*flails wildly*

[donutsweeper]

In news of the awesome in nature, faikit on AO3 has translated my MCU fic "Old Dog, New Bun" into Russian!

Oddly enough, my one semester of Russian twenty-mumble years ago isn't enough for me to be able to read it, but it looks awesome and I'm super thrilled they liked my story enough to do a translation of it. If you know any Russian please go take a look at "Старый хот-дог, новая обертка" and drop them a comment or kudos!

Comments

[adafrog.livejournal.com]

Congrats!

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

Thank you! :)

[med_cat]

Hello there,

capt_facepalm asked me to take a look at the Russian translation, and I thought you would like to know that it is of quite a good quality overall :)

Cheers,

Cat

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for taking a look and letting me know! :)

[med_cat]

My pleasure :)

[awanderingbard.livejournal.com]

That's awesome! It makes you feel like a 'real' writer when you get translated, doesn't it?

There's a girl who has been translating a lot of my Skyfall/Sherlock fic into Russian, and she does an incredible job. I just look at it through Google translate, but sometimes her versions of the jokes I like even better than mine, and she always includes footnotes to explain any references the audience might not get. I'm so impressed by it.

Congrats to you!

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's awesome! I'm surprised Google translate did a good enough job to show you that though, I did try looking at this via google translate and could only tell they seemed to have done a decent job. Interestingly, this author also included a footnote (explaining what Nathan's is and when it incorporated) I wonder if that's typical for translators to add in to help people understand the fics.

[awanderingbard.livejournal.com]

Google translate is a bit dodgy and awkward to read, but I'm mostly looking for the general feel of how things go. I had one person who translated my story once and took out huge chunks of text, changed the way I worded things beyond what you would need to translate something and just made a mess of it. I felt like what she wanted to do was use my idea for a story and write her own thing, and I would have been cool with that, honestly, I just didn't like that she used my work as a base and then made it so different.

Anyway, the Russian girl is very faithful in her translations and even includes my author's notes, and is really lovely. And I had someone who translated a couple of my stories into Chinese and did a really great job, too. She had footnotes on hers as well, so maybe that's a common thing. Translating is an art, so you have the option of going really literal and including notes for cultural references or changing the cultural references to something relatable to the readers. I used to translate French lyrics into English for French musicals, and the more fluent I became in French, the less literal my translations became because I was able to get the essence of things.

My favourite footnote was from the Chinese girl who put a note basically saying she couldn't figure out what 'wriggle room' was, which is one of those moments where you go 'oh, yeah, I guess that's kind of unique turn of phrase to English'. :-P

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

Translation is definitely an art and there are so many phrases we use that just don't have literal translations (like wiggle room, etc) which is why I always laugh a little at all those programs and ads for things that are supposed to provide great, computer generated translations for things. Sure, they can provide simple stuff, but even that can be problematic (i.e. asking "where's the bathroom" - a US person means they need a place with a toilet but society has taught them to call that place 'bathroom' instead while for most other peoples it means a room where one can take a bath)

[awanderingbard.livejournal.com]

Google does a pretty great job at managing the idioms. I was translating "I owe you one" into Dutch, and it gave me the Dutch version of that ('I owe you in chalk'), which was pretty impressive. But for the most part, it's very hit and miss.

And heck, you have to do translating between dialects sometimes. I remember being on vacation in the States as a little girl and my mom went down to the front desk of the hotel to ask for an elastic. She tried every which way to explain what she wanted until finally, the clerk said 'do y'all mean a rubber band?'.

And my brother and his girlfriend were doing some shopping one day in the States and they stopped for lunch, and the waitress knew they were from Canada because his girlfriend excused herself to go the 'washroom', which I didn't even know was a Canadianism.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

That's pretty impressive for Google! I suspect it is constantly improving with that kind of thing.

Fandom, and reading fanfics by authors from other countries, has really opened my eyes to how many different terms and phrases people can have for things and OOC it can sounds when you hear the some of those things out of different characters' mouths. Some are easy dialect switches (i.e. lift/elevator) but some are whole phrases that are just oddly disjointed words to someone in a different culture (there was one fic I read where a (US) character was positive another didn't like him because he didn't bring grapes when he visited him in the hospital and I was all.. o.O and confused because I didn't know that was a thing people did in certain cultures)

[awanderingbard.livejournal.com]

As much as I try to mimic British ways of speaking in my writing, even Britpicked, I know the way I word things can be very North American sometimes. You're right, it's more than just words, it's the way they're ordered and used. One thing I like to do is go to IDEA (http://dialectsarchive.com) and find the region my character is from to get a feel of how they sound. I don't like doing phonetic accents unless my character is having trouble understanding or making a point of how odd it sounds to them, but even getting the rhythm of how it sounds is helpful when choosing words for them.

And I remember confusing someone very badly when I called a tortoise a turtle, because of all the things in the world, I never thought that they would be such distinct creatures in England as to require clarification. In fact, it took me quite a lot of research even after it was pointed out to find out exactly what the problem was. It comes down to: a turtle has fins and a tortoise has legs. At least where I am, any creature with a shell is a turtle, but in England, unless it's in the sea, it's a tortoise. Someone was very distressed about this.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

I love the dialects archive!

I had no idea that was the actual difference between turtles and tortoises. I mean, I knew they were actually different creatures, but not the specifics of how they were different.

Dialects are so difficult! Especially in fic where you're trying to get the sense of someone's accent without writing it out (I've come across far too many authors who attempt writing out accents and it can be terribly painful to try to read them sometimes) but a lot of times you can get by with just using the little things like "I've not" vs "I haven't" or whatever to give the greater sense of their rhythm of speech.

[awanderingbard.livejournal.com]

a lot of times you can get by with just using the little things like "I've not" vs "I haven't" or whatever to give the greater sense of their rhythm of speech.

Yes, exactly that! I do that with child characters, too, to show their age. Dialogue is my favourite part of writing, I love coming up with how original characters speak and distinguish them from each other.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

It shows what a dedicated writer you are to do that :)