Bell is perhaps best known for her adaptations of the French Asterix comics, in collaboration with her late co-translator Derek Hockridge
Bell is best known for her adaptations of the French Asterix comics. Pic/AFP
Award-winning translator Anthea Bell, who was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2010 and awarded Germany's Order of Merit in 2015 for her services to literature, has died on Wednesday at the age of 82, her son, Times columnist Oliver Kamm wrote on Twitter.
Bell is perhaps best known for her adaptations of the French Asterix comics, in collaboration with her late co-translator Derek Hockridge. Her work was acclaimed as it managed to transmit the spirit of the series renowned for its numerous puns.
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An obituary for Bell in The Guardian said, "Bell translated hundreds of books, from bestsellers such as Cornelia Funke's Inkheart series to ETA Hoffmann's 19th-century novel The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. The first book she ever worked on came to her by chance, when her then-husband, Antony Kamm, a publisher, was asked if he knew anyone who could translate the German writer Otfried Preussler's children's book The Little Water-Sprite. "It was my first translation and I did it with my first baby in a carrycot at my side," she'd told The Guardian."
The Guardian added, "She believed that translations should "read as if they were not only written but also thought in English", She said in 2004: "All my professional life, I have felt that translators are in the business of spinning an illusion – the illusion is that the reader is reading not a translation but the real thing."
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