It’s called Yildizfilosu, and it’s such a clever translation of the original English title: they managed to keep the pun! Let me explain …
Yildiz means star, which is also the elephant’s name (just like Stella in the original).
Fil means elephant.
And Yildiz Filosu means ‘star fleet’ – which is also the name of Yildiz’s aerospace company at the end of the book.
(Fun extra trivia – Yildiz Filosu is also the name for Star Trek in Turkey!).
Big thanks to İdil Koçak for the fantastic translation.
Yildizfilosu was published by the wonderful people at İthaki Çocuk. They did a great job on the cover, copying the style of the original title type (they even did the same spot varnish – if you’re not familiar, that’s the name for the shiny bits that sometimes gets added to book covers).
On a tangent – İthaki Çocuk have also published some of my Sally Tinker graphic novels in Turkish. So far they’ve done Brobot (Kardorobot) and Dungzilla (Devböcek), and Chickensaurus is on the way soon.
Back to the Turkish edition of Stellarphant – here are some internals. I love seeing how sound effects get translated into other languages!
There were also a few bits of text in the illustrations that needed translating. Luckily the publisher already had a font based on my handwriting that we’d used for my Sally Tinker graphic novels.
Buy a copy here:
James Foley 