[Lani]

After being on this board for couple monthes, I realized that there's more that couple of people for whom English is a second language.

What I wanted to ask about are translations of fantasy books on different languages.
I met lots of horrible translations which really could put away a person from a book, but ones it happened so that I found a translation of a book, that transated was more interesting to read than on original language...

Have you ever noticed that such a thing?

[FitzChivalry]

Well, my native language is Hebrew and i read almost all of my books in English.
I'm not sure if it's like that for other languages too, but translations from English to Hebrew and especially in fantasy and sci fi can get pretty rough.. maybe it's because the languages are from a different langauges group and it's easier to translate to other latin languages but try translate Dragon Reborn to Hebrew... i'm yet to see a good translation to those two words..

Besides that, sometimes the book loses something in translation because the translator doesn't understand everything...

[Liselle]

My native language is German, it is only half a year before that I started reading English books.
Most of the books get worse with the translations; the best example for it I know is the Lord of the Rings itself - I tried it in German and put it away, it was unsupportable (now they've made a new 'millenium' translation, and it's said to be still worse).
On the other hand, I've heard that the Otherland series by Tad Williams is much better in the translation than in the original...

[Bardos]

My native languige is Greek.
I think you can translate almost anything, if you try hard. Though some things you have to translate in a round-about manner...

[drakon]

I have read two translations to Hebrew which I though twere good, but then after a while I read them ( Amber, Hitch-hikers guide...) in English and they were ssooo much better that I totally gave up on translated material and I'm now reading only in English. ( except for occational books that I get from people, they can still be decent but I'm sure I would have liked them better in English eg. 'Grass' by Sherry Tepper)

[Ntschotschi]

I usually buy the English books, not the translations. It's cheaper.
In Germany they usually make two books out of one volume. For example Goerge Martin's Books or J.V. Jones' books. So you have to pay double the prize.
There are many good books which aren't translated - or maybe I don't know of any translations. For example Julian May.
And I simply don't want to wait for the translation.

[Lani]

Well, I guess you have some good points about translation, but sometimes I feel that it's more enjoyable to read a book on a language that you think on... But I really agree that most of the times it's more efficient to use original book though I don't know how come you can so easy get an english book in countries that don't have english as an official language. Or do you get books by Internet?

[Cadfael]

This topic has opened my eyes, I have been complacently assuming that it quite easy for a translation to be produced, and it would not be any less in quality than the English version.

The situation in Germany, making one book into two, seems on the face of it, a blatant rip-off, why does this happen?

[FitzChivalry]

Yeah, they do that here too to the wheel of time books...
not to mention that a translated book cost more than an original book to begin with.

And yeah, most of my books i order from amazon.com. You can't get many fantasy and sci fi books here, no matter what language.

[Liselle]

Well, if you make a German sentence out of an English one, it gets about half the size of the original again.
Now imagine a German paperback of one of the Wheel of Time books. It would be a cube, not very handy. This is why they make 2 or 3 German books out of an English one.
So I buy mainly English books now.