Vuvuzela, an Afrikaans youth novel by South African author Engela van Rooyen, was published as a bilingual edition (in English and Polish). It was aimed at the Polish tourist market in the run-up to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, which was hosted in South Africa. I translated the story into English, while a team of co-translators took care of the Polish section of the book. You may well ask why this is showcased in the writing section, then.

It was only after I started translating that I realised this story was intrinsically bound to the South African context. For a Polish person who hadn’t lived in South Africa, the milieu would be about as foreign as snow to the inhabitants of the Kalahari Desert.

In order to keep the South African flavour while introducing it to the reader in such a manner that he or she could get a feel for the dynamics of our country, I wrote an introductory chapter and a glossary. I tried to keep as many original indigenous language terms and phrases as possible while attempting not to change the story into a choppy and fragmented piece of confusion. The glossary thus had to do more than just explain the meaning of foreign words. Instead, it provided the reader with small windows through which to look at the diversity of our rainbow nation. [Example…]