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Comment by rvba | Hacker News Reader

In Polish there is this saying that "faithful translations are not beautiful and beautiful translations are not faithfull". The translator always adds a bit of own style.

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When I was young someone decided to publish Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in my native language, as a series of short books (i.e. not like a magazine at all). As this was a series, the publisher used a relatively small group of translators to translate all the issues.

After reading a number of the books I started to notice that I could easily tell who had done the translation, and it was at that point I started to get an aversion to reading translations. I didn't want to read the translator, I wanted to read the author. So I gradually started to switch to English originals (if the original was written in English). (And that, incidentally, is how I learned English.)

Where it becomes hard is non-English scifi. If you don't understand the language, do you pick the English or the native translation of for example Polish or Russian? Specially when those native translations are likely not too bad, albeit horribly expensive at this point.

Yes, that's a problem. I can read English as easily as my native language, but other languages like Spanish, German or Italian I can only read slowly - and if I read slowly I don't get "into" the story. So yes, I wish I could read other originals. I have read English translations of other languages (which is much easier to find than translations to my native language), and the feeling is that.. it's a translation. Most of what I read is by native English authors though.

Tove Jannson, the author of the Moomin stories, credited her English translator with improving the originals, because after the necessary dialogue about the true meaning of the text she had a better understanding of her own text and wanted that preserved in the Finnish.

She wrote in Swedish though, not Finnish.

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