Joanna Dare, Leicester, UK
J-E translator Susan Jones has recently translated the English in the nonalingual (nine language) picture book One Two Three! (Doshinsha, 2025) written and illustrated by Kanayo Sugiyama. With its brightly coloured illustrations and text in Japanese, Chinese, English, Korean, Nepali, Portuguese, Spanish, Filipino and Vietnamese, this book invites young readers to follow a cute yellow-dot character as it grows, bounces, stretches and even multiplies! Susan kindly agreed to talk about how this project came into being, and about the thorny translation challenges even a pint-sized text can present.
Joanna Dare: Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions today. When I first opened this book, it was like a little burst of sunshine on a grey British autumn day! I’d love to know more about how the project came about.
Susan Jones: It was through the network that is children’s literary translation. There aren’t many of us doing what we do, so we all know each other or know of each other. In this case, I was referred by another translator in the SCBWI Japan Translation Group who wasn’t able to take on the project due to other commitments. I’ve done some sample translations for publishers, but this is the first book that has my name on it and I’m very excited about that.
Joanna: Was it conceived as a multilingual project from the start?
Susan: Yes. Kanayo Sugiyama came up with the whole concept. Sugiyama-san is an author-illustrator who focuses on picture books for the youngest readers. For this project, she wanted to create a “barrier free” book that would be accessible to people in Japan who speak one of a wide range of languages, but not necessarily Japanese. Japan has historically been a monocultural society, but lately the number of cultures and languages represented is expanding. There are more bilingual kids raised by, for example, one Japanese parent and one from a different linguistic background. In immigrant families, the kids may speak Japanese at school and another language with their parents at home. For these children, this book is a way to bridge the gap between the kids and their parents or the kids and their friends. Kids of diverse backgrounds can enjoy it at the same time which is really nice. But the Japanese comes first, in a larger font than the other languages, because the target audience is in Japan.
The publisher also decided to include a hiragana pronunciation guide to all the languages at the back of the book and a link to a recording where you can hear the words spoken. Each translator provided the hiragana for the words in their language. I spent quite a lot of time on the pronunciation guide, because hiragana doesn’t always represent English sounds very well.
Joanna: Because it was conceived as a multilingual project, did all the translators work together from the start with the author-illustrator?
Susan: When I first started working on the book, Sugiyama-san had more or less finalised the text and had made rough sketches of the illustrations, so I had a pretty good idea what the final images were going to look like. But she didn’t ask the translators to be co-writers. It was very much her creation. My job as a translator was to try to bring the same feeling to the English as we get from the Japanese. So even though some of the translations aren’t direct translations, I wanted the child reader to enjoy the English version in the same way as the child reader in Japanese.
Joanna: Had Sugiyama-san already decided the layout of the text and how the different languages were going to be orientated on the page?
Susan: No, in fact I was worried about the length because I do some subtitle translation as well, where you have a limited amount of space for each subtitle. I asked at the beginning if there was a word limit for my translation and they said, no, we’ll make it work. I’m certainly not used to that!
Joanna: So, they gathered in all the different translations and then moved them around to make them fit?
Susan: Yes, like a puzzle! The typesetter did a great job. I love how the text on each page reflects the image.
Joanna: It’s beautifully done, isn’t it? And it must have been such a challenge!
Susan: I wish I could take credit for that, but it wasn’t me!
Joanna: Maybe the manga tradition in Japan means there is a sensibility around fitting text into limited spaces. But they’ve done such a good job—the text really complements the illustrations perfectly.
Susan: When a picture book is translated, there’s usually been no thought until that point about how it would work in other languages. It has to be re-typeset. Sometimes something that was one line in one language needs to be two lines in another language, and so they have to fiddle around with it. But with this book, since the concept was already there from the beginning, the illustrator left plenty of space – a whole page – for all of these languages that were going to appear, so it wasn’t like they had to find space – that was always part of the design.
Joanna: Why did Sugiyama-san decide the book should be translated into these particular eight languages?
Susan: She looked at which languages were cropping up in Japan due to immigration, and she also looked at which languages are most widely spoken in the world. That gave her Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, Portuguese and Nepali as commonly-used languages in Japan, and English and Spanish as languages spoken widely in the world. At a recent event which brought most of the translators together in Tokyo, she shared just how important it was for her to create a book that would help build bridges between children from different linguistic backgrounds.
Joanna: You mentioned you translated the pronunciation guide, but did you also translate the other surrounding texts, such as the explanation at the beginning about how to use the book?
