Blind Idiot Translation/Literature

File (Literature)

""Man, get a load of those buns. They are class A" Sydney swallowed. She supposed they were. "You man, fetch me a load of those beaver-boards! They are class A" Sydney swallowed. She hoped they were."
 * One of the most Egregious examples could be English as She is Spoke, an 1800s book by a Portuguese man, who only spoke Portuguese, writing an English phrasebook with the help of a Portuguese-French dictionary and a French-English dictionary. Hilarity Ensues.
 * For a while, there were several Russian 'translations' of Harry Potter floating around, all fairly terrible, featuring straight translations of figures of speech that have Russian equivalents. It got to the point where, back in 2004, a newspaper held the "Worst Harry Potter translation" contest. Since then, better translations have been made available (though the old sucky ones are still out there)
 * Even the official Spanish translations published by Salamandra suffer from glaring errors, including the use of the false cognate "embarazada" (PREGNANT) as a translation for "embarrassed".
 * That's actually a truer cognate than many people realize. The "old" word for "pregnant", still in use VERY informally, and also when taking about animals is "preñada"; "Embarazada" is actually a former euphemism which literally means "burdened" but whose root is probably the same as for the English word.
 * It's a true cognate, but a false friend.
 * And lets not forget that many Spanish-speaker readers of the series were told that Neville had a turtle. That's right, a turtle that liked to jump from its owner's hand. It was fixed in latter releases fortunately.
 * One of the official latin american spanish translations makes several translation mistakes, one of the worst being at the end of the book, when Dumbledore compliments Neville about how you need more courage to fight against your friends, it's translated as to say "you need more courage to SUPPORT your friends", which is pretty much the opposite.
 * The Russian translation of the second book received a prize for the worst translation. It was noticably better than the first. One of the best known mistakes (not exclusive to HP) is translating "ebony" as "ebonite". And a certain non official translation of Book 6 translated the words about a "breathless girl", not as a "zapykhavshayasia" - that is, out of breath, but as "bezdykhannaya". Dead, that is.
 * The German translation has a couple of mistakes as well. For example, in the fourth book, "eel farm" was translated as "Eulenfarm" (owl farm).
 * The Portuguese translation of Philosopher's Stone translated "Underground" as in a literal underground, a pitfall warned about in grade school. They did it AGAIN in Chamber Of Secrets when Harry tells Mr Weasley about "taking the underground" to which he replies "Really? Were there "escapators?", the latter word being translated as "fugitives" which makes the entire conversation take on a weird new meaning.
 * They also had the somewhat understandable error of not realizing that "witch" and "wizard" are gender specific (though exceptions exist in other works). That coupled with the vague descriptions of certain characters caused certain characters to spontaneously change genders between books)
 * One of the Guinness books of World Records translated into Russian had the Goosebumps series called Goose Bumps (i.e. bumps made by geese).
 * Joseph Conrad's writings have occasional odd turns of phrase due to false cognates between French and English, since he learned English partially from a French-English dictionary (like most Slavic aristocrats of the time he was fluent in French).
 * The original Swedish translation of The Lord of the Rings became infamous in part because the translator, Åke Ohlmarks, apparently had only a tenuous grasp of English idioms and mistook the meaning of various words. In one sentence, "roamed" was translated as "råmade," which despite phonetic similarity actually means "bellowed" or "mooed." The word "stripped," as used by Orcs, was translated as "piskade," meaning "whipped." The idiom "turn over a new leaf, and keep it turned" became "pick a fresh leaf, and hold it in your hand." Tolkien, being a Cunning Linguist, wrote to the publisher and sent a blistering blow-by-blow criticism of Ohlmarks' translation, which can be found in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien.
 * The French translation often gives the wrong lines to the wrong characters, repeatedly fails to notice that Isildur and Elendil were different people (possibly on account of Tolkien's comma usage), and, due to a change in phoneticization, ends up with Bilbo having a slightly different name between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings -- despite the fact that the translator was the same in the two cases.
 * The Finnish translation of Lord of the Rings is considered as one of the best foreign language translations, but it also contains one grave error. Poet Panu Pekkanen, who translated all the poems (while Kersti Juva translated the prose), translated All that is gold does not glitter as Ei kaikki kiiltävä kultaa lie (literally "all that glitters is not gold", which is a more familiar everyday expression.) Pekkanen later noted his error and changed it into Ei kaikki kultainen kiiltävää lie, carrying the original implication.
 * The German translator of Mr Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. For example, the "bloody stupid robe", worn by the big bad in "Guards, Guards" becomes "blutroter Seidenumhang" (blood red silk robe). Every character talks exactly the same way, with the exception of the trolls, who talk in infinitives. ("I be big troll. I be scary")
 * They also made a literal translation of a wordplay in Soul Music. In English, "club" can mean both an establishment and a weapon, so confusing the both is possible. In German though, there are two words and confusing them makes no sense whatsoever.
 * There's many, many mistranslated puns... Pratchett loves puns, his translator apparently does not. Also, translated names, usually horrible.
