Quote:
Originally Posted by FlorenceArt
...
I feel a bit reluctant to read English translations of books that are in another language. It feels wrong. At least if I read a French translation I am only suffering from the translator's errors. I don't want to add to that my own incorrect or inaccurate understanding. When I read in English I'm sure I don't get all the subtleties, and I sometimes make mistakes. Although I still prefer that to reading a bad French translation, reading an English translation of a book would feel a bit like reading that French translation of an English translation of a Japanese book.
|
I can follow this. While I'd probably prefer to read a good English translation over a bad Danish one, if I had the choice, I think there's a level of subtlety or intimate understanding, that you can't really 'get at' unless you have grown up with that language. As fro books written in Danish - if it was a cheap thriller or something it probably wouldn't matter much, but if it's by a writer with a 'good' language, I feel it would be a shame to read it in English (not that many are translated to English anyway
)
I'm just lucky that many of the authors I like are English or American, and there seem to be an overweight of English and American authors among novels that are translated compared other foreign countries. I sometimes wonder why there are so relatively few German, French and Spanish authors that are translated, but perhaps it's simply because it's a really small market and there isn't room for a great number of titles.