The Art And Business Of Literary Translation With Dani James

The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

Joanna Penn

Self-improvement, Arts, Books, Entrepreneurship, Business, Education

4.8 • 745 Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2025

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What happens when you fall in love with a book that deserves a wider audience but has never been translated into English? How do you navigate international copyright law, multiple publishers, and estate permissions when you have no translation experience? Dani James shares her journey from discovering a powerful Flemish memoir in her childhood home to becoming its first English translator, a labor of love that took years to complete.

In the intro, How to start dictating fiction [Helping Writers Become Authors]; Payment splitting with co-writers and collaborators [Draft2Digital]; Rise in spam and scam emails [Writer Beware]; The Thinking Game Documentary; My AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars; The Buried and the Drowned, A Short Story Collection; Writing Partition with Merryn Glover [Books and Travel].

Write and format stunning books with Atticus. Create professional print books and eBooks easily with the all-in-one book writing software. Try it out at Atticus.io

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Dani James is a writer and literary translator who recently translated Return to the Place I Never Left, a Holocaust survivor memoir by Tobias Schiff.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

* Growing up in Belgium's Jewish community and discovering Tobias Schiff's Holocaust memoir

* Navigating international rights and copyright law. The complex legal process of securing translation rights across borders.

* The creative challenges of literary translation. Balancing faithfulness to the original with making the English version the best it could be.

* The challenges of publishing

* Marketing a translated memoir. The realities of promoting a niche book as a first-time author.

* Lessons learned and what's next for both translation and original writing

You can find Dani at DaniJames.co.

Transcript of Interview with Dani James

Jo: Dani James is a writer and literary translator who recently translated ...

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Creative Pen podcast.
0:03.7	I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing craft and creative business.
0:14.7	You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots more at thecreativepen.com. And that's Pen with a
0:23.7	double N. And here's the show. Hello creatives. I'm Joanna Penn. And this is episode number
0:30.2	824 of the podcast. And it is Sunday the 17th of August 2025 as I record this.
0:45.7	In today's show, I'm talking to Danny James about the art and business of translating literary memoir.
0:49.0	And this is really a story about a labour of love.
0:54.7	When a Holocaust memoir resonated with Danny years ago back when she lived in Belgium,
0:58.4	she was determined to bring it to a wider audience in English.
1:00.9	But she had never translated a book.
1:04.7	And so began years of work, slowly translating it and then also navigating the complexities of rights licensing and then publishing.
1:10.6	And I think it's just a wonderful story of passion and art
1:14.0	and really gives an insight into the reasons why we work on these kinds of projects.
1:19.8	So that's coming up in the interview section.
1:25.4	In writing and publishing and book marketing things, well first, a really useful post about how to start dictating fiction on helping writers become authors, although of course it could be nonfiction as well.
1:37.5	Dictation is one of those things that can help with RSI and also more healthy writing and moving around more as you can dictate as you walk. And with
1:46.5	AI tools, it's getting better and better and easier to use than ever. So the article goes through
1:51.9	some myths, like it will make you faster. I've definitely never found it faster. It's not about
1:57.4	being faster. It's not a race. It's more about a different process and perhaps
2:02.3	this more healthy one. It does take some getting used to and you will pause to think a lot and
2:08.2	your draft will be messy and that's all right and it can be a great way to get your thoughts down
2:13.3	and you can organise them later. Now I've had lots of interviews on this show over the years about dictation.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Joanna Penn, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Joanna Penn and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.