 * On a note here: The former german Translator, Andreas Brandhorst, once said it is often impossible to translate some of the puns. He, however tried to make up for the missing ones where it was possible. The new translators however...
 * There are several different translations of Discworld into Russian. The good one translates Granny Weatherwas as Vetrovosk (Windwax, which sounds better in Russian then the straight Pogodovosk). The bad one translated her as a Groms-Hmurry - Thunders-Gloomy. Which in no way corresponds to her actual name.
 * Danish SF lore tells of some horribly bad translations of science fiction done in the 1950's. In one case, a story dropped several rungs on the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness when a hydraulic power plant that supplied energy to a human settlement became a "hydraulisk kraftplante" (hydroactive force-weed, more or less).
 * The Hebrew translator of Dragons of Summer Flame translated "draconian" (a lizard-like humanoid) to "dracon" - which is the Hebrew word for "dragon". Apparently Caramon Majare was so strong he killed two DRAGONS by bashing their heads together. This translator also called Tasselhoff Burrfoot "Barefoot Tasselhoff", and traslated the word "Elf" everywhere it appeared to "Shed" - meaning "Demon". Tanis Half-Demon, how cool is that?
 * Another translator got it right through the magic of inversion, translating "dragon" as "dracon" and "draconian" as "dragon". Both translators ignored the fact that there was already a loanword for "draconian", "draconi". So "dracon" is Hebrew for "dragon", "dragon" is now Hebrew for "draconian" (noun), and "draconi" is Hebrew for "draconian" (adj). Simple, really.
 * An error in the Traditional Chinese translation of Warrior Cats has caused Blackstar to have black claws instead of black paws. Apparantly, they've also referred to Hawkfrost as Brambleclaw's older brother (he's really his younger half-brother), among other minor errors.
 * The infamous "Magenta Dune" is a "translation" of the first Dune book to Russian (suspected to be one of early bootleg double translations "via Poland", since those did tend to accumulate errors), done so ludicrously bad--no page contained less than 3 errors and 8 typos--and having so little in common with any sane use of either language that it kept its "fame" from 1990 to this day. The problem: later lazy translators created several mutated clones trying to polish it instead of working from scratch. Let's just say "the pile of rocks that were" home of Atreides family and there was 19 g. And so on. Amen.
 * Some participants of the Fidonet newsgroup RU.FANTASY in 1999 proposed to use "milliMD" after it as the unit of text inarticulateness, alluding to Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure in more than one way.
 * Happened a lot with the Hebrew translations of the early Discworld novels. In one book, the librarian is described in English as "the sad orangutan". It was translated to "the sad orange jam". The Israeli Discworld fans still wonder what the hell the translator was smoking.
 * Even worse was the whole witches vs. wizards deal. There are two possible words for magic-user in Hebrew: mechashef and kosem. The translations of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic chose to use "mechashef". Unfortunately, there's only one word for "witch": machshefa (kosemet would only mean "female magic-user"). So when Equal Rites comes along and they make a big deal over the fact that Esk is the first female magic-user as opposed to witch, it would have made sense to put a translator's note at the beginning saying "up until now we used mechashef, but in this book a wizard is a kosem" - and made Esk the first kosemet and Granny Weatherwax a machshefa. But if they'd done that, I wouldn't be entering it in this page, right? They made Esk the first kosemet and Granny Weatherwax a machshefa - but they left wizard as mechashef! So they made a big deal over the first kosemet appearing, and accidentally implied that there was no such thing as a male kosem!
 * Then came along "Sourcery" which needed the 2nd word for a male magic-user and made a wonderful mess of things.
 * Did they use kosemet for that and thus imply that Esk was a sourceror?
 * Renne Nikupaavola is an infamous translator who has butchered numerous fantasy novels into something resembling Finnish and consistently translates the English "uncle" into the Finnish word for "maternal uncle" (Eno), even when someone who had been paying the slightest attention would have been aware that the word was being used to refer to someone's father's brother.
 * Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson was subjected to an epically horrible Finnish translation full of bizarre neologisms and general badness. The most memorable and horrifying detail was the mangling of the name of the Dark Lord (Lord Foul) into something that sounds like a humorous, family-friendly Harmless Villain (Vallasherra Falski) when he is actually anything but. The cherry on top is that the name means "False" while the character has never once lied during the entire series. This trainwreck of a translation killed all further translations of Donaldson into Finnish which is more than even Renne Nikupaavola can claim.
 * Finnish translation of 1984 by George Orwell contains some hilarious mistrantlations such as alikonekivääri (under/lesser machine gun) for submachine gun (instead of correct konepistooli). [At least it wasn't translated sukellusvenekonekivääri (submarine machine gun)...]
 * The original translation also muddled up the iconic "freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four" line into "freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make two". The translator must've cherished the right to practice bad arithmetic.
 * The infamous Polish translation of The Lord of the Rings by Jerzy Lozinski. Where do I start? Calling dwarves "krzaty" (that can be most closely translated as "ixies" - "pixies" (skrzaty) without the first letter)? Translating "Strider" as "Lazik" (something like "Rover" as in "lunar rover" the vehicle or just plain ol' "Land Rover")? Trying to make Frodo Baggins' name sound more "Polish", as "Frodo Bagosz z Bagoszna"?
