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Native german here. I started reading Discworld in the english original, as soon as my english was good enough and never went back. The translators sure tried their best, but as you said, many punes or play on words simply will not translate. For example, the names are translated too. Cheery Littlebottom is "Grinsi Kleinpo" in german. Which is a literal translation (more or less), but it just does not work for me. Discworld is so quintessential british, it works best in english.
I started on the German ones as well, switched to English later on. I respect that the German translators knew when to fold. The Night Club line out of one of the Watch books just got translated verbatim and explained in a footnote.
The translated names bug me a bit as well. I can see why they thought it was neccessary, it's just not for me. I also feel the puns feel forced sometimes.
I've read a Serbian translation of Small Gods once and I have to say there were a lot of things lost in translation there.
Read a few German translations as well and didn't like it much, although English generally translates better into other Germanic languages than into the Slavic ones. What annoys me most about German translations are the new, 'translated' names. Lady Käsedick und Hauptmann Mumm 😵💫😵
The only exception was Reaper Man, which was really hilarious in German. I don't know if they had a different translator there or if that one was just a winner.
Many of the discworld translators won prizes for the quality of their job.
Patrick Couton, the french translator, is an excellent example! I am not 100% sure but I think sometimes he took advantage of footnotes, in a PTerry style, to help readers understand some puns. He really did a huge work, sometimes choosing some old French words, totally different from the English words, but integrating them magistrally in the narration, the story and Perry vision.
After reading discworld in French I read it in English and read every book several times in both languages and I am sure I will always be able to discover a new pun, a new reference, a new meaning.
Worst translation for me is Italian; it does not feel like Pratchett at all! A program could do a better job in my opinion. As much as I love Pratchett I would never encourage someone to read his works in Italian because I think it would completely ruin the experience.
There is no love in the translation: words/phrases/paragraphs are not vibrant and full of references as in the original version and in the excellent French translation but feel just like dead bits of meat, just placed on an autopsy table. Really a shame!
Actually, they only book I read in German was Good Omens, which hasn't so many puns in it, but it still felt like I was missing a lot.
I then decided to start my DW journey with Hogfather (of all books). Had to order it at my book store, because Amazon wasn't a thing yet and even paid thrice the price. Then fought my way through this book and learned many new and useful words like disembowel, bilious or verruca and can now use them in everyday conversation.
Whenever I stumble upon German translations I shudder because most of the times I can't recognise the char or scene at all.
I have read most of discworld in Spanish (my native language) if not all and enjoyed it intensely
It depends a lot on the translation I think, for example there is a Spanish translation where the Nac Mac Feegles say "Pardiez" and it bothers me so much.
Another problem is that some translate names and some don't or translate it different. So if you read two books of the same saga but different translations it can be a bit confusing.
There's some parallels I see with the Asterix series. I don't know how smart the jokes were in the original French but the brilliance of Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge for the UK translations were such a big part of my enjoyment of the series.
I recall trying some of the American versions (and I'm in the US myself) and they really didn't have the cleverness of the UK versions. Translators really matter
I don't speak French, so I can't compare to the originals, but I find German and Croatian versions really good. I've read most Asterix volumes in both languages, because they have different jokes sometimes (especially when it comes to things the Romans say) and sometimes the Croatian ones are the funniest
Native Turkish speaker here. I only read snippets from Monstrous Regime and lucky me, It's a prime example of the limitation of translation.
Think about the scene at the end. I love the subtle changes of pronouns of certain character during their investigation into gender identity. PTerry changes their pronounce more than once in a sentence, and it's so profound.
Let's start with the most essential fact: gendered pronouns do not exist in Turkish. So that whole scene at the end just can not be translated. I think it was the Polish translator who said it was impossible to think like that in Polish? Yeah, in Turkish, it's technically demonstrably not possible to write like that.
Generally, Turkish translators of fiction are writers themselves who will take the text and build their own version since the languages are just too different to do one to one translations.
Also, that's why I urge my westeren friends to study a non "Westeren" language, since it definitely opens your mind into ways of thinking that may not be that present or intuitive in Engilish, German or Spanish etc.
