Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts (2011)

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144 pointstosh84 comments

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I remember that dumb ad. I think that was the moment when I finally decided to read his books in his original English instead. (It helped that at this time my English got good enough that I could read whole novels complete with puns and obscure references.)

> when I finally decided to read his books in his original English instead.

Good for you.

Sooo much is lost in the translations of Pratchett to other (even linguistically close) languages.

I mean, the translator try their best to carry the word plays or funny anglo-centric cultural references over, bu very rarely succeed in matching the wit and timing of the original English.

French is one of the most famous translation and is known to be excellent. I can confirm although I never read it in English (I'm not good enough, especially regarding cultural references).

Yeah, I've read all of Pratchett in English, and read one or two in German and French.

The French version, much effort went into it, and it is very good indeed, but nowhere near the original.

Some attempts at translating Pratchett's humor fall rather flat or completely miss the point of the original puns.

If you want a really good translation of something: the Dutch translation of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien himself praised it[0]. Max Schuchart rewrote a lot of things completely to get the exact same vibe across to Dutch people that English-speakers would get from reading the English versions.

It depends less on puns, though. Those are always hard to translate. The Dutch translation (the one book I've read the translation of) Terry Pratchett is okay, but not brilliant.

[0] Edit: I thought Tolkien praised it. I'm sure I read that somewhere ages ago. Wikipedia tells a different story: that Tolkien hated it. Personally I think it's genius that names with a clear English vibe (like many hobbit names) get translated to names with a similarly Dutch vibe. Schuchart did not mess with the Elvish or other other languages as far as I know.

There was a translation that caused Tolkien to write a guide to translating the Lord of the Rings - it’s worth reading to get a feel for what he wanted.

Of course Tolkien was a linguist so he could understand translation difficulties even in languages he didn’t speak. He went so far as to add fictional translation difficulties to his own story.

Tolkien was initially critical of the Dutch translation of LOTR, complaining that many of the nonclemature were too localized to his original liking[0].

That said, from what I understand, Tolkien would later change his mind after the original Swedish translator took even more liberties, which provoked him enough to write an official translation style guide, and in retrospective light apparently the Dutch translation would mostly end up conforming to those guidelines.

The entire thing is pretty curious given the fact that if you want to get down to it, the framing devices of Lord of the Rings is that it is an alledged translation of a book called "The Red Book of Westmarch". Tolkien himself took liberties with this supposed translation, which is why many of the place names have some form of "common" English name, to make them more palatable to English readers. It's pretty interesting to see him then take offense at other translations.

[0]: As someone who fell in love with Tolkien's work from the Dutch translation - eh, it's fine? Most stuff is fairly faithfully and accurately translated. The main issue is that the translator was an even bigger fan of purple prose than Tolkien and occasionally used German roots for certain words. Most of the literal translations used are translated to what amounts to kinda formal, stiff Dutch but others flow fairly well. The biggest difference is probably the title which is something closer to "In the grasp of the Ring", which... might be more accurate to describe the events of the book. It's hardly about the Lord of the Rings himself after all.

"In de Ban van de Ring" has roughly the same rhythm as "The Lord of the Rings" (triplets). "De Heer der Ringen", while a more literal translation, has a different feel to me. But maybe that's because I'm too use to the original translation.

I agree with you; I think it's because of 2 things.

1. De Heer der Ringen sounds very formal. It's because of both the choice of "Heer", which is a literal translation of Lord but is more commonly used to describe an old, respectable man. (The connecting word of "der" only adds to it, given "der" isn't often used nowadays.)

2. "In de ban van X" also nicely doubles as a Dutch saying; being in de ban of something means being enthralled by it. Which fits well with the overall motive of temptations that the ring provokes in those around it.

I have read both English and French versions of most Diskworld books. It is the best translation I have read, ever. Patrick Couton is outstanding. He carries all the charm and wit across languages, but is never a slave of Pratchett’s words and does not hesitate to adapt what needs to be. His French puns are glorious. Guet des orfèvres for Pseudopolis Yard is absolute genius, and so are many others. They always land well and are never jarring, and I find some of them better than the original. The Ch’ti that the wee free men speak is great. He managed to reproduce the difference in tone of the book series as well. Including the footnotes, which is most impressive.

TL; DR: if there is one good translation, it has to be this one. If you read it in French, you are not losing much over the English original.

I'm probably biased, but I also think the Russian translation was very well done for most of the books. I read many of Pratchett's works in Russian before English, and I found that the translations were rather faithful in keeping with Pratchett's humour.

