Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Which is exactly why I'm uninterested in them. I'd rather read something untransformed in the language in which it was written. If I were multilingual, I might feel differently, but I'm not.
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You can afford to feel this way because you were born as a native speaker of one of the most widespread languages in the world. If you had been born in a country with a very small native population, you'd pretty much have no choice but to read translated works until you learned to speak at least one major foreign language.
Not that there weren't any books written by Estonian authors in Estonian when I grew up, of course there were. But not that many for a voracious reader. Even many children's books were translations - from Russian, French, German, English and so on.
It's the same today. Most books in our stores are translations. Estonian works are and always have been a minority, because there are just too few Estonians overall.