Re: [Adonthell-general] Waste's Edge i18n

[Kai Sterker]

On Fri, 12 Apr 2002 08:57:58 +0200 address@hidden wrote:

> I think the translation does not have to be as close to the original
> as possible, it should be good in its own terms (each language works
> slightly different, so a direct translation is quite difficult). 

That's certainly true. The reason I thought about this is the German
translation of LOTR. There is the 'original' translation by Margaret
Carroux and a new one by Wolfgang Krege, which is rumored to be crap.
The copy I have actually belongs to my mother, but I wanted to have my
own and had to decide whether I should spent 75 EUR for the old or 30
for the new edition. Fortunately I found a PDF on the web that had a
chapter in english, old and new translation next to each other
(http://www.tolkiengesellschaft.de/down/specialuebersetz.pdf). And to my
surprise, the translation of Carroux practically had the same
grammatical structure as the original text. And I think that was what
made her translation exceptional (so I bought that one) while Krege, who
made a lot of changes to the structure, deserves the bashing he got. ;)

Anyway, in our case people probably won't compare original and
translated text, so it's not a problem in our case. The important thing
is that it sounds good in it's own right, and fits to the respective
NPC.


> I suppose in the German version, the character;s names should be left
> in English, because most people are used to English names from films
> ect. If you want me to, I can help with the translation into German.
> Just send me the English dialogues, I'll translate them.

Thanks. I haven't generated the language catalogue template yet, but
once I have I'll send you a copy. We can share the work though, as it's
probably a few 100K of text.

Kai