How do the weemens way of talking come across in translation

The translators pick a fitting dialect of the target language, I think.

In French it's largely based on picard, a dialect from northern France.

https://youtu.be/W17uYuQA9Mc?si=3Ndlen5P2ZqeyZdn&t=52 Oh Its perfect.

The one series whose translations are very good is the series Asterix and Obelisk. The original is in French. I believe that most of the translations are good. Certainly the English one is.

the translator (anthea bell) has also done a brilliant translation of leonie swann's "three bags full", a hilarious novel in which a flock of sheep try to figure out who murdered their shepherd. (at least, i assume it's a brilliant translation because the novel is both charming and funny in english.)

Absolutely. I've read a few of the Asterix books in French, and a couple in Latin (my native language is English); they were originally written in French, of course. Just one example: in English, Obelix's dog is Dogmatix; the French version is Idée-Fixe. Brilliant!

That last one is weird in that while it conveys the same information of being stubborn, Dogmatix makes more sense in terms of humor because the point of Asterix is that the characters were supposed to have names that look vaguely like real Gaulish names like Vercingetorix; Dogmatix fits the mold better than Idée-Fixe. I know it isn't the case, but if I had to guess without knowing which was the original, I would have guessed Dogmatix.

The French name is pronounced something like `eeday-fix', so even though the dog doesn't look Gaulish, he sounds Gaulish.

Another of my faves in English Asterix is a Goth; all their names end in -ic. This one is named Electric. In a fit of enthusiasm about being a war leader, he says. `I shall be a general, General Electric!'

Much is lost (and I learned this painfully reading the translation along with the annotations in APF), but also a lot is added by the translator. The translators had a lot of freedom – with Pterry's blessing – and some of them put it to good use. I love the Polish translation by Piotr Cholewa.

> (It helped that at this time my English got good enough that I could read whole novels complete with puns and obscure references.)

It's been almost a decade since I started watching movies/tv shows, and playing games with original audio (usually english or japanese) and english subtitles instead of my native language, to help improve my english. But I to this day, every time I rewatch the movie Airplane, there are new jokes I hadn't understood before. It's one's of the reason I like to rewatch it every couple of years, the other being that it's my favorite comedy movie.

Sometimes it is the core language and sometimes it is the jargon on top. After watching Apocalypse Now many times I recently found out that in Kilgore's "Outstanding Red Team, outstanding..." , red team is an actual thing in Air Cavalry .

Even as a native English speaker, I'll occasionally re-read a Pratchett book and realize there was a minor reference or pun that I probably missed the last time.

Another pretty consumer-hostile thing German publishers sometimes do is to split books into multiple parts in the German version. This does have a legitimate reason in some cases as the German version will be longer and you can hit some limits on book size with already large books. But I've also seen it in cases where it was clearly artificial. And it results in essentially 2-3x the price for the same book, because of course each German book part costs around the same as the original full book.

French publishers do (or did at one point anyway) the same thing. For instance the first section of realm of the elderlings (3 trilogies, so 9 volumes) was published as 19 volumes.

And for some reason a few years later they republished it in only 7, which is just as insane (they literally cut in the middle of the 5th volume).

Really shows how much these industries respect the actual art involved.

There was (still is?) a French law that mandates the maximum sales price for soft-cover/paperback books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law (if you can read it, the French version of that wikipedia article is much more detailed). The intent behind the law being to attempt to keep "culture" accessible to all incomes, notably by preventing resellers from price-gouging books at the expense of the publisher(s).

This has resulted in many larger tomes being split up when translated to French - for example, the first 5 (English/Original) volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire are sold as 15 (translated to French) books in total : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Tr%C3%B4ne_de_fer#Publicati...

I am also very disappointed at how often French publishers seem to decide that they can chop up these stories willy-nilly without it degrading the quality of the art (re-)productions that they are selling us.

The price is fixed by the editor, there is no state mandated price.

The purpose of the law is to have the same price for a book in every bookshop (with a 5% discount possible). This was supposed to help small booksellers, who could not compete against big corporations. And it kinda worked, as there are more than 3500 independent bookshops in the country.

The split up is not linked to the uniform price, I think it's more a cultural thing.

no the french law is to protect publishers and libraries by setting a minimum price for books :(

and now they've updated it to say you can't offer delivery for less than 3 euros...

In Bosnia in the 80s, I read this novel which was amazing but confusing.