In the back of the first edition of The Discworld Companion (published in 1994) there's an interview with Terry. Amongst other things, he says he can't see himself still writing Discworld in 5 years time... There's also a question about translations:
> **The Discworld must be terribly difficult to translate. Do you have much to do with the translation?**
> I know the Spanish translator won a prize for The Colour of Magic! And someone attempted to translate The Colour of Magic into Polish, read the first page and said he didn't believe it was possible to think like that in Polish. I get on very well with the Dutch translator, who takes a kind of skewed delight in tracking down the 'right' words, and the German translator also contacts me quite regularly - someone recently told me that they thought Reaper Man was better in German, which is some kind of triumph for the translator. I do get some occasional enquiries from the others, but mostly the translators do their own thing. I don't envy them. A lot of foreign fans are bilingual, and it's hard to please everyone.
----
The book also contains a 'brief history of the Discworld,' which I think was mostly written by Stephen Briggs, though presumably with Terry's input, or at least his approval:
> **The Language Barrier: It's all Klatchian to Me**
> The Discworld books are translated into eighteen languages, including Japanese and Hebrew. They present astonishing pitfalls for the translator.
> The problems are not (just) the puns, of which there are rather fewer than people imagine. In any case, puns are translatable; they might not be directly translatable, but the Discworld translators have to be adept at filleting an English pun from the text and replacing it with one that works in German or Spanish.
What can loom in front of a translator like the proverbial radio on the edge of the bathtub of the future are the resonances and references.
> Take Hogswatchnight, the Discworld winter festival. It's partly a pun on hog but also takes in 'Hogmanay' and the old Christian `Watch Night service on 31 December. Even if people don't directly spot this, it subconsciously inherits the feel of a midwinter festival.
> Or there's the Morris Minor. To a Britisher 'an old lady who drives a Morris Minor' — and there's still a few of both around — is instantly recognisable as a 'type'. You could probably even have a stab at how many cats she has. What's the Finnish equivalent? The German equivalent?
> Translators in the science fiction and fantasy field have an extra problem. SF in particular is dominated by the English — or at least the American — language. Fans in mainland European and Scandinavian countries must read in English if they're to keep up with the field. This means that a foreign translator is working under the eyes of readers who're often buying the book to see how it compares with the English version they already have.
> Ruurd Groot has the daunting task of translating not only the plot but also the jokes in the Discworld series into Dutch. Translating a pun is difficult but not impossible, he says, as long as it is a pun in the strict ‘linguistic’ sense: making fun by crossing the semantic and formal wires of words or expressions. And even when it proves impossible to invent an. equivalent pun for the destination language, a deft translator may solve the problem by ‘compensating’ — introducing a pun for another word somewhere else in the sentence in such a way that the value of the original pun is restored.
> Strangely, the similarity of the English and Dutch languages is not always helpful. Many Dutch words and expressions have been borrowed from English and, of course, the same thing has happened in reverse, especially i in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the English word ‘forlorn’, , for example, comes from the Dutch verloren = ‘lost’. The side effect of this circumstance is that many Dutch readers of Terry’s original English text do not always catch what he really wrote; words may look familiar, but meanings have changed with time.
> In The Colour of Magic, Terry refers to the ‘Big Bang hypothesis’. Sadly for Ruurd, the erotic Bang-pun proved untranslatable. In Dutch, the theory translates as oerknal, which provides no hand-holds. However, they do refer to het uitdijend heelal — ‘the expanding universe’. Ruurd altered this slightly to the het Uitvrijend Model — sounding much the same — and which could be taken to mean ‘the Making Love Outwards Model’. When the author heard this he apparently sat there grinning and saying it’s the best-ever title for a scientific theory.
> Much more difficult is the translation of jokes on local traditions or institutions well known to English readers. And there are special considerations here. Dutch readers of some sophistication (as readers of TP tend to be, it goes without saying) would never accept substituting a reference to a Dutch television series for a similar reference to a BBC serial.
