A Winning Translation

The Marsh Award was established in 1996 to highlight the quality and raise the profile of children's literature in translation. Back then, books were eligible for entry if they had been published in the preceding six years, a reflection of the paucity of translated fiction for children in the UK at the time.

These days the situation is slightly brighter, and continues to improve, with the prize now given biennially and a greater number of books being submitted for each successive award.

The Flowing Queen is the first in a dark fantasy trilogy set in an alternate 19th century Venice, a world where mermaids with sharks' teeth live in the canals and stone lions patrol the streets and skies.

The last free city in the world, Venice is under siege by the evil Egyptian Empire. It's up to Merle, apprentice to a maker of magic mirrors, and her friends Junipa and Serafin, to save the city with the aid of the mysterious Flowing Queen.

The trilogy has sold a quarter of a million copies in Meyer's native country and has been translated into nearly 20 languages.

The trilogy has sold a quarter of a million copies in Meyer's native country and has been translated into nearly 20 languages. The author of more than 45 books, 25 of them for children, Meyer won the young people's category of Germany's prestigious Corine Prize for his novel Frostfire in 2005, following previous winners JK Rowling and Cornelia Funke.

Funke's success, particularly in the United States, paved the way for Meyer and other German authors. 'Suddenly publishers in New York or London, who usually don't have any German reading editors, were willing to pay extra money to have our books judged by freelancers,' he says.

'The Flowing Queen was offered to several US and UK publishing houses right after it became a success in Germany, and all of them declined because they couldn't read it and didn't care much for translated novels anyway.

' But when, shortly afterwards, The Thief Lord became a phenomenon in America, everything changed. The same publishers who didn't want to have a look at The Flowing Queen just a few months earlier suddenly became very interested.'

In addition to her translation work, Anthea Bell recommends German-language books to UK publishers. When she read The Flowing Queen, she knew she had come upon something special.

'I had just been reading one of the many, many bad fantasies I see trying to concoct a bestseller by combining ingredients from other people's successful books. The relief of coming upon a real narrative gift was enormous. I'm amazed to find how well Kai, who is so prolific, manages to tie up the ends of his multi-stranded plots.'

The UK title of the book is a direct translation from the German, but in America the novel is called The Water Mirror. 'I love the title The Flowing Queen,' says Meyer. 'But my US publisher, Simon & Schuster, explained to me that no American boy would pick up a book with the word "queen" in the title.

' I guess we can make of that what we want. The Water Mirror is a good title as well. Water Mirror might be an imaginary word in English, but in German we actually have that word: Wasserspiegel. It means the height of the water surface in rivers or lakes.'

One of the challenges for any translator is to capture the feel of the book in its original language while allowing its English voice to develop naturally. 'I think the right voice for a book always emerges while one is working on it, not through any pre-set decision - and it can change as work progresses, which is why I never like to deliver a translation in chunks,' says Bell.

'I wasn't asked to do that here, but it sometimes happens. The translator is always trying, for the time being, to turn into the author as far as possible, and echo the tone of the original.

'And I am always reading aloud in my head, to get the sound and cadence of a sentence right. I definitely go back - more than once! - to tweak and adjust, particularly in the earlier parts of a book.'

In addition to finding the right voice for the book, Bell had to deal with issues of grammar specific to German-language texts.

In addition to finding the right voice for the book, Bell had to deal with issues of grammar specific to German-language texts. 'In The Glass Word, the third in the trilogy, there was a small difficulty when Merle suddenly changes from the polite Sie pronoun for "you" to the familiar du pronoun for a character, to express a warmer relationship.

'Merle suddenly feels sorry for Professor Burbridge, alias Lord Light, who has been taken over by the forces of the Stone Light. He has been an ambiguous figure, and now Merle, who has discovered that he is in fact her paternal grandfather, sees him as a pathetic old man.

'Her softening towards him is expressed by the change of pronoun in German. With Kai's permission, I had her call him, just this once, "Grandfather" – it's not in the German, but I did want not to lose the effect of the familiar pronoun entirely.'

The translator used her ingenuity to come up appropriate English names for some of Meyer's characters, such as the mermaid who lives as a human, wearing a mask to hide her true identity.

In German, the mermaid's name is Unke, which means 'toad'. In the English translation, her name is Eft. 'Eft is the real form of “newt”, before it attracted the “n” from the article: “an eft”,' she explains.

Bell is a fan of Meyer's other work too. She has high praise for his forthcoming Pirate Trilogy, which she is in the midst of translating for Egmont, and hopes that further down the line his Cloud People series will also be published in the UK.

'The first in the Cloud People series is splendid stuff - China, 1760, plus an airborne island of solidified cloud driven by engines fixed there 250 years earlier by the Great Leonardo, and inhabited by the descendants of a bunch of Italian Renaissance characters. Lots of martial arts stuff, and some mysteriously disappeared dragons. I can't wait to read the second two volumes, and that's the acid test.'