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Comment by mcmoor | Hacker News Reader

I've heard about this book so many times and was interested to read it. But I know that as a non native English reader, my track record against reading English proses is very poor, and looks like lots of value of the book is exactly in the prose? Maybe I'll have to skip this one, unless some brave souls have already translated it.

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I don’t know what language you speak, but GEB it’s been translated into multiple languages during the years.

I read it in Italian as a teen, the Italian edition is beautiful, and incredibly well translated (the book includes many puns and language tricks.)

But if memory serves the translators of the Italian version removed a whole chapter of it (I might have to check details because I am far from both my author-signed English edition and the Italian one I bought many years later).

It's Indonesian, which as I have guessed, doesn't have one at least as far as I google it. But it's astonishing that this kind of book have so many translations! Even into Chinese, wow! I guess it's truly one of most influential book.

And the translations are actually very good, since Douglas Hofstadter worked directly with translators to ensure that as much of the wordplays and Easter eggs as possible are preserved (of which there are a lot)

The Dutch translation of GEB is excellent. I think others, e.g. the French, are also quite good/excellent, potentially because Hofstadter himself was quite involved in the translation process. Hell, much of GEB and especially his later books discuss translation extentensively, so it would be strange if there were authorized translations of GEB that were somehow lacking in quality.

Crucially the French translation was significantly rewritten, with contributions from Hofstadter. In doing so, the French version becomes a separate projection of the author’s original ideas, along a different vector than the original English version. The approach therefore illustrates the main point of the book, similarly to its cover. Very meta. :)

i had no idea; now i have to read it, because i've only read the english original and part of one of the spanish translations

Hofstadter wrote another interesting book regarding translation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot

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