Twisted Tales
Shaping the language of a transmedia fairy-tale world
Twisted Tales is a children's transmedia ecosystem produced in Slovenia by the Institute for Transmedia Design, with a creative team drawn from more than a dozen countries. The project rewrites classic tales such as Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, The Three Little Pigs or Pocahontas through the lens of contemporary themes: identity, ecology, displacement, masculinity, bullying… Each tale then branches out into a book, an audio tale, an app, interactive theatre or classroom workshops.
The editorial process is demanding by accumulation. The texts start as English-language versions written by authors from a range of backgrounds, are then worked on in classrooms in countries as different as South Africa, India and across the Balkans, and finally evolve across different formats. By the time they reach Spanish, they carry three superimposed mental frameworks: that of the original folk tale, that of the international author who rewrote it, and that of the children around the world who reshape it in the classroom.
I have been working with the project since 2025. I have translated six tales, localised the project's website (editorial content and long-form educational articles) and contributed to its communication campaigns. I have held conversations on editorial judgement with the story design and brand strategy teams, and reviewed the work of external proofreaders hired by the client.
Linguistic decisions were often resolved in conversation with the team rather than through closed briefs. Much of the value lay in arguing for adaptation choices that affected tone, naming or cultural readability.
The layers each text carried called for a cultural-adaptation approach, with a deliberate distance from the English original.
Proper names absorbed much of that work. Srećka, the genie in Allen and the Magic Lamp, became Fortuna: in Serbo-Croatian the name evoked the idea of "the fortunate one", and the connotation was lost without a rewrite. Bibi the Beaver became Casti el Castor to preserve the euphony. In Meera of the Coral Sea I argued to keep all seven names of the sister queens against the temptation to simplify them: each one carried a personality trait and echoed the sea kingdom she ruled.
The variety chosen for the texts is peninsular Spanish, although some audio recordings are later narrated in Latin American varieties: writing stabilises the norm, while orality opens up the spectrum.
The collaboration also extended into brand and communications. I was consulted on the project's market positioning, contributed to shaping its branding strategy, and took part in strategic conversations that usually fall outside the remit of an external language consultant. In advertising, the tagline "Once upon a what if" had initially been proposed as "Érase una vez… ¿y si?"; I rewrote it as "Érase una vez… un poco distinta a la primera".
The educational articles called for a different register: a journalistic, accessible tone that steered clear of the academic. I kept that register in Spanish without flattening it into a functional neutrality that would have drained the texts of life.
The collaboration is ongoing, and the audio tales released so far have been produced from my translations. What began as a translation commission has grown into a stable consulting relationship: the project now has a single point of reference for its Spanish-speaking audiences. An augmented-reality exhibition, produced with Fab Lab Barcelona, is planned for December 2026 as part of the DAU festival, and I will be involved again.