AUTHOR REVEALS JOY OVER WORKING ON KIDS’ CLASSIC
DAHL “You ignorant little slug!” the Trunchbull bellowed. “You witless weed!” “You stupid glob of glue!”
If Anne Donovan could turn back time and get the chance to meet Roald Dahl, she might be tempted to call him a “tattie-heidit torag”.
Anne is best known to school pupils as the writer of Scots language stories which form a vital part of the English National 5 curriculum.
But for the last six months, former teacher Anne has put aside her own writing to work instead on one of the best-loved novels of Dahl.
She was asked to translate Matilda into Scots – to help celebrate the book’s 30th anniversary.
And while she enjoyed every second of the challenging project, the bit she has loved best is translating Dahl’s vicious insults.
She said: “Roald Dahl wrote fantastic stories with wonderful characters, including many with a real darkness to them.
“I n Ma t i ld a , the character of school teacher Miss Trunchbul l is so horrible, so over the top, and she says things to her pupils that are just so incredibly awful.
“The or ig ina l insults are great but getting to translate them into their Scots equivalent was a lot of fun to do.
“There is something about Scots that makes it such an amazing language for insults – and there was certainly no shortage of insulting words I could have used.
“It was wonderful figuring out which ones were best to put in.”
Dahl’s classic tale tells the story of gifted Matilda Wormwood, who is treated badly by her parents and attends a school with Trunchbull as the evil head-teacher.
In 1996, it was made into a film – starring Danny DeVito and Mara Wilson – and has since become a hugely successful stage show. The original book sold more than 17million copies and had been printed in 49 languages when Anne was approached by publishers Itchy Coo and asked to make a Scots edition the landmark 50th translation.
She added: “To translate into Scots, you don’t just look up a Scots thesaurus.
“There can be so many di f ferent Scots alternative words out there, you really have to put a lot of thought into what works best.
“I like to hear how the words sound when I say them out loud – the Scots language is so vibrant.
“And you don’t just go through the book changing everything. It’s not like translating a book that was written in English into French.
“You have to get the balance r ight and not get too car r ied away.”
Itchy Coo, part of Black & White Publishing, have previously translated three other books by Roald Dahl into Scots – The Twits, which became The Eejits, George’s Marvellous Medicine, which became Geordie’s Ming in Medicine, and Fantastic Mr Fox, which became The Sleekitt Mr Tod.
Mat i lda is t he f irst novel Anne has translated and it has given her a new-found respect for translators of her work.
She said: “Matilda is more than 200 pages long so translating it was a full- on project – and by the end I was well and truly Matilda-ed. When I first started writing myself, I wrote in English. Then something clicked and I started writing in Scots and it felt right.”
She added: “I recent ly had a Russian translator get in touch with me, not asking anything about a Scots word I had used that perhaps he hadn’t understood but instead asking a cultural question about Partick Thistle Football Club.
“He wanted to know if they were the worst football team in Scotland. I did say ‘no’.
“I had mentioned them in my book, not in an important way but simply in discussion between some children who were having a joke and the interpreter was trying to work out how good a football team Partick Thistle were so he could swap in a Russian alternative.”