. That feels like a compromise until you accept that a picture book text has always been shaped by the space it occupies, in every language.
Verb tense carries more weight
English picture books lean heavily on the simple past. He looked. He waited. He smiled.
Spanish gives you a choice between the preterite and the imperfect, and the choice is not cosmetic. The preterite gives you a completed action, the imperfect gives you a continuing state or a habit. So “Botitas waited” can become an action that finished or a condition he remained in, and those are different stories about the same cat.
We went with the preterite for the moments of action and kept the imperfect for the habitual scene setting, which is the conventional handling, but it required deciding on a case by case basis what kind of waiting was happening.
Read-aloud rhythm does not survive translation on its own
This was the one we underestimated.
A repeated refrain in English is chosen partly for how it sits in the mouth. Translate it accurately and you can end up with a phrase that means exactly the right thing and is awkward to say four times in a row. Stress patterns differ, syllable counts differ, and the little click of a well built refrain is easy to lose.
The fix is unglamorous. Read every repeated line aloud, in Spanish, several times over, and change it if it does not want to be said. Meaning is easier to preserve than rhythm, so rhythm is the thing to protect deliberately.
Who the Spanish edition is actually for
We assumed the answer was Spanish speaking families. It is broader than that.
A meaningful share of the interest we see comes from households where one parent speaks Spanish and one does not, and from families who are deliberately raising bilingual children without both parents being fluent. For those readers a picture book is a low stakes way into the language, because the pictures carry the meaning if the vocabulary does not.
Teachers and dual language classrooms are a third group, and they buy differently, usually in the autumn and usually in quantity.
If you are in any of those categories, we would genuinely like to hear what you look for in a Spanish edition. It is a harder question than it looks and we are still learning the answer.
El gato que trae amigos is our Spanish edition of Bootsie Brings Everyone Home, and it joins El Milagro del Gato Negro and Tufi: El Osito Musical in our Spanish list.
