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Originally Posted by FlorenceArt
Still reading The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and I can confirm one thing: the French translation is not just "awkward". It's pure crap. I wonder if the English translation is any better?
I usually don't read books in English if they were translated from another language, but in this case it would be no worse than reading a French translation written by someone who obviously doesn't know French very well. It looks to be transcribed word for word (and not always the correct words) from the Swedish, which I think has a sentence structure that is closer to English than French, and also probably uses a lot of expressions imported from English. So even a word for word translation may be more bearable in English.
Otherwise, the story is starting to go somewhere at last, and I'm beginning to be interested.
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I had to say that I doubt Swedish probably uses a lot of expressions imported from English - but since English, being a partly Germanic language (the group to which Swedish also belongs), and from my knowledge of Danish, which is close to Swedish, I can say that the sentence structure certainly is a great deal closer to English than French.
I would also be interested in reading an English translation - just to compare to the Danish.
It was interesting to hear your opinion of the French translation though. Generally I expect translations into Danish to be fine (not all is, but still I don't expect them to be bad from the outset). I wondered if you think it may have to do with the structural differences between the romantic and the germanic language groups? I can certainly say that French, Spanish and Italian translated into Danish has a certain different "flavour" that can set the prose apart, unless you have an especially talented translator - though you could argue that then it's a re-telling, not translation.