Someone messaged me on LinkedIn today, asking about my PhD and wanting to know whether I was daunted at the prospect, which reminded me I’ve left that last post hanging a bit. So here goes…

In short, my PhD project is a feminist translation of Camila Valenzuela León’s YA novel, De bosque y cenizas, which I will produce through workshops with secondary school students, where we will revise and adapt my draft translations to produce a finished text that will cause its readers to critically engage with the issues it raises.

As I said before, my motivation to do this came from my master’s, and the work I had begun on establishing feminist translation strategies for children’s literature while translating another YA book by Camila. I have continued to work with Camila since finishing that project, and become more and more interested in what she and others in Chile are doing to change the way that children’s literature is perceived, taking it from something that is seen as having either pure entertainment or educational value, somehow lesser than books written for adults, to something that is recognised as literature in its own right.

There are a lot of brilliant books for children coming out of countries like Chile and Argentina at the moment, written in the aftermath of lengthy and brutal dictatorships. The books might not be about that per se, but there is a common theme of writers telling stories that encourage children towards civic engagement, that promote a “nunca más” (never again) ideal…

And there are a lot of fantastic books for adults from these countries that are being translated into English – many of them published by the brilliant Charco Press – but a lot of UK children’s publishers seem unwilling to take a chance on translating a book that is more than just a good story; there’s a reluctance to believe that children are capable of reading and appreciating literature that holds a subtext.

So my hope for this project is that I can not only establish some effective feminist translation strategies for children’s literature, which can be used by other translators in future, but also that I can help to further the work that Camila and her colleagues are doing, to get Chilean children’s literature recognised and read by children around the world.

Oh, and to answer Hilal’s question: yes, I’m terrified! But I really believe in this project, and I have a fantastic supervisory team behind me at UCC, who are giving me the support and encouragement I need to make this happen.