Life & Wisdom Quote by Cornelia Funke

There is a quiet power move hiding inside this matter-of-fact workflow. Funke isn’t describing a quaint authorly habit; she’s staking a claim over what globalization usually steals: control. Translation often gets treated as the necessary, invisible plumbing that lets a book travel. Funke flips that hierarchy. The English version isn’t a derivative product she vaguely blesses at the end. It’s an authored object she co-builds, down to the names - the most identity-loaded, culture-saturated words on the page.

Names are where translation stops being technical and becomes political. Do you preserve strangeness and risk alienating a new readership, or domesticate and risk flattening the world you built? By singling out names, Funke signals that her stories depend on texture: phonetics, mythology, humor, class markers, the tiny cues that tell you who a character is before they act. That’s why she “always” talks to her translator: she’s not just checking accuracy, she’s negotiating tone, resonance, and the ethics of adaptation.

The insistence on approval also reflects the modern author’s reality: English is the prize market that can redefine a career. Funke knows that an English translation can become the default version in global culture, influencing cover art, marketing, even future interpretations back in the source language. “I always have to approve it” reads less like vanity than self-defense - a boundary line drawn around authorship in an industry that often treats translation as both essential and disposable.