Paddy Phillips is the 2016 Susanna Roth Award-winner from Great Britain. His translation can be read here.

Why did you decide to study Czech in the first place?
I was teaching English in Tokyo and after a year I decided I wanted to move somewhere different. I remembered that when I had done my teacher training course one of the other people in my class had gone to Brno so I thought I’d try Brno. There I met my future wife who was also a teacher of English. I really liked it there so I stayed for three years and that’s when I started learning Czech. But as I was teaching in the evening, I didn’t have time for Czech evening classes and so it wasn’t until I moved to the UK and got a job as an editor that I actually had time in the evenings and weekends.

So you actually started learning Czech once you got back to the UK?
Well not completely, I’d learnt the basics but not very systematically. Unfortunately there aren’t any language courses in Oxford, so I learnt Czech at home, talking to my in-laws and friends.

You recently completed an MA translation course specialising in Czech to English translation at Bristol University. What did that involve?
The course involved seven modules such as legal translation, essays, more commercial texts like tourism texts. I also did a module in subtitling which gives you a real appreciation of how difficult subtitling is as the translation is only one part of it, condensing and paraphrasing is the real art. We also leant how to use various computer assisted translating packages. There is also a lot of online discussion on forums, because there are dozens of students studying all over the world doing different languages. For my dissertation, rather than do a theoretical essay, I decided to do a translation of 10000 words of a book and also do an analysis of the translation. I picked six stories from a children’s book by Arnošt Goldflam called Tatínek není k zahození. One of the reasons why I picked it is because I wanted to make sure I had enough material for the analytical part of the dissertation and that book combines lots of different issues that we’d covered like dialects (one of the stories in set in Brno so there’s a lot of Brno dialect in it), there’s a lot of wordplay and humour and a bit of poetry, so it tested my skills in various different ways.

The extract for this year’s Susanna Roth Award was picked by the author herself, why do you think she chose this particular chapter?
As I understand it, one of the main aims of the competition is to showcase as-yet untranslated Czech novelists to potential foreign publishers. So I imagine Anna Bolavá chose this particular chapter because it works very well as a sample. It gives a good impression of what the book as a whole is like, and introduces the main characters and themes in a way that is full of suspense, so the reader is left wanting to know more.

What were the most challenging aspects of the translation?
Probably the hardest aspect was the need to make the text flow as smoothly in English as it does in Czech. My first draft came out sounding terrible, so I had to revise it again and again to try and eliminate the ‘translationese’.

The other aspect which I found particularly difficult was the plant names. I know nothing about botany, so I spent quite a lot of time researching medicinal plants to make sure I got the terminology right. For example, the species of Jitrocel (Plantago) described in the novel seems to be Jitrocel kopinatý (Plantago lanceolata), but that apparently has at least four or five possible common names in English, and I wasn’t sure which one was the most widely used in the UK. In the end I went with “plantain”, but even that was problematic, because I think for many English speakers the word plantain conjures up images of bananas, not medicinal plants. Eventually I decided to use it anyway, because I thought it was safe to assume that readers would realize Bolavá couldn’t be referring to tropical fruit.

Conversely, did you find any parts of the extract which lent themselves especially well to an English translation?
One thing that was a real blessing was the fact that the sentences in the novel are quite short and straightforward in structure, which in general makes them easier to translate. As well as that (and this might be another reason why Bolavá chose this particular chapter), the extract includes lots of action, conversation, and vivid description, rather than (for example) abstract discursive passages. I think that immediately makes it more accessible to a foreign reader. In terms of English specifically, I liked the fact that the name of the character “bláznivý Mácha” (page 104) translates as “mad Mácha”. I think that alliteration might be an example of how you can sometimes gain in translation, and not only lose.

Were there any interesting translation puzzles you had to overcome in the extract?
One problem was words which have no neat equivalent in English – for example “jídlonosič” and “ohniště”. Two other real headaches, near the beginning of the chapter, were “sesychací poměr” and “výkupní rozčarování”. But probably the most interesting examples were “jako když plivne čert” (p. 105) and “on nehodlal kousat do kyselých jablek” (p. 107). With the first one, I didn’t think the ‘spitting’ element would work in English, but I wanted to keep the image of the devil, so I used “like a devil’s pitchfork” instead. In the second example, the Czech seems to have a double-meaning: the narrator is talking about her father-in-law wanting to replace her family’s orchard with a house, and so the jablka / apples referred to are both literal and idiomatic. Luckily English has a similar idiom which also works here – grasp the nettle – so I was able to use that.

Do you think the text is understandable to anglophone readers? Or were there areas in the translation where you felt you needed to provide additional information for your audience?
The text is definitely understandable to anglophone readers, and there weren’t many terms in it which needed explaining. One which did (I felt) was the word “vila”. This is sometimes translated into English as just “villa”, but that wouldn’t have worked here, so I used “big posh house” instead.

One aspect of the book which I think might need explaining to an anglophone audience is the design of the narrator’s own house, which plays a central part in the novel. It seems to be a traditional South-Bohemian-style courtyard building, but the layout wasn’t entirely clear (at least not to me). I think foreign readers of the novel might find it useful to have a simple diagram showing what the floorplan of the house might look like.

Would you recommend the competition to other young translators? And do you have any advice for others interested in taking part in the competition?
Yes, of course. For anyone under 40 interested in translating from Czech, it’s the only competition around, so I would definitely recommend it. In terms of advice, it’s probably better to ask the judges! But I suppose two things that I learned from taking part are to make sure that you leave yourself enough time – it will take longer than you think – and to spend as much of that time as you can revising your text until it reads smoothly and naturally in English.

Last month you attended the annual Bohemistics Seminar in Moravia as part of your prize for winning the competition. What took place at the seminar? Were there any highlights for you?
The seminar / study tour was great. The highlight for me was meeting the other winners of the Susanna Roth competition, as well as the other participants (more than 50 translators and teachers of Czech from all over the world). The tour visited four places – Brno, Olomouc, Kunštát, and Lysice – and involved lectures and talks by leading Czech writers and academics. For me, the most enjoyable were the guided tour by Kateřina Tučková and the talk by Milan Uhde – they are both brilliant speakers. I also enjoyed the lectures on Czech literature by Professor Petr A. Bílek and Dr David Drozd. The other highlight for me was the visit to the chateau in Lysice, one of the nicest I’ve been to in the Czech Republic.

What are your plans for the future? Are there any books and authors you are interested in translating?
At the moment I’m working as a freelance translator and editor, and one of the things I like about it is the variety – you tend to be offered very different types of work. Recently, as well as business and academic texts, I’ve also translated a film script and a sample from a detective novel. You can’t always predict what kind of work is going to come along, but I’m happy to try most things – I’ve only been translating for two years, so I’d like to gain as much experience as I can. At the moment I’m also looking for an English-language publisher for the text I part-translated for my MA dissertation. It’s a great book, and I’d love to have the chance to translate the rest of it. Maybe one day!