Enter the World of Brian Andreas and the Story People

Lost in Translation

This year, the Story People added around 100 international galleries to its roster of 400 U.S. galleries that sell the whole line of Story People products. The global expansion also involved the translation of scores of Andreas’s stories into Swedish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese.

Andreas knows the sticky work of translation well. He is fluent in Italian and can read the Romance languages. He even penned a story that gets at the baffling inconsistencies between languages and thus, between people: "There are some days when no matter what I say it feels like I’m far away in another country & whoever is doing the translating has had far too much to drink."

The project opened up maddening translation issues. Case in point: there is no word in Swedish that captures the subtleties of "imagination" — no word that evokes the active reverie of imagining that the English word has.

"It won’t be the same story when we translate it," Andreas said. "It will be the perfect story for that language, a thing in itself."

Andreas worked individually with the translators and hired them based on whether they "got it" — what the stories are meant to do. But he did butt heads with some of the translators. The Spanish translator wanted to make the stories more formal, more literary for to write in the vernacular would be considered scandalous. It tends to devalue the writer, she said. He kept returning them to her, telling her, write as people speak. Exasperated, she finally threw the finished translations on the table in a huff, disgusted.

"We had to capture what it’s like to be human — not what it’s like to be a prize-winning author," Andreas said.

Something similar had happened once with the Story People blacksmith, who worked in the sculpture studio for several years creating handles for the company’s line of furniture. He would come in with these beautiful hand-forged handles, they were so perfect they looked like they were made by a machine.

"I said Andrew, these need to look more beaten up," Andreas said.
And he kept coming back. And they kept not being beat up enough. Finally the blacksmith came in, disgusted, and threw them on the table.
"They were wretched, with hammer markings and everything," Andreas said. "They were perfect."

There was even more at stake in entering a new market than language — the simplest questions of how people live, such as what size artwork Europeans put on their walls. Some Americanisms — Jello, for example — just didn’t translate. But going global seems the only possible step for the company, which regularly turns down new galleries so as not to create competition for established ones. It would be easy to read something larger into the expansion — a message of good will emanating from the heart of America.

"What I really want is world domination," Andreas said, lifting an eyebrow as if in a challenge.


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