 * The Message, an English translation of the Bible by Eugene Peterson. "Sex, sex, and more sex"!
 * In Stephen King's short story In the Deathroom, a character is described as such: "He looked like a movie Mexican. You expected him to say, "Batches? Batches? We don’t need no steenkin batches" - a reference to the famous line from the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In the Hungarian translation (in Hungary, the line is not well-known) "batch" was traslated into "halom", meaning "pile".
 * Rob Grant's Incompetence has the main character attempt to fix his boiler using an instruction manual that was "translated from Japanese to English by a Kalahari bushman whose closest encounter with either language had been a chance encounter with a German explorer trying to acertain the going rate for a second hand camel in terms of petroleum and shiny beads."
 * The "translation" of The Bible directed by King James the First of England occasionally mixes up Jesus (the son of God) and Joshua (Leader of the Israelites in Exodus, Numbers and Joshua) because their names are the same in Greek and similar in Hebrew. What isn't as understandable is that the two appear literally almost half a book apart.
 * The belief that The Grapes Of Wrath was translated into Japanese with the title of "The Angry Raisins". This is an urban legend and did not happen.
 * The English translation of Stieg Larsson's Men Who Hate Women (aka The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) has one while giving the backstory to why Mikael Blomkvist is nicknamed Kalle Blomkvist. In his youth he helped stop a gang of robbers known as Björnligan, which is the Swedish name for The Beagle Boys. In the English translation they're called The Bear Gang, which is a literal translation of "Björnligan". Translating the gang's name directly rather than correctly replacing the Swedish name for the Beagle Boys with the English one, thus ruining the Disney references concerning the gang, makes no sense.
 * The French translation is infamously bad. So bad it caused an uproar on the Internet and led the (whiny) translators to issue an open letter to explain themselves. It Got Worse.
 * Another problem with the translation is that Björn doesn't necessarily reference bears - it might very well, indeed, given Swedish criminal gang naming traditions is fairly likely to, reference the Swedish name Björn.
 * The first Croatian translation of The Da Vinci Code is a notorious example. The translator apparently knew nothing about religion, which is kind of ironic for a country where about 90% of the population declare themselves Catholic. The term immaculate conception is the best known mistranslation in the book: translated back to English, it would be something on the line of “exceedingly honorable concept”.
 * A translation of Pratchett’s Sourcery into Croatian is terrible from the very start: the title was translated as “Sour Spellcasting”, probably because the blind idiot translator considered it a pun on “sour cherry” instead of “source of magic”, as it is explained in the book itself.
 * Dave Barry parodied this in the two funniest things ever written. One is an instruction manual "translated from the Japanese," including instructions like "Never to hold these buttons two times!" "This is a very maintenance action," and "However." The other was inverted, in a section of a book on travel, which includes some phrases like "Je donne a madame chat plus que ca a manger," translated as "I give my damn cat more than that to eat."
 * Mark Twain's short story The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was translated into French. Suspecting that the lukewarm response to it was due to poor translation, Twain relates that with the assistance of a dictionary he translated it word for word back to English (producing a Blind Idiot Translation of a Blind Idiot Translation). The result is arguably even funnier than the original.
 * "the dark brethren of the elves" was translated to "de onda alfernas bröder" (brothers of the evil elves) in the official Swedish translation of a fantasy book.
 * Tolkien's works in Hungarian generally fared very well, and the translations are regarded as utter masterpieces, save for a single instance: in this version of the The Lord of the Rings, it was Merry (called Trufa in the translation) who landed the finishing blow to the Witch King, not Eowyn.
 * This same error happened in Åke Ohlmarks Swedish translation - according to him, it was Merry, not Eowyn, who killed the Witch King.
 * The Hebrew translation of The Silmarillion barely averted this trope. The Elves were originally intended to be called b'nei Lilith (children of Lilith) - Lilith is the evil she-demon of the Semitic lore. Fortunately the translator was informed that Tolkien's intention was to pose Elves as what human beings would have been without The Fall, and b'nei Lilith could have not been further from this intention. The name used is alph, plural alphim, a neologism from English word "elf".
 * In the Russian translation of Astrid Lindgren's Karlsson on the Roof, the main character's mother keeps calling him "My little billygoat" for absolutlely no reason. This is probably the result of the translator mixing up the the Swedish words kille ("guy" or "boy") and killing ("kidling").
 * Actually, it's a result of a literary translation, not of a mistake in translation.
 * Observe what the Hungarian version of Luring a Lady translated the following lines as:


 * Used in-universe in The Flying Sorcerers. The human explorer introduces himself by his English name, which his computer translates into the native tongue "as a color, shade of purple-grey". He spends much of the book being called "Purple" because of this, but he eventually sets them straight: His name was.
 * If the joke's too subtle for you:.
 * In the German translation of Dracula. In the pivotal scene where Mina is visited by the Count at night, she tells the reader that she "couldn't resist him." In the original she says that she "didn't want to resist him" (she thinks that's part of his terrible power) - a small, but important difference.