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Post by Peek on Aug 31, 2009 15:44:41 GMT
I've recently been reading the Wallander books by the Swedish writer Henning Mankell , and wondered how the translations in foreign books varied. I currently have 2 copies of books printed around the time of the Wallander series last year ,plus another book from a more recent print, and all 3 have different translators, I've read 1 and am over halfway through another.
Whilst I imagine they all get the substance of the story down correctly, I just wonder how the everyday slang and general talk amongst characters etc is changed depending on the translator.
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Post by tigerlily on Aug 31, 2009 18:53:49 GMT
Good question, Peek.
I bought quite a few books in German when I started learning it again; I hoped I would be confident enough to read Inkheart in the original German before too long but am still a little hesitant and keep second-guessing myself, so bought it in English a couple of days ago.
The problem with any language is that translating it exactly often renders it somewhat meaningless, or rather, some things can't be translated directly. Aphorisms are a good case in point. In Germany one cannot get blood from a turnip, rather than out of a stone, and the morning hours have gold in their mouth as opposed to the early bird catching the worm. Certain words also have more than one meaning, and the exact meaning depends on the context which is not always as obvious as you might imagine.
I was pretty pleased to find that I'd got the gist of the couple of pages I'd spent hours working on...I keep stopping to grab the dictionary and look up words I'm unsure of and sometimes lose all sense of what a particular sentence or paragraph is about because I have to look up several of the words and hunt down verb roots.
Most authors have their own 'voice' that they write in; a really good translation retains as much of that as possible. I can spot places where the translation is more literal than actual to a degree, but not all of them by any means, and it isn't enough to spoil the flow of the story.
I guess the only answer to your question is to learn Swedish!
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Post by Peek on Aug 31, 2009 18:57:21 GMT
I may have to learn Swedish at some point as most of the interviews that BwO have are in Swedish....trouble is it all sounds like scribble !
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Post by Glen B Ogle on Sept 6, 2009 19:07:44 GMT
I sometimes have the same problem with British versions of American books! I find myself looking for color, faucet and the like to see if they've been "translated" or not.
Glen
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