(Kind of curious now ... were the other translated editions in non-English languages as powerful? Do readers of science fiction in other languages seek out works by specific translators or publishers known to have great translations?)
We have two translations of Lord of the Rings (Tolkien fans being one of the more picky bunches of book geeks here, I'll refer to it in depth.) The older one, by Lavnit, is considered more beautiful and poetic and flowing (my nick comes from it though I was never much of a Tolkien geek, just hung out with them - Elves were translated into the Sons of Lillith from Hebrew mythology, and my mother's name is Lillith...). It's also long out of print and goes for (lowish I believe) collector prices. The newer one by Dr Emanuel Lotem is more... I don't know, academic maybe would be the word? Anyway, the Tolkien community hates him so much that he's one of their main memes. He also translated Dragonlance, which I grew up with, so I had no ill will towards him myself, and at some point I realized he's the one who managed to translate the Illuminatus! trilogy, which is... quite a feat. I wouldn't expect it to be translatable. So now I hold a deep appreciation for him.
The local Harry Potter geeks treated the translator as a minor celeb.
Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of any other translators that are held in special regard.
One of the challenges with Khamlet is that Klingon originally had no state of being verb - it was part of the word itself rather than a bare "I am {something}". Thus "to be or not to be" was never something that was translatable in the original Klingon language and it had to be updated.
Glancing at Amazon, there appears to be a release of Sunzi's Art of War from 2018.
Ox2b | ~0x2BCan't say about Shakespeare, there are many translations, and in my eyes all of them lack something that the original has, but Russian translations of such writers as O'Henry, F.S. Fitzgerald and Jack London have some irresistible charm and familiarity that is completely absent in original English texts.
I attribute it to censorship: many talented writers couldn't actually write because of it in soviet times, and to provide for themselves they took jobs as translators.
Shakespeare is perhaps impossible to translate properly to Spanish, just like Don Quijote to English, and yet we keep doing it because even the small glimpse afforded by the translation gives you an idea of the greatness behind it.
Funnily, I’ve always found the Spanish translation of the Lord of the Rings significantly more readable than the original, perhaps because Tolkien went out of his way to write in an old form of English that is a bit too distant for me. Or maybe it is because I read the story in my youth and re-reading it is a way to recapture some of the wonder that I felt then.
(Yes, that kind of BBS, with the dial-up modems, XMODEM/YMODEM/ZMODEM etc.)
(Yes, it was mostly for pirating books in the form of badly OCR-ed TXT files, and occasionally discussing them.)
Apparently at some point he decided he needs to bring Gibson to the non-English speaking part of the population and... I don't remember the translation as being "good", but it definitely was "bold".
On the other hans, I find that French translators usually utterly fail to capture the dry kind humor from British authors. From Jane Austen to Lord of the Rings, it reads so serious in French translations!!
I think I read the same text in a 1996 reprint some years later, in 1999 - coincidentally also during my last year of highschool with impending doom^Wexams afoot.
Definitely mind-expanding, and helped shape my early cyberpunk tastes, though it didn't get me hitched :)
I do think the translation was excellent, he definitely must have put hard work and passion into it!
"Sorry for the long post (translated by GPT as it was originally in Greek)."
It seems unambiguous to me, they were referring to their own posted comment.
Edited to add: they also confirmed same in this thread.