Quote:
Originally Posted by ficbot
with a novel translation, I feel they would not take such liberties, so reading it in English vs in French, I would have pretty much the same experience...
|
You may be surprised; sometimes a "translator" all but rewrites a book.
A classic example is the Jules Verne 1864 classic "Voyage au centre de la Terre", generally translated as "Journey to the Centre of the Earth". The most common English "translation" of this, and the one that you'll very likely still get if you buy an English edition of the book in any book shop, is the 1871 translation by Griffith and Farran. It's undoubtedly a good book, but it's
not the book that Verne wrote. The plot outline is the same, but all the details are different - the "translators" have taken Verne's plot and written their own book.
If you want to compare the two, I've posted the Griffith and Farran translation to MR under the title "Journey to the Centre of the Earth", and an
accurate 1877 translation by Malleson under the title "Journey to the Interior of the Earth". If you read the two, you'll find that they are two different books.