h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I tend to order new Pratchett books from the kidby shop because they are all signed and I kind of like that. I also have a lot of paperbacks and still don't have the whole collection. Additionally some of my books are in German and I should rather get the English version because Pratchett in German is just not the same. But when I started reading them my English wasn't as good as it is now and it seemed too much effort to read them in a foreign language.

I'd have imagined Pratchett would translate particularly badly.

FB

The names must be even harder to translate well than those in the Harry Potter books.

I think I read a couple of pages of a Discworld book in German once. It's not Discworld.

I just think so much of what is good about TPs stuff is the way it is written (rather than what he is writing about). Lots of word play and linguistic in jokes.

I'm sure stuff like that can be translated, but I'd imagine not with anything like 100% fidelity.

FB

Yes, many jokes don't work in a different language and they also tend to mess up the names of the characters completely.

The first Pratchett book that I finished reading was "Good Omens." The first Discworld book I finished was "Making Money," as it was the only one that was shelved with regular fiction rather than with Fantasy/ Science Fiction. Then I went backwards and read "Going Postal." After that, I decided to read the whole Discworld series from beginning to end. I'm about halfway through it now. Currently, I'm in the middle of "Feet of Clay." The scroll in the head of every golem seems suspiciously like the computer program in the head of a robot. A coincidence? I think not!

Not sure whether it needs saying but the scroll factor
is indeed part of the historic golem myth.

from wikipedia:
"During the Middle Ages, passages from the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation) were studied as a means to attain the mystical ability to create and animate a golem, although there is little in the writings of Jewish mysticism that supports this belief. It was believed that golems could be activated by an ecstatic experience induced by the ritualistic use of various letters of the Hebrew Alphabet[1] forming a "shem" (any one of the Names of God). The shem was written on a piece of paper and inserted either in the mouth or in the forehead of the golem, thus bringing it into life and action."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem

That entry also notes Terry Pratchett as a modern source:
"The novels of Terry Pratchett in the fictional setting of Discworld also include several golems as characters. For example, they are a plot device in the 1996 novel Feet of Clay, in which the golems create their own golem. The golems of Discworld are also much more intelligent than most representations; though still bound to obedience, if they feel they are mistreated they will take an obstructively literal interpretation of their orders as a form of rebellion."

Some detail of the scrolls are explored in the 1966 film "It" starring Roddy MacDowall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It!_(1966_film)


~jwf~

Um, I was looking at the ways in which Pratchett makes his characters and situations into satirical commentaries on our own world. There's a definite sense in which workers in Ankh-Morpork resent golems because they thinki holems are taking jobs away from them, just as robots were taking jobs away from people in our own world during the time when Pratchett was developing Discworld.

Indeed. The deeper history of the medieval golem myth
goes back to even earlier automotons envisaged by the
Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians. The remains of ancient
clockworks and steam powered mechanisms that can be found
hidden deep and unexplained in many museums of archeology
haunt the modern mind which generally remains reluctant to
accept that the Industrial Revolution was nothing more than
a final realisation of many ancient dreams.

In a way, these antique fantasies are at the heart of the
mindless machine versus sensitive humanity debate. Imagine
an Archimedean clockwork operating a perfect classic body
of polished marble.


~jwf~

Speaking of which...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFrjrgBV8K0

I, for one, welcome our robot overlords.

I've never read Pratchett in German since I prefer to read things in their original version where I can. But I got Wyrd Sisters for Gruesome #1 at a flohmarkt recently (she isn't fussy about which language she reads in and for some reason I seem to have lost my English versin) I'll have a look to see what I think.

(I have read a bit of Tolkien in German, just to see, but it's not right)

The ones that translate worst are probably the Feegle books.

(I read LOTR in German when I was 13 and I must say the older translation is in fact really good (as far as translations go) but they in my opinion completely messed up the new one)

It's interesting that the translations of books can change over time.

I suppose this is something that I don't really understand, being a monoglot, but I can't help but feel that a translation should stay a translation? I can understand that language changes over time, but unlike with films, they don't rewrite books time and again for a more modern audience. Except the Bible maybe, that's been re-translated a few times.

oh there are lots of reasons. The standard translation of War and Peace, when I was a teenager and doing all the Russian stuff, was by Constance Garnett. It was fine, really. Thousands of us read it.

But there is a more recent translation which is said to be so much better because the tone of the language has been "corrected". The soldiers talk like soldiers, the officers like officers and the ladies like the well brung up ladies they were etc etc. (which is more like the original text) I think if I read that one now I'd probably much prefer it to the old one.

I agree, there are a lot of differnces between translations. When you read translations of a series of books you can even sometimes spot when they used a different translator for one of them or you see the translations changing in later novels or something like that. You can even say that the books of some writers get better translators than the books of others.

The main reason for this is (I think) that you have to translate by meaning and not by word very often. In different languages words are used in different ways and according to the situation the meaning of a word can change but it doesn't usually change in the same way in all languages. So the translator has to always understand the meaning of a sentence or paragraph and translate the meaning and not strictly the words.

Often the translation is even completely different because things are just nottranslateable.

There's one example that I can think of from LOTR:
Right at the start Sam is listening to a conversation between Frodo and Gandalf and he is cought and is asked something like 'Are you eavesdropping?' and Sam answers 'There are no eaves at Bagsend.'
So how do you translate that? In German the word for 'eavesdropping' and the word for 'eaves' are not in the slightest way similar. The German translation (At least the old one, no idea about the new) has something to do with deer and makes you go 'huh?' when you read it.

Especially in the Discworld novels many jokes just never can be translated. This starts with the names. You can translate Magrat Garlick, but you can't translate Rob Anybody. Rob Irgendwer.

Just curious, how well does Foul Ole Ron translate? "Buggrit, millenium hand and shrimp" is surely about as sensical in German as in English.

Um... hm... it sounds strange in German but I think it sounds strange in English too. They basically translated it word by word.

I've seen a joke about Shakespeare being translated into English. Don Quixote is famously hard to translate. If you translated the Rabelaisian stories about the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel, would you want to depict them in 15th or 16 century language, or in 21st century language? Would modern readers even get the social satire based on Renaissance viewpoints on life?

I have occasionally watched Shakespeare in different languages. German, Russian and Korean, to be specific. I can speak German and I spent a long time learning Russian so those two aren't odd to me (even though I understood barely 1 word of the Russian) but Korean? Crazy language at the best of times. But I am familiar with how it sounds, so I'm used to the patterns and rhythm of modern spoken Korean. Which meant that I could tell that A Midsummer Night's Dream sounded fairly poetic.

I haven't reported on my reading since April 7th, when I was reading "Feet of Clay." Since then, I've finished the following:

Hogwatch
Jingo
The last Continent
Carpe Jugulum
Fifth Elephant.

I've started reading "The Truth."

The cleverest plot twist was the one in "Carpe Jugulum." Granny Weatherwax is the best!

There have been some scary characters -- Teatime and Wolfgang in particular.