Reading in English as a Non-native Speaker

[jineapple]

It depends on the book of course, but even at the very best a translation can only be as good as the original really, while there are many ways how it can be worse...

There aren't that many books I've read both in English and German, but when I did, I always preferred the English version.

[orangedotgreen]

I am from Romania and I started learning English when I was 7. The first book I tried to read in English was 20.000 Leagues under the Sea, when I was around 10, and I didn't get very far then (I still have the book and the piece of paper with the words I needed to look up in the dictionary ). The next one was Charlie and the Chocolate factory, included in our 6th or 7th grade English textbook, and then for a long time I read only in Romanian. There were so many books we had to read for school, I didn't get to read too much for fun.

I've gone back to reading more after I bought my Kindle and with a few exceptions, I read only in English and only for fun. I tried reading the translated versions of some books, but unfortunately the translations are quite bad. There are wordplays and expressions that are clearly not understood and translated word for word, not even to something close in meaning. Even if it's not something that happens on every page, it's annoying. The biggest problem I have is that simple past is translated to a form that is not considered a literary form of the verbs, used only in one region of the country, non-officially. Since I live in a part of the country where it's not used, reading a novel where it's the only used past tense feels wrong. I've looked it up on Wikipedia, and apparently "Usage of the preterite is very frequent in written narrative discourse" - why would it be used frequently in novels when it's almost never used elsewhere?

It might be just me, but I don't process some English names as words or the sum of the words they're made up of. The best example would be Neville Longbottom from the Harry Potter books. When I read them in English, it was just a name. When I watched the first movie and read the subtitles I had a very loud reaction to the translation, even though, literary speaking, it was correct. I wonder how Chivalry, Shrewd and Verity from the Farseer Trilogy are translated.
A similar difference is with swearing. I know that there are different 'levels', but when I read or hear them, they're more or less equivalent to 'damn' in my mind. The fact that for a while all swearing on TV shows was translated in the subtitles to damn or less might have something to do with it, but then if it had been different, I presume my childhood would have had fewer movies in it.

I used to think that any books I can find here, translated to Romanian, would be available in English, as well, but I found a counterexample in another thread. There are some books by Karl May that I read when I was young, after I finished everything I could get my hands on by Jules Verne. They were quite popular here and several books of the series were available at our local library, which didn't have that many books. I read on this thread that many of his books haven't been translated to English.

Originally Posted by bucsie

The downside is not finding words in my tongue when I need them - only the English ones come to the tip of my tongue, and I have to stop to think of an appropriate translation. That sucks, it makes me look silly/inarticulate.
Sometimes I forget myself and interject the English words, and that can be embarrassing .

That happens to me, as well, especially when I try to talk about things that I have read about in English, but haven't talked about in Romanian. There are times when I feel that I could express my feelings better in English than in my mother tongue, but then I read about people's feelings a lot more time than I spend expressing mine.

What I've noticed when starting the book I'm reading now is that some ways of expressing things seem stilted because of the context in which I learned the words and it's difficult to get used to the style and not notice it. An example of this would be '[...] he expressed his interest in [...]' when talking about two friends who wanted to do something.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Ansileran

Reverse it. I couldn't find a proper translation for "angst" (English) in French, something like "angoisse" but not exactly...

One problem with English is that so many words are borrowed from other languages. In the case of 'angst', either German or a Germanic language. Angst is also used in existentialism which gives yet another layer of meaning to the word.

"English doesn't borrow from other languages. It follows them down a back alley at night, knocks them over, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar and vocabulary."

Regards,
David