Janet Shirley M.A.Oxon.

Translator of medieval and modern French
Member of the Translators' Association and of the Society of Authors.

email: janshirley@french-translator.co.uk

Welcome

I hope you find this site interesting. I've put it together so that you can see what sort of translating work I like doing, and if any of you can come up with interesting suggestions - or commissions! - for further work along the same sort of lines, so much the better. The originals of almost all the books referred to here were written at different times from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries and I have translated them as carefully as I can. They do not, repeat not, tell us what did actually happen at any given date, but they do tell us how those people saw themselves and their world, how they thought it was, how they wanted it to be. Truth, says Terry Pratchett, is the soap you can't get hold of in the bathwater of history. Add the scrubbing brush of translation and there's nothing much left but bubbles. Still, I really have tried. Check out some of the excerpts and see what you think.

My other interest is in writing fiction for children aged eight and upwards. Click on the Children’s Fiction button for more about this.