I’ve read Red Platoon by Clinton Romesha, first in English, then I picked up the Japanese translation of the book, around halfway there was a word translated in the wrong context, in this case the word was *borrow* as in this part of the book, his comrade was asking Romesha about something he could borrow to give back later, however the verb *borrow* was mistranslated as in the context of asking the bank to borrow money from (貸し出し), instead of *borrow* as in letting someone take and use an item or object you own with the intent to return later. (借りる)
Past the halfway mark, there was another translation error, from the segment they were in a firefight with the insurgents, Romesha narrated this segment in present tense as it was happening, the part he talked about how his battle buddy was blasted by an IED, as the word for *died* was again mistranslated in Japanese, they instead translated the word *died* \- as in the generic definition of an individual passing away usually from an incident eg. accident, crime, etc. (死亡した), when the correct variant is: *died (KIA)* as in a soldier was killed in action while serving active duty. (戦死した)
In hindsight, do you know examples of mistranslations of a book originally from English translated into your language (other than English), such as:
* German
* Dutch
* French
* Spanish
* Portuguese
* Italian
* Russian
* Ukrainian
* Polish
* Czech
* Slovak
* Swedish
* Norwegian
* Turkish
* Arabic
* Hebrew
* Hungarian
* Romanian
* Greek
* Mandarin
* Korean
by Affectionate-Mars196
5 Comments
I read the Rush trilogy by Eve Silver a while back in German, since I grew up in a German speaking country (I’m bilingual). I don’t remember what book exactly this came up in (one of the later ones, possibly), but the MC was up in a tree with her boyfriend/crush spying on someone for a mission. A friend teased her about this, and started the “x and x sitting in a tree, K.I.S.S.I.N.G” thing. In German, this teasing quote doesn’t work (“x und x sitzen in einem Baum, K.Ü.S.S.E.N.-S.I.C.H” since it would have to be two words lol), but instead of using other, commonly used German teases, they translated it directly 😂 it was quite awkward to read. and it’s not like this scene was super plot relevant; they could have easily just switched it out.
i’m not sure if this is what you mean with “mistranslation”, but it just kinda ruined what could have been a really cute moment 😂
The first German Harry Potter translation was notorious for the amount of mistakes in it.
The most egregious one was that they translated the game “Exploding Snap” as “Snape Explodiert” insinuating that the first years were playing a card game about blowing up Severus Snape on their first train ride to Hogwarts.
This led to even an online Flash Game being developed where you could blow up Snape. XD
yes, it happens. in one case chopper was translated as a motorbike when context clearly showed it was a helicopter (might’ve been the other way round), or pebbles from the flinstones got translated not as a character but as small rocks.
There is a short story by Fredric Brown in which a character in far future comments on extinct mankind: “It was a good race”. Over the decades, German translators came up with various arbitrary solutions to this offence, including: “It was a good race to the finish”. Whatever that is supposed to mean in the context.
My Philosophy teacher back in high school once showed us a book where they translated the term “general will” (as in, “the general will of the people”), as if it referred to a military commander (“O General Will”) rather than the actual concept (“A vontade geral”).
Which, now that i think about it, is even worse if you keep in mind that Rousseau was French, but that mistake could only be made by translating from the English version of his writings.