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Post by Mijahu on Mar 14, 2009 0:51:32 GMT -5
I'm sure this has been brought up before, but what hasn't by now?
aSoUE has been translated, from English, into thirty one languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek and Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish. This list is from Wikipedia, though, and we all know how accurate they can be (especially when it comes to aSoUE).
How do those three suspicious letters that we've all come to know and love fit into each of these languages while still maintaining their various meanings, and what are all the different variations of letters? I think French is VDC, but that's all I know. We could get a list going:
English: VFD Spanish: VFD French: VDC Italian: VF Portuguese: CSC? German: FF Polish: WZS
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Post by KlausBaudelaire833 on Mar 14, 2009 3:03:40 GMT -5
Awww... No Tagalog.
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Post by Dante on Mar 14, 2009 3:39:53 GMT -5
In French it is indeed "V.D.C." They even modified the insignia in some cases to match: Apparently, in Germany it's "F.F." Edit: In another language it's "C.S.C." - but I'm not entirely sure which language. It may be Portuguese.
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Post by Mijahu on Mar 14, 2009 9:12:17 GMT -5
Hey, they did a good job with the VDC insignia!
Now I'm wondering, though. Did they even finish the series in all of these languages? Or even get to book five, where VFD is first mentioned?
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Post by Dante on Mar 14, 2009 9:36:37 GMT -5
Well, if you consult TheDailyPunctilio.tk's cover resources (dear gods, we're lucky to have Helquist), you can see which books some other languages definitely did, and bear in mind that I think the site may have been abandoned, as I know for a fact that all thirteen books were published in France.
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Post by thedoctororwell on Mar 16, 2009 13:17:29 GMT -5
All thirteen books have been translated in France ; only two were made for Quebec, but I assume thay just released the original french versions after that (after all the quebecian editions were just adaptations of the french translations, which is somewhat necessary : in France "gosse" means "brat" but in Quebec it means "testicle," which would make Olaf's rants actually creepier than they already were). I think France and Poland are the only countries to have translated the unauthorized autobiography, but I'm not sure.
In France VDC was actually coined before the translator had any remote idea of what VFD actually meant. She just had "Very Fancy Doilies," "Village of Fowl Devotees," "Volonteers fighting disease," and chose an acronym that would make them easy to translate. Not necessarily a bad choice : the VDC insignia looks more like an eye than the VFD one, and Villeneuve-des-Corbeaux actually means New CrowTown (it is improper to refer to crows as "fowl," or am i mistaken ?). These letters overall gave more solutions than difficulties to the translation. The actual meaning of VFD was however translated in a kinda lame manner... Volontaires Désenflammeurs Coupe-Feu ("unarsoning stop-fire volonteers"). It poses quite a few problems : 1) it destroys the ambiguity (is the departement supposed to put out fires or to start them ?); 2) it's pleonastic (désenflammeurs and coupe-feu imply the same idea), 3) it sounds weird and inelegant (neologisms galore !). Fans had thought of "Volontariat Départemental à la Combustion" (Volonteer Department for Combustion). But you don't always get what you want...
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Post by Dante on Mar 16, 2009 13:39:06 GMT -5
That's quite interesting; I'd assumed that the translators were given some information about the meaning of V.F.D. in order to not completely mess it up, and I know there was some of this involved with Harry Potter. But that they had a few books to go on for context helps. (it is improper to refer to crows as "fowl," or am i mistaken ?) It's a bit of a stretch... looking it up, it seems it technically only refers to a certain group of birds, but colloquially I think it can refer to any kind of bird. I guess it's a bit less prosaic than, say, "Village of Flying Devotees" - although, hm, that might add another layer to Hector's character...
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Post by Hermes on Mar 16, 2009 15:08:12 GMT -5
It's a bit of a stretch... looking it up, it seems it technically only refers to a certain group of birds, but colloquially I think it can refer to any kind of bird. ... I think that simply 'bird' is the older sense -Chaucer's 'Parliament of Fowls', for instance, is a parliament of birds of all kinds. It came to refer, more specifically, to the kind of bird which is raised for food - chickens, ducks, geese etc.
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Post by Mijahu on Mar 17, 2009 0:36:15 GMT -5
Volunteer Department for Combustion would have been much better, I think. Or, perhaps is would be better as Volunteer's Department for Combustion. Either way, the French translators certainly did do a fine job with what little information they'd been given.
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Post by munchkinguy on May 2, 2009 1:49:58 GMT -5
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Post by Arthur Morrow on May 17, 2009 13:30:12 GMT -5
I read the Portuguese versions of the books, and in fact they translated from VFD to CSC, three letters which here means "Corporação pelo Salvamento das Chamas", "Corporation for Rescue from Flames".
I think the translator used CSC because C and S are some common letters in Portuguese, and very easy to work with.
It's stressful here in Brazil because there is no Beatrice Letters or Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid. And they used the VFD insignia to represent the eye, didn't even draw one that has the letters C, S and C.
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Post by Dante on May 17, 2009 14:11:13 GMT -5
Thanks for posting, arthurmorrow! I read the Portuguese versions of the books, and in fact they translated from VFD to CSC, three letters which here means "Corporação pelo Salvamento das Chamas", "Corporation for Rescue from Flames". Edit: In another language it's "C.S.C." - but I'm not entirely sure which language. It may be Portuguese. Will you look at that. I remembered something accurately for once. I think the translator used CSC because C and S are some common letters in Portuguese, and very easy to work with. Ah, that's quite interesting to hear. I always wondered what the tactic employed by translators was. To be fair on the translators, something like TBL is an extremely extensive package - and indeed, I'm not sure the whole arrangement with the punch-out letters would even work, since they'd need to be entirely different letters... I do agree that it's an unfair situation, of course.
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Post by Arthur Morrow on May 17, 2009 15:05:24 GMT -5
Ah! Now I remember another translation to Portuguese that is a bit weird:
In English it's Captain Widdershins, in Portuguese it's Captain "Andarré". The word "Andarré" may be a mix of the words "Anda" and "Ré", "Go" and "Backwards", but "Ré" is used more for describing the backward of a car.
And (I think) the newspaper found by Violet has the headline with first letters V, F and D. In Portuguese version it's not CSC, not even VFD.
EDIT:
The name of the 7th book, TVV, was translated as "A Cidade Sinistra dos Corvos", "The Creepy Crows City. The translator took the oportunity of how easy it was to translate, and made a title that was CSC.
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Post by Dante on May 17, 2009 16:02:41 GMT -5
I'm personally interested in how translators choose to modify certain things so that any connotations they have still work in the target language (although I'm a terrible speaker of other languages myself, paradoxically), so this is all good stuff to me. Thanks.
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Post by Hermes on May 17, 2009 16:35:43 GMT -5
Does anyone know what it is in Spanish? (I'm wondering, because VFD seems to have connections in Peru.)
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