Tobias Buckell gets letters

[james_davis_nicoll]

[...] i will not read another of your books as I am finding it hard to read.
I speak English English as my first language and am not over keen on American writers as their language is different.

Comments

[rydra_wong]

See, I feel the most interesting section is the bit that follows, starting:

I am finding it hard to read this translation of your book

I wonder very much what language the writer thinks Buckell's books are translated from.

[spiralsheep]

It does make one wonder, but we could be charitable and assume the letter writer was thinking something along the lines of Harry Potter being "translated" from English English into USian English.

[(Anonymous)]

Links don't go anywhere. "Insert URL within quotes here" is apparently not a valid URL.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Everything depends on good cooperation between the author and the translator (or do you people spell it translatour?).

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

Very odd. Something blinkered there. Sounds like a load of codswallop.

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

How sad never to have read anything in Middle English or any of the English dialects because they're not modern English English. Poor Shakespeare to be so ignored by such an eloquent critic.... ;-)

[magedragonfire.livejournal.com]

One wonders what the letter-writer's thoughts on A Clockwork Orange are.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Feersum Enjinn

[magedragonfire.livejournal.com]

Iain Banks is Scottish; he probably doesn't count as writing English English.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Dear British child-lit authors who made me wonder for years what an electric torch looked like: as an American, I blame you for everything that's wrong with culture, which is everything, and I will never read you any more than the dozens of times I already have.

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

When this dust-bunnies-for-brains person complains about the poor translation, does he mean that the publisher should have changed all the allegedly American spellings and phraseology to "English English" ones? The only other explanation I can come up with for his gripes about the translation (instead of just saying "I don't like reading books that aren't written in British English") is that he's actually reading a version of the book that's literally been translated into a foreign language and blaming all the problems he's having following it on the original author instead of the unfamiliar-to-him foreign-language vocabulary.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a British author (who tries to write in American English because bigger market is where the money is) I get exactly the same kind of letter. And the same in reverse ("what is this electric torch your character is wielding?").

Telling them that re-editing and re-typesetting a book for two different barely divergent linguistic markets is expensive somehow doesn't usually go down well.

[casacorona.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know what this is! It's a letter from some guy who wants to work as a translator, and he's blindly sending these letters out to writers in hopes of catching someone.

He doesn't realize how poorly publishers pay for translations.