Roberto Santiago’s series appeals to readers over its Football stories: Persian translator
TEHRAN –(Iranart)- Saeid Matin, the Persian translator of Spanish author Roberto Santiago’s “The Mystery of the Sleeping Referees”, has said that the series appeals to readers for its football-themed stories.
The book series has been released by Hoopa Publications in Tehran. Hoopa, is one of the major children’s books and board games publishers in Iran, and has acquired the copyrights to the books from the Spanish publisher.
“Communicating with the readers is quite challenging, and we should know that writing for children and young adults is not an easy task. Translation also helps readers become more familiar with new words and language,” Matin said in a session held at Hoopa’s Qaba Bookstore in Tehran on Sunday.
“Sometimes, people ask how the translators discover the needs of the readers in translating a text. I think translators should first find out more about their own childhood, while communications with new generations make it much more tangible,” he said.
“The people speaking the Spanish language have their own energetic literature with interesting narratives. The stories written based on myths and stories for children and young adults are very interesting, and Persian readers are not very familiar with them. This made the translation harder for me,” he said.
He further noted that the secret behind a good translation is first to be familiar with the subtleties of Persian literature and the concerns of children and adolescents.
“The book series ‘The Mystery of the Sleeping Referees’ is interesting for the readers because of their topic which is football. The first volume was warmly received in Spain and it still continues to be,” he concluded.
Santiago was born in Madrid in 1968. He studied image and sound at the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid and literary creation at the Madrid School of Writing.
He has worked as a TV screenwriter, an editor for Madrid advertising agencies and a video clip producer and has published several novels.
Among others, his collection Footballisms is a publishing phenomenon that has become one of the bestselling collections of children’s literature in Spain in recent years and has been translated into several languages.
His first novel, “The Lie Thief”, was a finalist for the Barco de Vapor Prize, and he won the Edebé Prize for Children’s Literature.
source: Tehran Times