Category: translations

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translations

Joshua Files in French and German

A very happy day for me, to see my book in the French (Operation Joshua: Dossier Confidential – La Prophetie Maya) and German (Geheimakte Joshua: Die Unsichtbare Stadt) editions.

I like the French title very much although they have missed out on the Calvino reference. Aha, you may come to regret that come Joshua 3, mes cheres amis.

I know I have gone on and on about the pyramid point-of-sales materials but LOOK! It’s so pretty!

There are bookmarks and posters too.

I can give away one poster and some bookmarks, if anyone wants to play another quiz.

OR…you could just promise to write a review of ICE SHOCK on Amazon when it comes out. Doesn’t have to be long. And please – only if you like the book! I’m not nearly famous or well-liked enough to be able to afford bad reviews there…

Joshua Files has now sold in 14 languages: French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Japanese, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish, Greek, Indonesian, Vietnamese.

I have to say that just seeing it in three languages is blowing my mind quite a bit. Fourteen is just…BOGGLE.

Well done to the translators, Frank Boehmert (Deutsch), Amelie Sam (Francais), Ivan Stefanek (Slovak). I have been looking through Frank’s version and marvelling at how some things translate. In fact I think my very rusty German would benefit enormously from reading it.

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ice shock raves translations

A Joshua-themed writing competition for schools

Very happy today for several reasons.

One is that Scholastic have launched a writing competition for schools, in the magazine Junior Education Plus.

On the website and in the magazine you’ll find the first 600 words of a short story – written by me.

To enter the contest, you then write the ending of the story – in 200 words.

The winner gets a signed copy of INVISIBLE CITY (or I guess you could ask for ICE SHOCK if the winner has it already), plus £150 of books for their school.

The story is brilliantly illustrated by Dave Neale and the online interactive version includes turning pages and cool sound effects!

The story is called ‘Stars Fell On Campeche’ and features Josh when he was younger, playing football at some ancient Mayan ruins where his father worked. It was originally one of four prologues I wrote for the opening of INVISIBLE CITY. (In the end we went with the newspaper article about the strange incident at the museum…) 

And the other reason I’m happy is that the German (Frank Boehmert) and Slovakian (Ivan Stefanek) translators of Joshua are reading ICE SHOCK now, getting ready to translate it. Frank even blogged about ICE SHOCK (vielen Dank, Frank!).

Still reading the brilliant “Black Swan” book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I wrote him a fan email yesterday and he replied right away! (I told him that one day, a character in Joshua will quote him…he wrote back that he’s very intrigued…)

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getting published Joshua Files translations

Coolness from Dressler – get ready for ‘Geheimakte Joshua’

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I’ve been waiting with great excitement to let you all see the coolness that is in store from the German publisher of “Joshua Files” – Cecile Dressler Verlag.

Number one is this awesome Webplayer for “Geheimakte Joshua“. Btw the German title is actually cooler than the English one – because ‘Geheimakte’ translates as ‘secret files’ not just ‘files’. Oooh, mysterious – good choice, Frank! See the advantages of a fusional language?

The ‘Geheimakte Joshua’ webplayer features an interview with me – dubbed by me auf Deutsch (someone else translated the words), a sample chapter and a terrific little book trailer. I show this to kids when I do book visits – they love it!

The second thing is a lovely little online tool you can use to customise a bookmark of ‘Geheimakte Joshua’ and print it out!

gj-bookmark-small.JPGHere’s a bookmark I made earlier – with a little message from me and the Ek Naab hieroglyph stamp.

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Finally, if you are seriously keen – the Dressler autumn 2008 catalogue, Joshua themed and with four pages devoted to our little book.

Crumbs I’m excited.

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getting published Joshua Files translations

Very Cool Things to promote “The Joshua Files”

Today I’m especially excited because a) I’ve seen photos of the AWESOME point-of-sales materials that are going to be used to sell ‘Geheimakte Joshua: Die Unsichtbare Stadt’ in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and b) the lovely publicity department at Scholastic have been working with me to develop some fact cards to play a Joshua-themed game at events on my upcoming book tour. They are fab!

So without further ado, here they are…
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If you know anyone who runs a bookstore in a German-speaking country, they can order these from the publisher (Dressler):

http://meta.verlagsgruppe-oetinger.de/index.php?id=3391 (scroll down to Geheimakte Joshua)

Also – very exciting – here’s an excerpt of Frank Böhmert’s translation of Joshua Files.

And below is an example of the Tyler fact card. Aintitcool?
josh-fact-card-front.JPGjosh-fact-card-tyler.JPG

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Joshua Files readers translations videos

Geheimakte Joshua: Joshua Files in German!

Yay, I’m very excited indeed that a German language version of Invisible City will be published this autumn in Germany.

Firstly, I have always suspected that Germans might enjoy Joshua’s adventures slightly more than British. Not to say that I’m not getting lovely feedback from British readers!

But there’s no doubt that many Germans seem to share my fascination with exotic adventure stories, going all the way back to that famous adventure writer, Karl May. And when I’ve visited the ruins in Mexico I’ve hardly ever met any British people, but mainly Germans and French. (And other North Americans of course).

If you follow this blog you may have seen that the German translator of Joshua Files, Frank Boehmert, occasionally posts a comment. (Hi Frank!).

Well all today I’ve been working with a translation of the brief video interview I recorded in the offices of Scholastic. I’ve dubbed myself into German and recut the video…I’m sending this to the media company in Germany who are going to add graphics etc to produce a book trailer for the German book trade. (Hence the long bit of title page at the end).

Here it is. What do you think? I have another day to improve it, if it’s really too bad…