Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.
If a translation doesn't have obvious writing problems, it may seem quite all right at first glance. We readers, after all, quickly adapt to the style of a translator, stop noticing it, and get caught up in the story.
I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.
Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.
Sometimes it seems like there's more footnotes than text. This isn't something we're proud of, and over time we'd like to see our footnotes steadily shrink.
The writing I do makes great demands on translators.
When you start writing a picture book, you have to write a manuscript that has enough language to prompt the illustrator to get his or her gears running, but then you end up having to cut it out because you don't want any of the language to be redundant to the pictures that are being drawn.
I think my writing changed when I put 'the' in front of my titles. It had more command.
When you read something in script form, there are some subtleties that stand out with far greater gravitas than sometimes what you see on screen.
What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.
