On Mar 22, 2006, at 11:47 AM, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:

> I prefer to read the original texts, with all the word-jokes
> and other things the author put in.

Well, a "translator" of reasonable quality ought to preserve much
of that, and there are probably enough good translators for British
to American that little is lost.  Other languages are less fortunate,
and less similar.

There was a very interesting side-discussion on R.A.SF.W where a
women who had done some of the official translations of Bujold
into Italian described some of the difficulty translating
descriptions of the characters' meaningful yet subtle hand gestures
into Italian, where apparently hand gestures are seldom subtle, and
therefore literal translations were just ... not right.  A more
surprising and unexpected example of the "Chinglish" issue, in a
situation where you would have expected the cultures to be similar.

BillW
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