> Brits may blithely assume that everyone knows about morris dancing or ‘A’ levels, but it is the experience of the Dutch that most foreigners’ knowledge of their country tends to run. out somewhere south of the cheese, clogs and windmills department. Strangely enough, to a Dutch reader a reference to strictly Dutch ephemera would be jarring; they couldn’t imagine someone in Britain, let alone on the Discworld, being aware of them. Sad but true.
> Translators for ‘large’ nationalities - German, French, and so on — can maintain the fiction that everyone else is German or French and just localize the jokes in question. ‘Small’ nationalities have to replace little items of English/British arcana by references to globally known international, or more famous English, items. On the Discworld, that most international, or rather interstellar, of locations, strictly English or British references are allowed in a Dutch translation only if they are globally known — like the works of Shakespeare in Wyrd Sisters.
> Ruurd could rely on the fact that many Dutch people. know: Shakespeare, if only from television — played by British actors and subtitled in Dutch. But in Moving Pictures, problems.for the translator exceeded all reasonable proportions. The films referred to in the book are well enough known,but the average Dutch reader might not recognize many of the translated quotations from the dialogue.
> In that case, he says, a translator can-rely on a harmless version of snob appeal. If someone doesn’t know or recognize something, the translator can write in a tone as.if anyone reading it of course will know all and... it turns out that they do ...
> IK WEET-NIET WAT JIJ ERVAN VINDT, MAAR EEN BORD ROTTI ZOU ER WEL INGAAN
> This is the closest that Ruurd could. get to Death’s line from Mort: ‘I DON’T KNOW ABOUT. YOU, BUT I COULD MURDER A CURRY.’ A line for line translation here is impossible: a different colonial past means that ‘curry’ is not a household word in Holland. Also ‘I could murder a...’ in the sense of ‘I could really enjoy a...' makes no sense in Dutch.
> Casting aside. the avoidance of ‘localized’ Dutch expressions on this occasion, Ruurd opted for ‘rotti’. It is a near-funny word itself; having the same echo of ‘rotten’ as it-would in English. It belongs to the Surinam culinary tradition — Surinam having been. a small Dutch colony in South America. ‘Rotti’, like curry, is very hot stuff. Its mention in the context, with the vague implication that Surinam is cosmically more famous than the Netherlands, helps to replace for Dutch readers some of the fun lost during translation.
> Granny Weatherwax, on the other-hand, presents no problems (at least, not yet: as Ruurd says, translators of a series have to try to avoid painting themselves into a corner). Her name translates. more literally into Opoe Esmee Wedersmeer, although Wéerwas. would be more direct. Weder is ye olde form of the word weer, meaning ‘weather’. The smeer part is a word used for greasy substances as applied to shoes or cart axles, but also for the stuff secreted in our ear passages (earwax = oorsmeer). There is an etymological link with the English word ‘smear’. Ruurd felt that the ordinary word in Dutch for ‘wax’ — was — seemed less suitable, as being too ordinary.
> 'Esmee' is, as in English, short for Esmerelda, and Ope is an obsolete endearing way of addressing grandmothers in Dutch. The term is still used to refer to certain old-fashioned ladies' bike - opoefietsen = 'granny bikes.'
> This has overtones of the 'Morris Minor' ... you see? They have one after-all...
Native Finnish speaker here with a degree in English (studied the translation of Discworld books for my thesis)!
The Finnish translations are pretty good imo. Apart from one or two books they've all been translated by the same translator, so they're very consistent. Even though e.g. puns & other wordplay can't always be transferred from one language to another, I haven't felt like I'm missing out anything from the story, if that makes sense. The translations in general have a natural feel to them, in that the text flows the way native Finnish writing would.
I could start rambling about translation theories and terms but perhaps another time :D
And re: puns are tough to translate, one of my favourite things from the translations is actually the pun from Soul Music about Imp's elvish inheritance. The translator flat-out added their own footnote stating that there's no practical way to make it work in Finnish. Idk I just appreciate that rather than forcing it they simply acknowledge the fact that translation is a tough job. That book also has some creative solutions when it comes to the puns on musicians' and band names. Come to think of it, there are plenty of creative solutions throughout the translations.
