Lost in Translation?
Whoa — it’s cool that I’m getting so many comments! This new feature is turning out to be a lot of fun, and I love reading what everyone’s been saying while I’ve been away.Â
 Reader Ghasemkiani suggested that I blog about foreign editions. It just so happens that I’ve been mulling over that very topic recently, so this is a great time to talk about it. The foreign language market for authors can be a truly lucrative one. Almost a third of my annual income, in fact, comes from foreign sales, and I consider them so important that I’ve been traveling overseas at least once a year on book tour. At last count, I’ve sold foreign rights to 29 countries, and every few weeks, some newly translated edition will show up in my mail, sent to me by one of my foreign publishers. More often than not, I have no idea which language it’s in. I’m sorry to say that I still can’t tell the difference between Latvian and Slovakian, so I have to check the copyright page for the publisher’s city to find out the language.
Needless to say, I usually have no idea if the translation bears any resemblance to the book I wrote.
A few weeks ago, a foreign language school in my town hosted an afternoon program called “the art of translation.” They gathered together five native speakers of French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese and gave them the foreign editions of my thriller, THE SURGEON. Each speaker read aloud from her foreign edition’s prologue, then talked about the accuracy of the translation.
Some of their comments surprised me.
Entire sentences are sometimes dropped in foreign editions — and not just trivial sentences, but sentences that I’d consider artistically important. Sometimes, there’s a practical reason for this. English is an economical language. Going from English to, say, German, usually means a huge expansion in word count, and if the last sentence in a chapter spills into a new page, they may delete text to avoid having a mostly blank page.Â
Another translation quirk comes into play because of feminine and masculine nouns. The English prologue of THE SURGEON is told from the first person point of view of the killer, who refers to himself/herself as, simply, “I”. The killer’s gender is hidden from the reader. The Japanese translator explained that this is impossible in her language, because men and women use gender-specific words when they refer to themselves. The Japanese first-person character will automatically reveal his or her sex — a real problem for the Japanese mystery writer who wants to keep the killer cloaked!Â
Sometimes, the translator’s personality and educational status will insinuate itself into the work, changing the texture of the novel. My villain, Warren Hoyt, is a very formal, even fussy man. Yet one of the translations had Warren refer to the police as the local equivalent of “cops.” Another translator changed slang-laden dialogue to a very formal exchange.Â
One element, however, remained unchanged in all five foreign editions: the name of the coffee chain “Starbucks” made it through, untranslated. Some things, I guess, are universal!
So when my foreign readers pick up a translated edition, the story they read may not be exactly as I wrote it.
The other element that can vary wildly is the cover design.  In France, the cover for THE SURGEON showed the back of a male doctor in a white coat. In Germany, it was a lush painting by Caravaggio. Other publishers went with scalpels, frightened women, zippers, or bloody drains. There was one frankly pornographic version, of a woman who was either in the throes of death — or orgasm. I couldn’t tell which. (I’ll bet that edition sold like hotcakes.)
We Americans tend to think the U.S. is the center of the universe. But when I look at my foreign sales, I remember that there’s a much bigger world of readers out there who don’t speak English. And I’m thrilled they’re buying books.
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I am French and often read books in French and English, and it’s usually a lot more fun to read in the original language. Despite the translator’s best efforts, some English expressions are impossible to put correctly in French. Now that my English is good enough, I read books in English most of the time.
First of all, welcome back! I’ve been going through “Tess withdrawal” for the past two weeks. Are medical conferences something you choose to do now that you’re not practicing medicine or are you required to attend to keep your license current? And do you sometimes feel little twinges of desire to still be in practice? Through your writing you have a far greater reach into the lives and minds of people, but do you miss the more direct contact you had as a physician? I’m just curious because it takes such hard work and years of intense education and training to become a doctor that I’d imagine the drive that took you there in the first place doesn’t ever quite go away. Or maybe it just jumped tracks …
About the foreign translations, I saw a man reading a foreign language version of one of your books on a cruise I took last year. I don’t recall the title, but at the time I thought it may have been The Surgeon. I think that’s the only time I’ve spied a foreign version of an American book. Since the foreign versions make up about a third of your income, do you hear from those readers on as big a scale? And since we all tend to put things in our own frame of reference, does your foreign audience get a different “take” on your stories as compared to your American readers?
