translation: Dutch Radch 2 + 3
Jun. 18th, 2020 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
itrytobei'm not going to do such an extensive post for Mariëtte van Gelder's translations of Het zwaard van de Radch and De genade van de Radch as i did for Het recht van de Radch. partly because i'm tired and don't have much time, but mostly because there's not terribly much to add. so this is more of a summary of my thoughts, plus a few things that did stand out:
an interesting thing i noticed is that humans are referred to as menselijken (a nominalised adjective), rather than the more usual noun mens. i think that's to distinguish between people and humans, which Dutch doesn't have separate words for, both are mensen. still, it was a little confusing when Anaander said that AIs can't be significant because they're not mensen, i would have just gone with personen.
even though Dutch has a neuter third person pronoun het, like English and German, AIs aren't referred to with het, but with ze (she), like humans. i'm not entirely sure why, but i guess i do agree. i don't have any arguments for it other than "het would just sound weird", i suspect there might be a difference in the use of it and het, but i don't really have anything to support that and i don't feel like going into it.
for some reason the Presger gun is called a geweer, which means "rifle" or other guns with long barrels, even though it's clearly a handgun that can be hidden under a jacket. this is apparently a common problem in Dutch translations. my mother, who reads more crime/detective/thrillers than i do, has mentioned before that for some reason beyond our understanding, "gun" is systematically translated as geweer, whether that's accurate or not.
other than that, i have many of the same complaints as with book 1. lots of mistakes where the translation doesn't say the same thing as the original, and sometimes even the complete opposite. many things i'm tempted to call reading comprehension mistakes. some inattentive mistakes, like "six seconds" being turned into zes minuten (which is quite a long pause in a conversation...), or the wrong name (Tisarwat instead of Ekalu). some word choices that are not technically incorrect, but that i personally don't like – verdoezelen is way overused, and the translator doesn't seem to like the word wanhopig but nearly always translates "desperate" as radeloos.
anyway, i wasn't particularly impressed with the translation.
an interesting thing i noticed is that humans are referred to as menselijken (a nominalised adjective), rather than the more usual noun mens. i think that's to distinguish between people and humans, which Dutch doesn't have separate words for, both are mensen. still, it was a little confusing when Anaander said that AIs can't be significant because they're not mensen, i would have just gone with personen.
even though Dutch has a neuter third person pronoun het, like English and German, AIs aren't referred to with het, but with ze (she), like humans. i'm not entirely sure why, but i guess i do agree. i don't have any arguments for it other than "het would just sound weird", i suspect there might be a difference in the use of it and het, but i don't really have anything to support that and i don't feel like going into it.
for some reason the Presger gun is called a geweer, which means "rifle" or other guns with long barrels, even though it's clearly a handgun that can be hidden under a jacket. this is apparently a common problem in Dutch translations. my mother, who reads more crime/detective/thrillers than i do, has mentioned before that for some reason beyond our understanding, "gun" is systematically translated as geweer, whether that's accurate or not.
other than that, i have many of the same complaints as with book 1. lots of mistakes where the translation doesn't say the same thing as the original, and sometimes even the complete opposite. many things i'm tempted to call reading comprehension mistakes. some inattentive mistakes, like "six seconds" being turned into zes minuten (which is quite a long pause in a conversation...), or the wrong name (Tisarwat instead of Ekalu). some word choices that are not technically incorrect, but that i personally don't like – verdoezelen is way overused, and the translator doesn't seem to like the word wanhopig but nearly always translates "desperate" as radeloos.
anyway, i wasn't particularly impressed with the translation.