Decade later, I learned it was the middle third of the Original dune novel, starting literally in the middle of Harkonnen attack, as they ponder the ancient cannons without any mention of shields etc.

It was quite the trip :-)

I don't think it was hostile though. I think it had to do with this one guy / club doing the translating and needing both time to do the work, and money from first part to live through / finance the next part. I could be wrong, I was 10 at the time...

I read the third book of the Zelazny's Amber series before I read the second, back when the series was new. I didn't do it on purpose, but I wasn't careful to avoid the risk either.

That was the first time in my life I read three novels the same day. It was 2 days before qualifying exams for my PhD. 1 day beforehand I was going to cram, but the day before that I wanted to clear my brain.

First time I read The Lord of the Rings, I was 12 or so, my dad was reading The Two Towers, my older brother was reading The Fellowship of the Ring, so I decided I should just start reading The Return of the King.

So my first memories of LotR are Pippin riding Shadowfax behind Gandalf.

When my dad finished book 2, I dropped book 3 and switched, and then to book 1 when my brother finished the first book, so that was a bit of a fragmented experience.

Maybe there's also a lesson here to read books with your kids, or at least where they can see you read. It's contagious.

My dad ended up buying the famous pirate Ace version of the Fellowship of the Ring - and it had absolutely no indication it was the first part of a combined trilogy so he thought it has a VERY abrupt weird ending until he later learned there were other volumes.

My dad had all three, my mom had only the first (of the same edition), so we had two copies of Fellowship at home. I guess I should have started in the other copy, except when I started we were on vacation and we didn't bring the duplicate Fellowship with us.

And the last volume consists entirely of verbs ...

Do you have an example?

I'm aware of books, which come in three volumes and this seems completely unnecessary. Subutex by Virginie Despentes comes to mind but that was already in the original.

I'm not aware of a German trilogy, which wasn't a trilogy in its original edition.

Thus, genuinly curious.

They did this with the "Song of Ice and Fire" (i.e. Game of Thrones) books for example. If you look at the translations here:

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?4543

You will see two titles for German, French, Italian for each one title in English but only one each in Spanish and Russian. In the former cases, the story was split into two books with different titles.

Thanks!

My wife tells me that Russian publishers sometimes just translated a whole series...and then kept "translating" books that didn't exist. She only found that out after coming to America, trying to read the originals, and finding that what she thought of as the books at the end of various series often didn't EXIST in the original.

Loved this part: """They did it to Iain Banks, too, and apparently at a con he tore out the offending page and ate it."""

And both men are sadly no longer with us. Coincidence, hmm?

Death smiles at us all... or not so much smiles but looks at us with a frozen grin while he hums a little tune.

and sometimes he pets his horse Binky

I would like to read more about that incident - which book was it!? - but I can find no other reference, alas.

I saw this type of ad only once, in an old Bruce Sterling novel. I found it funny (it referenced the story in a clever way) and thought it was some new innovative approach to advertising which hadn't caught on. I didn't knew this was actually an old thing for Heyne.

Yeah, in the ones I've read the characters themselves are eating the soup and commenting on how good it is! It's funny, but I can well see how an author might not be amused by advertisers putting words in their characters' mouths.

It also makes more sense for some novels than others. For a cyberpunk novel this example of unchecked capitalism would fit right in.

In "Moving Pictures" Dibbler tried to do just that with... well.. moving pictures. Only it was not a 5-min soup but Harga Ribs. I think even phrasing was the same "why not try..." "...nuorishing..."

Moving Pictures came out in 1990, and this only came to a head in 1994, so _probably_ a coincidence.

i’m amazed that Terry didnt insert this into one of his Moist von Lipwig stories, seems like a very Moist thing to do

Don't you dare to delete the ad with a black marker, because doing so it is clearly unethical, just like those internet ads.

I know what you mean, as long as you paid for it nobody has the right to tell you that getting rid of ads in a book or webpage is wrong.

I'm surprised nobody seems to have caught on to the obvious sarcasm in your comment

This explains the naff "Captain Crunch" section of Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon". Not that you can get it where I live; it would have made sense to do a "Weetabix" section with the same theme.

I figured that was a homage to https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/capn-crunch-whistle

It absolutely was

It's funny, I know exactly what passage you mean and even though it's been many years since I read Cryptonomicon it's one of two specific passages I vividly remember reading and enjoying. This is even though I've never had Captain Crunch in my life.

