Rod Collins

Translating Books Into English - What Gets Lost in Translation ?

Readers who have English as their first language are spoiled when it comes to books, it seems most of the fiction read around the world is initially written in English. Therefore most of us rarely read foreign language books translated into our language.

Some great literature has, of course, been written in Russian etc but these have been subject to expert translation, often numerous times leading to a well honed piece of work.
What about those that are more run-of-the-mill ?

I am thinking this as I am just coming to the end of The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell. It is an Inspector Kurt Wallander mystery originally written in Swedish. A good read but sometimes the translation lets it down.
Some things just don’t seem to sit right, phrasing, prose and certain words used which are technically correct but just not quite right.

This first came to my attention when I read a series of books by Jean-Christophe Grange, again some good plotting, characters and storylines but terrible translations.
Written in third person narrative the translation continually referred to the detective as The Copper for example, just not right and clearly the work of a translator whose first language was not English.

It’s clearly a very difficult job translating a book and trying to keep the nuances and feel intact but I wonder if it would not be better if the books was initially translated technically by someone native to the author and then tweaked here and there by an English editor ?

Returning to Henning Mankell, there are also some switches between 1st and 3rd party narrative which seem jarring and clunky at times, also on occasion slightly confusing.
Although traditional thought leans toward sticking to one narrative or the other there are notable exceptions which employ the switch, Treasure Island, for example, shows how it can work when done well.

It all made me wonder what other countries think of us, our way of life etc when much must be based on erroneous translations which can so easily change the whole feel of a book ?

Anyway I suspect I’ve bored you enough about this, I’m reading heavily at the moment so any recommendations what to read next are greatly appreciated.
Regards
Rod - Literary Pedant !