Translating Wordless Picture Books

 

How difficult can translating a wordless book get? Wordless books do have a title and blurb, which we translate into different languages. Often this is taken up by our language editors themselves.

The book is entitled When the Sun Sets and has been written and illustrated by picture book maker Ogin Nayam. The magical wordless book recasts the sun as female and also retells a folk tale. Readers are invited into the sun’s home once she sets and the moon takes over sky duty. What does the sun do once home, the reader is encouraged to imagine. Plenty, it seems! Replete with familiar nature characters of the sun, moon, clouds, and rainbows, this picture book is whimsical, enchanting, and timeless. Set in the Northeast of India, When the Sun Sets is a powerful book that celebrates imagination and the relationships between the different natural elements. A nuanced reading offers a recasting of gender roles that are seen traditionally for the sun, a challenge that our translators took on with much gusto.

While translating this to other languages, we faced the challenge of popular narratives in those languages addressing the sun in masculine ways (or more gender neutral ways). To personify the sun, and to do it in a way that goes different from popular narratives was difficult.

We considered many ways out of this. For example, why not write a non-pronounced blurb. In a language like Tamil, while the word for Sun is Sooriyan – referring directly to the object. It has a -an suffix, which is commonly masculine. So while it doesn’t negate the story, we lose the aspect of female sun indirectly inside these words. We also discussed avoiding words with religious or cultural connotations. Finally we decided on using Sooriya thaai, which literally translates to Sun Mother in Tamil.

In Marathi folk tales, Sun is sometimes referred to as ‘Surya Devata’ . We could have used that and the content would have been intact. But to avoid any cultural and religious connotations, we came up with the word ‘Surya Maauli’ (Sun mother) which is apt and keeps the references of the original story intact. We could keep the title of the story gender neutral by using ‘Sunset’ (and nor Sun) as the subject word. 

In Hindi Sun is always referred to with masculine words and a lot of people know it as Surya Dev, but we didn’t want the religious context in the book. To avoid the masculine reading we changed surya to suryaa. Suryaa is the female version of surya in few texts. With this we tried to keep the original Arunachal Pradesh folktale in the centre for Hindi readers.

In Kannada, though we used the english headline as “Soorya Mulugidaaga” at first, we were a bit doubtful. As the name soorya suggests, the usage is masculine and given the story is rooted with female significance. We tried sooryavathi, which challenges the very notion of sun with a feminine suffix was a good alternative. But, we weren’t convinced as a whole, because there were spacing issues on design aspects and we again kept looking for a better alternative with rather small words. And, our reviewer Sarita who works as a Teacher in a Government Higher primary school rescued us.  When she was discussing this with her students, a girl in her class suggested “Why not use bhaanu?” Bhaanu is a common name which means sun and it is quite gender neutral. We were so in awe, as we heard of the word that it made us think “oh how simple and neat is that? Where was this word hidden from our mind?”