Novel, memoir, children's book or manual: each wants a different route

A book is not measured for translation by its length but by what breaks in it when it changes language. In a novel the voice breaks, in a children's book the rhythm breaks, and in a professional book a term that should have stayed identical every time it appeared. So the same process does not suit the four common kinds of book.

The table below is the short version, and the explanation follows.

Kind of book	Riskiest thing to lose	What it mainly needs
Novel	Narrator's voice and dialogue	A human reading the text as text
Memoir	Personality and candour	A translator who understands the story, not just the words
Children's book	Rhythm, rhyme, line length	Writing again inside a constraint
Professional manual	Consistency of terms and accuracy	A terminology list and systematic checking

Novel

The problem with a novel is that you can translate it entirely correctly and end up with a dull book. Every sentence is accurate, and yet the characters all sound the same, the humour is gone, and the tension that was on page one is not there.

This happens especially in dialogue. People do not speak in complete sentences, and translation tends to "fix" them into something too tidy. We wrote about that in why dialogue sounds stiff in translation.

What it needs: somebody who reads the result like an ordinary reader and asks whether it sounds like a book. Not a check against the original — a reading.

Memoir

A memoir looks like plain text, which makes it tempting to treat it as non-fiction. That is a mistake.

The value of a memoir is that the reader feels a real person talking to them. That rests on small choices: a sentence that cuts off, an everyday word chosen instead of a dignified one, a repetition that reads like hesitation. A process that tidies and beautifies — and many translation processes do exactly that — erases precisely what makes the book yours.

What it needs: telling whoever translates, up front and explicitly, that the text should sound spoken rather than polished. How to phrase a request like that we covered in how to explain how your book should sound.

Children's book

This is the kind that misleads people most. The text is short, the words are simple, and it looks like two days of work.

In practice it is the hardest work of all. If the book rhymes, the rhyme does not carry across — somebody has to invent a new one that says roughly the same thing and fits the same picture. If the line has to sit under an illustration, it has a maximum length. And if a parent reads it aloud, the rhythm has to work in the mouth.

What it needs: treating it as rewriting rather than translating, and giving whoever does it freedom to change things.

Manual or professional book

Here things are actually simpler, and rightly so — this is the kind that tolerates an automated process with checking best of all.

The single danger is consistency. If a central term is translated three different ways across the book, the reader loses the thread, and that fault happens to human translators in a long book too.

What it needs: a short terminology list agreed before work starts. Twenty to fifty lines covers most books, and it is the cheapest thing you can do to improve the result.

How to decide in practice

Ask yourself one question: what does the reader lose if every sentence is correct but flat.

If the answer is "nothing, they came here to learn something", take an efficient route with checking. If the answer is "the entire reason I read the book", pay for a human eye that goes over the text as text.

The terms themselves are explained in a short glossary of translation methods, and the remaining common questions in our frequently asked questions.