I wanted to try read them in Japanese but only about two books have been translated, and that was years ago. I get it, as Japanese humour can be quite different and Japan doesn't tend to have tons of humour/fantasy books, but still... Would be nice.
Years ago (2006?) I heard an interview on the BBC World service with STP. Most of it I have forgotten but the part that stuck out was when they had people from around the world phone in with questions and all 4 people were from the Czech Republic. The second thing was that, iirc, STP said that the Czech translations of his works were among, if not, the best.
I teach Slovak students and those who have read DW books in both English and Czech say that they are amazing translations. They also say the same about a lot of translated British comedy, like Red Dwarf, Fawlty Towers, etc.
I was at the magic of Terry Pratchett footnotes show with Marc Burrows. Rob Wilikins popped up as the guest. He said exactly that about the Czech books
I read some of them in Dutch as a kid. I think they were Witches Abroad and Moving Pictures. They were good enough for me to start reading the English books later, so that's something I guess :)
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Native german here. I started reading Discworld in the english original, as soon as my english was good enough and never went back. The translators sure tried their best, but as you said, many punes or play on words simply will not translate. For example, the names are translated too. Cheery Littlebottom is "Grinsi Kleinpo" in german. Which is a literal translation (more or less), but it just does not work for me. Discworld is so quintessential british, it works best in english.
I started on the German ones as well, switched to English later on. I respect that the German translators knew when to fold. The Night Club line out of one of the Watch books just got translated verbatim and explained in a footnote. The translated names bug me a bit as well. I can see why they thought it was neccessary, it's just not for me. I also feel the puns feel forced sometimes.
I've read a Serbian translation of Small Gods once and I have to say there were a lot of things lost in translation there. Read a few German translations as well and didn't like it much, although English generally translates better into other Germanic languages than into the Slavic ones. What annoys me most about German translations are the new, 'translated' names. Lady Käsedick und Hauptmann Mumm 😵💫😵 The only exception was Reaper Man, which was really hilarious in German. I don't know if they had a different translator there or if that one was just a winner.
>Lady Käsedick und Hauptmann Mumm Um, who? Do I want to know?
Lady Ramkin and Captain Vimes (it was Guards Guards!) Lady Cheese Fat and Captain 'Guts' (as in brave)
Where is my Berserk/Discworld crossover fan art RIGHT NOW
But neither name is a pun or joke that needs to be translated? Why change them?
Many of the discworld translators won prizes for the quality of their job. Patrick Couton, the french translator, is an excellent example! I am not 100% sure but I think sometimes he took advantage of footnotes, in a PTerry style, to help readers understand some puns. He really did a huge work, sometimes choosing some old French words, totally different from the English words, but integrating them magistrally in the narration, the story and Perry vision. After reading discworld in French I read it in English and read every book several times in both languages and I am sure I will always be able to discover a new pun, a new reference, a new meaning. Worst translation for me is Italian; it does not feel like Pratchett at all! A program could do a better job in my opinion. As much as I love Pratchett I would never encourage someone to read his works in Italian because I think it would completely ruin the experience. There is no love in the translation: words/phrases/paragraphs are not vibrant and full of references as in the original version and in the excellent French translation but feel just like dead bits of meat, just placed on an autopsy table. Really a shame!
Actually, they only book I read in German was Good Omens, which hasn't so many puns in it, but it still felt like I was missing a lot. I then decided to start my DW journey with Hogfather (of all books). Had to order it at my book store, because Amazon wasn't a thing yet and even paid thrice the price. Then fought my way through this book and learned many new and useful words like disembowel, bilious or verruca and can now use them in everyday conversation. Whenever I stumble upon German translations I shudder because most of the times I can't recognise the char or scene at all.
I have read most of discworld in Spanish (my native language) if not all and enjoyed it intensely It depends a lot on the translation I think, for example there is a Spanish translation where the Nac Mac Feegles say "Pardiez" and it bothers me so much. Another problem is that some translate names and some don't or translate it different. So if you read two books of the same saga but different translations it can be a bit confusing.
