shyamala's world

   P ublished by Puffin India, Tales from the Kathasaritsagara is a collection of nested stories from author and translator, Rohini Chowdhury. The lesser-known tales are a treat not just for kids but also adults. Rohini tells us more about this book of unique tales. How did you enter the world of translation? Growing up in the multilingual world that is India, translation was an inevitable and inextricable part of my life. We move effortlessly across languages, often without even realising that we are doing so. The UK – where I have now lived for the past 23 years – is, by contrast, a staunchly monolingual world. I realised very soon that my daughters would most likely grow up to be more comfortable in English than in any Indian language, and it became very important to me that they should be able to access and read the stories I grew up with – if not in the original language, then at least in English. And so I began translating, little storie...

  Suman Bajpai is a f reelance writer, journalist, editor, translator, storyteller,  and a travel writer. She has been translating children books for over twenty years.  Read on to know more about her world of books and translation. 1.      How did you enter the world of translation? Which languages do you translate? I really don’t remember exactly, how it happened, but after completing my journalism, as I was into writing already and writing for magazines and newspapers and was a talker at All India Radio, I did translate my first book on Rajiv Gandhi, in 1986. At that time there was no plan in my mind to get into this field. I happened to meet the then Editor of Children’ Book Trust in 1987, who gave me a book ‘ Indira Priyadarshini’ to translate and after some time, he also offered me a job for Sub-Editor there and after that, I had started translating books from English to Hindi to promote their Hindi programme. I trans...