Csilla Kleinheincz – #WITMonth

Hungarian is an unusual language. I gather that the closest thing to it is Finnish, and you should all know how weird that is. Like Finnish, it has no gendered pronouns. I look forward to seeing how both languages cope with Ancillary Justice.

I know of Csilla Kleinheincz because she was a finalist for the translation awards last year, for a story she had in the The Apex Book of World SF #2. I was also delighted to get to meet her at World Fantasy in Brighton (I think thanks to one of Charles Tan’s travel scholarships). You can find her online, though mostly not in English. I look forward to seeing more fiction from her soon.

2 thoughts on “Csilla Kleinheincz – #WITMonth

  1. It’s funny to find my name alongside Ancillary Justice because I was the lucky translator who had to tackle the problem. 🙂
    The non-gendered pronouns helped a lot as we are well used to having no default gender and don’t have to make a deliberate choice when using pronouns in our writings – thus our language is a bit closer to Radchaai, although I had to adjust the text more at the places where Breq uses direct references to gender. On the other hand, instead of gender-neutral nouns for ‘child’, ‘cousin’, ‘parent’ etc., I used the feminine versions to make up for what I lost with the gender-neutral translation of ‘she’. It’s possible to find a different solution but I wanted to keep the text flowing and natural while retaining the mentality behind using ‘she’ as the basic pronoun.
    I really enjoyed working on it, I wish all books I get for translation would be this good and challenging.

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