The aim was to avoid a catastrophic leak.

“Working in a bunker for a month and a half is a very unusual experience.” “You need people who are psychologically strong,” says Delporte. Delporte, who had been hired by the French publishing house JC Lattès, worked with Dominique Defert, with whom she had already translated other bestsellers including Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. While some agile translators worked individually, most tackled the 3,000 manuscript pages in pairs. Despite being a basement, Delporte remembers it as comfortable, with two big windows providing some natural light and, in an Olympic Games-like gesture (that does feature in Roinsard’s film), a little flag on each desk indicating the various languages involved: Spanish, Italian, French, German, Portuguese and Catalan. Instead, it was a large conference room, equipped with a coffee machine, fridge, microwave and a printer. Unlike in Roinsard’s film, the “bunker” was not a luxurious doomsday shelter. Photograph: Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images

‘We were under time pressure, and we had to do a top class job’ … Oscar Niemeyer’s Mondadori building in Segrate, outside Milan, where Inferno was translated. You mustn’t forget that it will be read by millions of people.” “We were under time pressure, and we had to do a top-class job. “It was a bit like working in a crisis unit,” says Delporte. Since 1975, the company has been housed in an iconic building designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer: a concrete structure made up of a series of sculptural arches and black tinted windows that emerges from a 20,000-sq-metre lake. The secretive location that Delporte found herself in was the headquarters of Gruppo Mondadori, Italy’s largest publishing house. In reality, the 11 translators in the Milanese bunker had just one job: translate Inferno, and guarantee the simultaneous publication of the novel worldwide. In Roinsard’s film, 10 pages of the novel (retitled Dedalus) are leaked and the translators are put up against the clock to find the source.

Coming out 10 years after Brown’s The Da Vinci Code became one of the bestselling books of all time, Inferno followed Langdon, the Harvard professor of “symbology” who decodes intricate religious mysteries to stop catastrophic events – in this case a lethal pandemic.īut it is the extraordinary experience of Brown’s translators that has now inspired a film: Les Traducteurs, by French director Régis Roinsard.

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