I’m sorry about all the questions in a comment-based forum; hope you don’t mind.
Hi–love the new blog format.
As you know, when I was in Bratislava I found loads of your books on the display tables–nice to find mine in such illustrious company!
At the Prague Book Fair, which I also attended, they had a session in which awards were handed out for the Worst Translation into Czech! I suspect there were plenty of candidates…since being published in other languages than English, I’ve heard so many complaints by the quality of translation from the native speakers of those languages.
I often hear from foreign readers, who manage to write me even when English is not their first language. I admire anyone who makes the attempt! Occasionally, one of them will complain about the quality of the translation. (So Czech readers are not alone in their complaints.) It’s almost impossible to know how foreign readers perceive our stories — we just hope they’ll like them enough to keep buying!
When I enter your name into the search form at the German Amazon site, it lists 32 (German) items, most of them books. These are translated by six different people. If each of them has a different style, your books could seem to be written by different authors, even though you wrote all of them.
I stopped reading translations a while ago, because the original books are, in my opinion, so much better and Amazon can get me almost any English book I want.
The results of the translation program are really interesting. There’s obviously a lot more to it than most people know.
And I would love to have a public Worst Translation Award Show over here, sounds like fun.
German words are usually longer and often you need more of them to express something, which is why the word count goes up.
I’ve got an English and a German edition of Stephen King’s “Misery”.
The spine of the English one is 0.9 inches wide and the book has 338 pages. The German one is 1.5 inches wide and has 413 pages.
Of course the font and margins make a difference, too, but if you’re going on vacation and the weight your suitcase can have is limited, you are always better off with the original books.
And this German cover (there are better ones) of “Misery” is pink. A bright pink that you will see in the store. From the other side of the road.
What always bothered me about the German edition is that they called it “Sie”, which means “She”. So that readers who liked “It” will pick up this one, though the stories don’t have anything to do with each other.
Can you imagine how difficult it is to translate poetry?In every language there are also words which are really untranslatable.
Tess, do you have any books translated in Hindi or Gujarti? Along with english, I speak both languages and am learning how to read Hindi.
It’s funny, when I read a book by a certain author in German translation, I find it hard, to read any other books by the same author in the original… Much harder anyway than if I would have read the first novel in English in the first place.
I translate history papers for my professor (German-English), and I have to admit, that I often mess with his style. He tends to write in very long sentences, and often I make three sentences out of one…
Translating is a lot of fun, it’s kind of like doing a puzzle. Someday I’d really like to translate novels from English to German.
So long,
Corinna
The German cover sounds gorgeous. Maybe you could post it?
I usually start reading foreign authors in German and then switch to the original language because I can’t wait until the translation is finished.
Sometimes I start with the foreign version, just because I spotted it earlier (and find it interesting) or simply because it’s cheaper than the German version.
Sometimes I read both versions and wonder, how some things were translated or that there are some parts missing (I saw this with some of Bram Stokers books [not Dracula]).
And I can confirm that the German cover is really special.
You can take a peek at all my German book covers here, on the German Amazon.com site. Too bad this doesn’t really capture the full image, which can only be seen if you open up the book cover, because the painting takes up both the front and back cover!
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books-de&field-author=Gerritsen%2C%20Tess/028-5244008-5718922
What sometimes really confuses me is the German transaltion of the English word “you”. You can either translate it formal (“Sie”) or more informal (“du”), which (to my mind) has a great effect on how the reader interprets a relationship between two people. For example: While reading the english version of the Jane Rizzoli/Maura Isles books, I always get the impression, that the two of them are not just colleques but also friends. But in the german translation the translator uses the formal “Sie”, which gives me the impression that there is a great distance between these two characters. Plus, I don’t like the style of the german transaltor(s)!
I just finished reading the german version of “body double” (after having read the english version a few weeks ago) and I didn’t like it at all, while I think that the original version is just fabulous!!!