When Herta Müller won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, I jokingly asked her translator whether he felt just a little like he’d won too.

“No,” said Philip Boehm, who lives in University City. But hey, now he’s translating her Nobel acceptance speech, which Müller is scheduled to give in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec. 10. Müller was born and raised in Romania, but she is of German descent and writes in German. People who read the speech in English will read Boehm’s translation.

No hints forthcoming on what’s in the speech. But Boehm has also been asked to translate two more books by Müller, which will be published by Metropolitan Books. The books are “Everything I Possess, I Carry With Me” (scheduled for 2011) and “The Fox Was Always a Hunter” (2012). Only five of the writer’s 20 books are now available in English.

Boehm is disappointingly professional about not dishing anything about Müller’s speech. But he did email: “What’s fascinating to me is how much the book I’m just finishing  - Gregor von Rezzori’s “The Ermine of Czernopol” - bears on Herta Müller’s work. Focusing on the same corner of the world, he shows the ferment that preceded the cataclysm of the 1940s, while her work shows the aftermath of those upheavals.”