An interesting question

[james_davis_nicoll]

Claire asked Ann Leckie:
Hello. I wondered if you were aware of the fact that in the french translation of Ancillary, Breq is male ?

Comments

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

I'm really sorry. Bad translators are amazingly bad. Didn't somebody (Bujold???) discover that the French translator had chosen to interpolate text from another place?

Good translators add notes at the front. This may be only an academic thing, but I've seen books' "Translator's Note" say things like "You can't really represent the difference between tu/vous in English, so I've used first name / last name to try to convey the difference" and "There's no good way to render [x] important word, so I've used this phrase:"

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

I have mostly had really positive experiences with translators. I didn't expect how much I would enjoy that, or that it would even be part of having a book published--the chance to talk to some of the translators has been awfully cool, and for the most part I trust they made the best choice for the language they're working in. Two out of two dozen isn't bad, considering.

Also, most of my contracts say specifically that text can't be interpolated from elsewhere! I wondered why that was ("really? why would anyone do that???") and I guess now I know!

[ian wright (from livejournal.com)]

I read a Tumblr exchange between Diane Duane and Peter Morwood where they were discussing a German (? I'm pretty sure it was a German publisher) who was earning a bit of extra money by inserting ads for canned soup into translated books. I would guess the No Interpolated Text clause is the result of that or similar incidents.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

It was Heyne, and the most famous example was in Pyramids by Terry Pratchett. And it wasn't just an advert on the page, it was sentences interpolated in several consecutive paragraphs about a character being hungry and making and eating the soup.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

I heard Terry tell that story.

I have the Heyne translation of Guards, Guards, but don't read German well enough to see if they did it in that one, too.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

I've heard about that happening with the German translation of John M. Ford's The Final Reflection. "Sometimes while rampaging around the galaxy, you just want to take a few minutes out to have a nice quiet cup of soup." Or words to that effect.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the German translator, who I met at Loncon, and got to talk to about the problems of translating AJ to German, did indeed include a forward talking about the problems and the choices he'd made. I am unsurprised, though, he struck me as a pretty smart and excellent person.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

There's a huge debate in manga translation about what to do with Japanese honorifics. The first name/last name thing doesn't work because that also conveys information. Translating them to Mr, Mrs. etc. works if all the characters are adults, but it comes across as weird in English if a teenager refers to a classmate as Miss Suzumiya. And leaving them out entirely erases nuance. The general consensus these days seems to be to leave honorifics untranslated as long as the story is set in Japan, but to translate or ignore them as seems appropriate when dealing with alternate and future settings or non-Japanese countries.