This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Robert: Trimmed the following, as too much of a digression in what was already a lengthy example.
Tulling: As far as I know, Wales is separate from England, while Britain encompasses them both. Therefore it seemed appropriate to substitute Britain for England in the Doctor Who example.
Seven Seals: "This happens more often for "childish" things. Absurd humour is considered so in Dutch literary circles, and so works from Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams are translated in the same vein as actual children's books, which just doesn't work."
Being Dutch and a reader of both the original and the translated versions of these works, I have to disagree here. I removed the paragraph.
First, these books are not translated as "children's books", that's just massively unfair. Second, while I could see some merit to the argument for Douglas' books (some quintessentially British things were localized awkwardly) I don't see how it would apply to Pratchett's Discworld books. These things are full of semantically significant names and puns and the translators try hard to convey them; not attempting to translate them to something similarly amusing in Dutch is a cop-out, even if the actual result is less than the original. See http://www.geocities.com/liessa_nl/discworld
.
When it comes to translating, the translator has to have at least some Creator Provincialism, otherwise they wouldn't be translating at all. The ultimate in audience receptiveness is when it reads the original, after all. The question of how much "transculturation" a translator should do is just that: a question. Just calling it Adaptation Decay is unfair.
Fencedude: Uhh...the part about Sophie's World, can anyone confirm that? I've read the book myself a number of times and I'm almost positive that such things were not changed. I don't have it on hand to check myself, but I'm generally rather sensitive to such things and I never noticed anything like what was described.
Tulling: I read it in some article in a newspaper several years ago. It could be a fabrication, it could be that it is true for some editions but not the one you read. If you are certain it is incorrect, by all means remove the example.
Removed a line as it duplicated the meaning of the Earth Is the Centre of the Universe example
The line in Enterprise sounds exactly like the recurring joke in the original series where Chekov claims everything was invented in Russia.
>> (Americans really did invent a good proportion of the technology we take for granted in the modern world, for example.)
Patently false. Most of the technology we use today has its foundation in Scotland, England, Switzerland, or the far east... Americans have in fact invented very little, but are major consumers, and as such a force for the improvement of such products. Someone Did Not Do The Research.
- Darktalon: On one
cesspitforum I used to frequent, we had an American nationalist whose mission seemed to be to demonstrate how much better the US was than the UK. To this end, he reeled off a list of what he thought were American inventions. Almost all of them were in fact European, and a goodly chunk were British.
>>Anyone else think Bleach belongs here? wih all the hollows and arrancars that attack Karakura Town on a daily basis you have to wonder if the whole world outside of japan or their hometown is spiritually dead
kicking_k: I have to take issue with the suggestion that the narrator of the Narnia books implies that Calormene food is unpalatable foreign muck. The Narnians in "The Horse and his Boy" think it is, but that's because they're homesick for Narnian food. The Boy, Shasta, has been brought up with it and thinks it's delicious, and if anything the narrator gently reminds us that tastes vary: "You might not have liked it, but Shasta did." Children are, after all, often deeply unadventurous eaters, and in immediately post-war Britain you wouldn't find many who had encountered foreign food. I've done a slight edit on these grounds.
Observation: The list of subtropes should to be split from the list of general examples to be more readable. —Document N
I can't think of the best way to put it, but there should be some exception if the site is just 'where the weird thingy already is', shouldn't there? Torchwood has 'the Rift' in Cardiff, for example. What's the line between 'set it where I live' and 'set it where the thingy is'?
