This book gets my vote as what I imagine must have been the most fun translation job of 2010. It’s called Schnittmengen, and is the German version of Jessica Hagy’s English-language book Indexed, based on her blog of the same name.
I’ve been a big fan of Jessica Hagy for a couple of years now, and featured her work on my blog as far back as 2007. So I was pretty excited to see her book translated into German, with a nifty little set of cultural notes for the German reader here.
Some careful sleuthing revealed the translator was Vivian Cullis (*I think*?)… but it’s a shame she doesn’t get a listing on Amazon, or even on the copyright pages of the book itself. So sadly, it’s a boo hiss on that score for the publisher, Goldmann Verlag (Random House).
But that aside: Can you imagine being tasked with this translation job? Cultural references abound, and as the very nature of this work involves comparing random things and finding an unexpected common point, the context wouldn’t offer very many clues to meaning either. Plus, it’s surprising and insightful in itself. Could this be the most fun translation job of 2010?
(I am late to the party / comment thread. I offer this comment as sacrifice to the Internet deity of “never gonna be read”.)
Zachary, having worked in translation (linguistic QA, but I ended up translating major chunks of content myself) for a major MMO (Warhammer Online, English -> German), let me tell you that it’s really not nearly as much fun as you would think. Translating MMOs is tedious work, and there is too much of it as well (a little tedium is good for the soul).
The worst part? Item names. “So here’s fifteen different items whose names are basically all variation of ‘really deadly sword’ in English. No you can’t know what the items do or what they look like, because that’s not final yet. You’ve only got the names. Oh and please don’t use more than 20 characters because that part of the UI doesn’t rescale well. Or at all.”
As a totally off-topic aside, German is really testosterone-deficient, compared to English. Or to put it more precisely, there are a lot of phrases that have been accepted in English in the special subculture of gaming and that denote the feeling of fiero*, while there are hardly any in German that don’t sound artificial or horribly awkward. What do German gamers do? They build German sentences that consist of more English than German. “Boah ey, hast du die kill-streak gesehen? Die dachten, die könnten mich fraggen, aber nix gibt’s. Double-kill! Dominating!” (this horribly awkward gaming German has been reconstructed by a 30 year old native speaker who really doesn’t speak like this anymore, but who earns his money talking to people who do.)
(* the feeling of triumph as you overcome obstacles, beat an enemy, or plain Blow Shit Up, as defined here: http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2008/04/top-ten-videoga.html)
Thank you for bringing this book to our attention. The “missing translator” is not an unusual problem. Vivian Cullis is listed as the translator on 4/14, which looks like the inside cover, but not on 5/14 where all the bibliographical and copyright information resides. Amazon.de reacted very promptly, by the way, when I asked them to list the (omitted) translators of some of their Nick Hornby translations (I had a blog post about it in June 2008). Within a couple of days they had their book info amended.
Good to hear Amazon.de were responsive on updating their book information to include translators – well done for pointing it out to them, Michael. Just goes to show it’s well worth raising it too. Thanks for the comment.
I remember my most fun translation job was a Simpsons Quiz for a magazine. An absolute joy to do 🙂
I vaguely remember some sticky German phrase about nerds ( it was an ‘Are you like Lisa’ type of question) and I thought “band camp” might work better for the target demographic, as American Pie was very popular at the time. Luckily the client agreed and was very open to suggestions 🙂 I had such a blast with that project!
I’m inclined to think that translating one of the bajillion new MMORPGs out there would be the most fun translation job of 2010. But that’s because I’m uncultured. And a boy. And uncultured.
(Wait, did I already say that? ::hangs head::)