Susan: Yes, that was me too. They asked each translator to do that after translating the main text, so I think they decided to add it—that wasn’t part of the original brief.
Joanna: Moving on to the translation challenges: there’s obviously a lot of onomatopoeia in the book. Japanese is very rich in onomatopoeia, but English is not so rich, so how did you tackle that?
Susan: The onomatopoeia was definitely the most difficult part. I actually retranslated the onomatopoeia quite a few times and asked various people how it sounded and if they had ever heard of words like “sproing”, for example! I had heard of it, but I was surprised that not many other people had. The Japanese しゅぽ (shupo) means “popping up” and everyone I asked thought I should use “pop”, but I’d used “pop” on another page, so I didn’t want to use it again. I came up with “sproing” instead, which is a cross between “spring” and “boing”. I really liked it and thought it was perfect for the image on that page. I think it’s fine to make up onomatopoeia, but I didn’t want to be too left-field in this book which is supposed to be very simple and approachable.
Joanna: Sproing is such a great word! Were there any other translation challenges?
Susan: I had a hard time with the last page and the phrase ぎゅっ！だいすき！ (Gyu! Daisuki!). Both of those words are difficult. だいすき (daisuki) means “I love you” in Japanese. There’s a more formal way to say it, 愛してる (aishiteru), which nobody uses. Between parents and children, no one would say 愛してる (aishiteru), they would say だいすき (daisuki). It’s a little bit more casual, so I didn’t put in “I love you”, I put in “love you”, which is more how an English-speaking parent would speak to a child and much warmer in tone. The ぎゅっ (gyu) is also really difficult because it’s a mimetic word for something English doesn’t have an equivalent for. It means “hug tight” and I think that’s what I put in at first. And then I had “squeeeeze, squeeeeze”. I also tried making up my own onomatopoeia, “mmmph”, but too many people told me they didn’t know what that meant! I tried several different things, but I finally ended up with “big hug!” because I thought about what we would actually say in that situation. It took me a while to get there, though. That was one of the most difficult parts.
The other onomatopoeia I changed to a non-onomatopoeia was ぼん (bon) in ぼん！大きくなった。(Bon! Ōkikunatta.) I considered words like “bam” or “bang” since they start with a “b” and the character suddenly gets big on that page, but both of these words reminded me of an explosion. And, again, I wanted to make sure it was a word that would actually be used by children. So I changed it to “Wow! So big!” since that is the feeling of surprise and excitement someone might feel in that situation. And I chose “so big” for both economy of space and a grammatical pattern often used by young children—and then I repeated that pattern on the other pages, too. (“So big”, “So high”, “So long”, etc.)
Joanna: You said you had to make a few passes at the translation—how long did it take in total?
Susan: I would translate the whole thing and then put it down and come back to it a few days later. I think I did it all in about a month, coming back to it again and again, running it by different people, including bilingual family members and other translators. I wish I could have taken my translation to SCBWI’s Creative Exchange to get feedback from other translators and illustrators, but the timing didn’t work out.
When I’m translating picture books, I normally like to cut out my translations and tape them onto the page with washi tape and then flip the pages. Because that’s the only way I can really feel if the text is working with the illustration. I only had a PDF of this book, so I pasted my translations virtually onto that, but it wasn’t the same as turning physical pages.
Before the book was published I had the opportunity to see it all laid out and make any last-minute changes; I think I made one small change at that stage.
Joanna: So, it really was a process of going back and trying things out. Even though the book is deceptively simple, you put a lot of work into getting that “just-right” word.
Susan: Yes, exactly.
Joanna: I’ve come to the end of the questions I prepared, so I just wanted to finish by asking: is there anything I haven’t asked, anything about the project you’d like to talk about?
Susan: Just that I really support the idea of this book. Having a book which can be enjoyed by kids from diverse backgrounds all at the same time is a beautiful thing. My impression is that bilingual books generally don’t sell very well, but when you have a book like this with nine languages it’s a real invitation to connection and I love that. I love the concept of this book. I can’t take credit for the idea, but I’m so grateful I could be a very small part of it. And it’s been nice to think back on the process of translating it during this interview.
Joanna: Thank you so much, it’s been absolutely fascinating to hear about this project. Talking to you has made me realise short, simple-at-first-glance texts can contain plenty of translation challenges.
Joanna Dare is a Japanese-to-English literary translator, librarian and educator based in Leicester, UK. In 2020 she was runner up in the 4th JLPP International Translation Competition organized by the Japanese government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs.
SCBWI Japan Translation Group 