(The other passage was the one about one of the characters using a computer while in prison and setting up a profusion of xterms scrolling through random files because he suspected he was being spied on using van Eck phreaking.)

So, not the imperial pint of semen?

Such a great book. Two of the big stand-outs to me have always been the bit about his ex-girlfriend doing a whole research project about his beard, and the phrase "anally copulating shopping carts" pops into my head every time Im at the super market.

Covered a month ago too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37762092

Why black out some text? Is that actual story text blacked out?

It doesn't look like it – this is an example from a Star Trek Novel: https://johannes.freudendahl.net/2019/01/werbung-in-romanen/

The only redeeming quality is that the ads seem to be typeset to cover a whole physical page, so you could just tear it off without losing any actual story text. But you don't need the black lines to do that...

So, are the black lines there just to pad the page? Seems quite wasteful.

See also, what happens if you try this game with harlan ellison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB_hekYXWiw

Wasn't this pretty common for comics during the 70's/80's?

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tfJ2jdP-UbY/UETPI7yXmdI/AAAAAAAAF...

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2c/32/80/2c32806b8a19c33614d4...

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e0/3f/7e/e03f7eec694bf14dfb09...

I guess the difference being that Marvel approved the advertisement.

They did this to William Gibson too! For some reason Count Zero (the middle book of the Sprawl/Neuromancer series) was translated as into German as Biochips and had the embedded soup advertisements. In way, that's fitting for the corporate-controlled cyberpunk future he depicted.

This is great. It's odd because this kind of stuff is pretty normal in TV (quiz shows, sports etc) but I had never imagined it might happen in books.

I can see how Sir Terry might have been deeply annoyed back then, but this was very fun to learn now.

I remember Fay Weldon taking some money for product placing Bulgari products in her novels. So it's a thing that some authors are happy to do.

It's one thing if the author decides to do it (although it might not go down well with their readers anyway) and a completely different thing if a publisher does it without the author's knowledge. But, to say something positive, it was at least identifiable as an ad and not "seamlessly" integrated into the text.

Some not-so-reputable print magazines still do something similar to this day: embed ads that have more or less the same layout as the actual articles, praising some product. However these must be clearly labeled with the word "ANZEIGE".

Does the law in other countries require advertorials to be labeled? I seem to remember cases in the USA, but I haven't been looking.

Actually definitely in Germany. But with product placement a "supported by product placements" is enough afaik.

Specifically her novel "The Bulgari Connection"

I read a series as a teen that I'm fairly sure had some product placement - characters mentioned multiple times how much they liked Smuckers preserves.

Interestingly, the series had multiple viewpoint characters with each book narrated by one, and one of them had much more product placement than all the others - I only remember Cinnabon being mentioned outside her viewpoint books, or her being the one to mention a brand. I wonder whether it was a result of the author method writing, as that character was also the most ruthless of the group.

Compared to your average youtube interstitial this is benign. Thank god for adblockers.

Old-fashioned targeted advertising!

Little did they know how prophetic they were...

I know you joke, but this advert is surely completely untargeted?

It's definitely untargeted in the modern meaning (they don't pick which adverts to insert into the book when you buy it based on a profile of you). And even under any other meaning, I can't imagine German readers of Pratchet are much more bewitched by the charms of powdered soup than anyone else.

I wouldn't be so sure about the second bit; in my experience there's a significant overlap between Pratchett-readers and consumers of instant soup.

shoop

According to Cohen the Barbarian

It’s even more deceptive because if an author you like recommends a thing, you are much more likely to try it. So deceptively convincing the author or even worse just sneaking it in is breaking trust.

Interesting. But in which direction does the arrow of causality point? Were they* advertised to because they* like instant soup, or do they* like soup because they* were advertised to?

* Oh okay then, "we".

Sure it's targeted, it's targeted at buyers of cheap pulp fiction. You say you don't think the readers are "more bewitched by the charms of powdered soup," but do you notice them selling river cruises through France? A Great Books history course? Rolex watches?

Advertisers understood the idea of a target market even back then.

The absence of brands which might be expected to target a very narrow market segment doesn't really help us understand if this ad for a mass-market product was targeted. But you're right, it probably was to some extent.

I guess my main point was that this is a completely different category from present-day individually targeted ads. Bank then Rolex didn't need to invade anyone's privacy when choosing to advertise in "More Money Than Sense Monthly"

Not complaining, just wanted to say that i see this mentioned every once in a while and it is still hilariously sad to see we had idiotic ad experiences before youtube.

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