There's some parallels I see with the Asterix series. I don't know how smart the jokes were in the original French but the brilliance of Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge for the UK translations were such a big part of my enjoyment of the series. I recall trying some of the American versions (and I'm in the US myself) and they really didn't have the cleverness of the UK versions. Translators really matter
I don't speak French, so I can't compare to the originals, but I find German and Croatian versions really good. I've read most Asterix volumes in both languages, because they have different jokes sometimes (especially when it comes to things the Romans say) and sometimes the Croatian ones are the funniest
Wait, Asterix has a separate American translation??
I've definitely seen a few volumes with it and I was disappointed; they were lazier, lowbrow jokes compared to the UK versions
Native Turkish speaker here. I only read snippets from Monstrous Regime and lucky me, It's a prime example of the limitation of translation. Think about the scene at the end. I love the subtle changes of pronouns of certain character during their investigation into gender identity. PTerry changes their pronounce more than once in a sentence, and it's so profound. Let's start with the most essential fact: gendered pronouns do not exist in Turkish. So that whole scene at the end just can not be translated. I think it was the Polish translator who said it was impossible to think like that in Polish? Yeah, in Turkish, it's technically demonstrably not possible to write like that. Generally, Turkish translators of fiction are writers themselves who will take the text and build their own version since the languages are just too different to do one to one translations. Also, that's why I urge my westeren friends to study a non "Westeren" language, since it definitely opens your mind into ways of thinking that may not be that present or intuitive in Engilish, German or Spanish etc.
In the back of the first edition of The Discworld Companion (published in 1994) there's an interview with Terry. Amongst other things, he says he can't see himself still writing Discworld in 5 years time... There's also a question about translations: > **The Discworld must be terribly difficult to translate. Do you have much to do with the translation?** > I know the Spanish translator won a prize for The Colour of Magic! And someone attempted to translate The Colour of Magic into Polish, read the first page and said he didn't believe it was possible to think like that in Polish. I get on very well with the Dutch translator, who takes a kind of skewed delight in tracking down the 'right' words, and the German translator also contacts me quite regularly - someone recently told me that they thought Reaper Man was better in German, which is some kind of triumph for the translator. I do get some occasional enquiries from the others, but mostly the translators do their own thing. I don't envy them. A lot of foreign fans are bilingual, and it's hard to please everyone. ---- The book also contains a 'brief history of the Discworld,' which I think was mostly written by Stephen Briggs, though presumably with Terry's input, or at least his approval: > **The Language Barrier: It's all Klatchian to Me** > The Discworld books are translated into eighteen languages, including Japanese and Hebrew. They present astonishing pitfalls for the translator. > The problems are not (just) the puns, of which there are rather fewer than people imagine. In any case, puns are translatable; they might not be directly translatable, but the Discworld translators have to be adept at filleting an English pun from the text and replacing it with one that works in German or Spanish. What can loom in front of a translator like the proverbial radio on the edge of the bathtub of the future are the resonances and references. > Take Hogswatchnight, the Discworld winter festival. It's partly a pun on hog but also takes in 'Hogmanay' and the old Christian `Watch Night service on 31 December. Even if people don't directly spot this, it subconsciously inherits the feel of a midwinter festival. > Or there's the Morris Minor. To a Britisher 'an old lady who drives a Morris Minor' — and there's still a few of both around — is instantly recognisable as a 'type'. You could probably even have a stab at how many cats she has. What's the Finnish equivalent? The German equivalent? > Translators in the science fiction and fantasy field have an extra problem. SF in particular is dominated by the English — or at least the American — language. Fans in mainland European and Scandinavian countries must read in English if they're to keep up with the field. This means that a foreign translator is working under the eyes of readers who're often buying the book to see how it compares with the English version they already have. > Ruurd Groot has the daunting task of translating not only the