"I first fell in love with languages at 15. The idea that everything was a coded message just waiting to be unscrambled intrigued me. So, the natural next step was studying languages in more depth at university. I’d already studied German and French, but I wanted to learn Spanish too and thankfully the University of Sheffield offered an undergraduate course that allowed me to study three languages at once!
I especially loved my Year Abroad visiting and working in all three countries so that I could learn in a more practical way. The university course gave me a chance to look at all the ways I could use my languages, with the translation modules always being my favourite, so I progressed to a MA in Translation Studies, focussing on the German language.
In my dissertation, I was given free rein to study whatever I wanted and I found myself drawn to rhyming children’s books – my mum is a poet, so rhyme has always come naturally to me having grown up around verse. But as much as I wanted my dissertation to be centred on the translation of poetry, I also wanted it to be a career stepping stone. With that in mind, I decided to look for a newly published children’s book in the hope that the authors might be more receptive to working with me in translating and potentially publishing together later.
I fell in love with Zwuderich der Unkürzbare as soon as I saw it: its beautiful imagery, the natural flow of the rhyme and metre, and, most importantly, the main character Zwuderich. This little dwarf was the most challenging part of the translation, because I had to find a way to translate not only the authors’ words but also the character’s personality: the polite and self-conscious way he talks, as well as in the way the other characters address him. The authors Christina Tropper and Alexander Smutni-Tropper invented such ingenious words to capture this disdain for Zwuderich like ‘Zwuder-Ding‘ and ‘Zwuderling‘. This mix of half Zwuderich’s name and the diminutive suffixes don‘t even exist in German as a word or a rule, so it was particularly difficult to translate. In the end, I 'transcreated' the words ‘Dwimblybum‘ and ‘Dwimblypoo‘ by using suffixes based on toilet humour to appeal to the target audience, and by adding the ‘y‘ to Dwimble’s name to make him seem smaller, as the German suffix ‘ling‘ does.
Thanks to the expertise I gained from my Masters and my newfound confidence in my translating abilities, I have begun to build my own translation business, focussing on localisation and literary translation.
Christina Lucassi
MA Translation Studies (German), Commendation Stephen Spender 2021
The support I received with my dissertation was fantastic and I truly couldn’t have achieved what I did without my supervisor Henriette Louwerse. She inspired me to fully embrace the creativity of translation in a way that I always thought was against the rules! Her motivational words and kind guidance really helped me to mould Dwimble and create an academic piece that I was happy with, as well as a creative piece that I loved.
I was also very fortunate to have the support of the authors Christina Tropper and Alexander Smutni-Tropper who guided me with insights on how and why they had written their book so that I could try to capture this in my translation. Even before the commendation, they were kind enough to provide me with hints and tips, however the Stephen Spender recognition has truly solidified our working relationship. It has given them the confidence in me as a translator to move forward with searching for a publisher together, so Dwimble may well be coming to a shelf near you soon!
My advice to any other aspiring translators is to really focus on what your dissertation can do for you even after you leave university; if I hadn’t thought to look for a new book to translate, then Dwimble might have had the same fate as many translations that are only ever seen in an academic light! Once we have found a home for Dwimble, I will continue to look for more projects to translate. In the meantime, I’m enjoying doing freelance work in the localisation field – something I never would have known existed without the wide variety of modules at The University of Sheffield.
Thanks to the expertise I gained from my Masters and my newfound confidence in my translating abilities, I have begun to build my own translation business, focussing on localisation and literary translation. A big thank you to The University of Sheffield for giving me the necessary translation tools, and to the Stephen Spender Trust for giving me the confidence to put myself out there as a translator!"
