The first part of your rant was just something you dislike about books and book stores in general, not particularly Dutch ones. However, I cannot but agree on the part about translations. Dutch isn't exactly a poetic language. It's good for sarcasm and irony (A.F.Th. van der Heijden being the epitome), but it's hard to take things like fantasy, sci-fi and horror seriously. It just doesn't convey as much emotion without the rich vocabulary English offers.
It goes both ways, though. Ever tried reading Kafka in English? It just isn't the same. (Of course, Kafka is German, but it sure is a hell of a lot closer to Dutch than to English.)
But book stores aren't even that bad, if you ask me. There's many different book stores, both online and offline, and you can always find the book you want in the end. It gets worse with libraries. I only have experience with one library, but I notice that almost all the non-English classics are available here only as a Dutch translation, not the English one. It's the same story: unless the original language is German or Nordic, the English translation tends to be a lot better. But because they only have the Dutch ones, my local library is for the most part useless to me.
I heard that in other countries, like Norway, if there's a rare book that isn't available from the libraries in your country, you can order it from a library in another country, and they'll send it to your local library. You can have virtually any book without buying it that way. I wonder why they don't do that in the Netherlands.
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Originally Posted by Katsunami
It's a direct translation of the Dutch sentence; I don't know the original English one. However, I think the English one is just better. It's more based on a feeling than on some sort of objectivity, apart from the word assassin, which I think can't actually be translated into Dutch very well.
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Wait, you speculated about what the accurate Dutch translation would have been, while you don't know what the English original was?
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Originally Posted by Zetmolm
'Assassin' can quite well be translated as 'sluipmoordenaar', a word which would also fit the atmosphere of the paragraph quite well.
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The thing about Dutch is, it does actually have one heck of a lot of words, and
the world's biggest word book, is a Dutch one, but nobody actual uses those words. Translations have to use words that people know, and because Dutch people know their own language less well than Brits and Americans know theirs, they often have to dumb it down to keep it comprehensible to the average person. Even in everyday speech, I sometimes have to look for more common alternatives to certain words in order to be taken seriously. A regular English word, when translated into Dutch, can make it sound like you're just trying to be a smartass.
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Originally Posted by Katsunami
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Even seeing the title translated makes me cringe. It sounds like a complete joke.
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Originally Posted by GlenBarrington
When I was in the US Air force, one of my friends was originally from Ecuador. He claimed that when he cursed or swore using foul language, he only used English.
He claimed he could get the MEANING of his feelings across in Spanish, but that he never felt quite as satisfied emotionally as when he swore in English. He said Spanish was too "pretty" to be an effective language for blasphemy.
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I feel the same way, except that English is the 'pretty' one to me. Dutch is an ugly language, but it's damn good for cursing. English is only good for the casual curse.