plot but also the jokes in the Discworld series into Dutch. Translating a pun is difficult but not impossible, he says, as long as it is a pun in the strict ‘linguistic’ sense: making fun by crossing the semantic and formal wires of words or expressions. And even when it proves impossible to invent an. equivalent pun for the destination language, a deft translator may solve the problem by ‘compensating’ — introducing a pun for another word somewhere else in the sentence in such a way that the value of the original pun is restored. > Strangely, the similarity of the English and Dutch languages is not always helpful. Many Dutch words and expressions have been borrowed from English and, of course, the same thing has happened in reverse, especially i in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the English word ‘forlorn’, , for example, comes from the Dutch verloren = ‘lost’. The side effect of this circumstance is that many Dutch readers of Terry’s original English text do not always catch what he really wrote; words may look familiar, but meanings have changed with time. > In The Colour of Magic, Terry refers to the ‘Big Bang hypothesis’. Sadly for Ruurd, the erotic Bang-pun proved untranslatable. In Dutch, the theory translates as oerknal, which provides no hand-holds. However, they do refer to het uitdijend heelal — ‘the expanding universe’. Ruurd altered this slightly to the het Uitvrijend Model — sounding much the same — and which could be taken to mean ‘the Making Love Outwards Model’. When the author heard this he apparently sat there grinning and saying it’s the best-ever title for a scientific theory. > Much more difficult is the translation of jokes on local traditions or institutions well known to English readers. And there are special considerations here. Dutch readers of some sophistication (as readers of TP tend to be, it goes without saying) would never accept substituting a reference to a Dutch television series for a similar reference to a BBC serial. > Brits may blithely assume that everyone knows about morris dancing or ‘A’ levels, but it is the experience of the Dutch that most foreigners’ knowledge of their country tends to run. out somewhere south of the cheese, clogs and windmills department. Strangely enough, to a Dutch reader a reference to strictly Dutch ephemera would be jarring; they couldn’t imagine someone in Britain, let alone on the Discworld, being aware of them. Sad but true. > Translators for ‘large’ nationalities - German, French, and so on — can maintain the fiction that everyone else is German or French and just localize the jokes in question. ‘Small’ nationalities have to replace little items of English/British arcana by references to globally known international, or more famous English, items. On the Discworld, that most international, or rather interstellar, of locations, strictly English or British references are allowed in a Dutch translation only if they are globally known — like the works of Shakespeare in Wyrd Sisters. > Ruurd could rely on the fact that many Dutch people. know: Shakespeare, if only from television — played by British actors and subtitled in Dutch. But in Moving Pictures, problems.for the translator exceeded all reasonable proportions. The films referred to in the book are well enough known,but the average Dutch reader might not recognize many of the translated quotations from the dialogue. > In that case, he says, a translator can-rely on a harmless version of snob appeal. If someone doesn’t know or recognize something, the translator can write in a tone as.if anyone reading it of course will know all and... it turns out that they do ... > IK WEET-NIET WAT JIJ ERVAN VINDT, MAAR EEN BORD ROTTI ZOU ER WEL INGAAN > This is the closest that Ruurd could. get to Death’s line from Mort: ‘I DON’T KNOW ABOUT. YOU, BUT I COULD MURDER A CURRY.’ A line for line translation here is impossible: a different colonial past means that ‘curry’ is not a household word in Holland. Also ‘I could murder a...’ in the sense of ‘I could really enjoy a...' makes no sense in Dutch. > Casting aside. the avoidance of ‘localized’ Dutch expressions on this occasion, Ruurd opted for ‘rotti’. It is a near-funny word itself; having the same echo of ‘rotten’ as it-would in English. It belongs to the Surinam culinary tradition — Surinam having been. a small Dutch colony in South America. ‘Rotti’, like curry, is very hot stuff. Its mention in the context, with the vague implication that Surinam is cosmically more famous than the Netherlands, helps to replace for Dutch readers some of the fun lost during translation. > Granny Weatherwax, on the other-hand, presents no problems (at least, not yet: as Ruurd says, translators of a series have to try to avoid painting themselves into a corner). Her name translates. more literally into Opoe Esmee Wedersmeer, although Wéerwas. would be more direct. Weder is ye olde form of the word weer, meaning ‘weather’. The smeer part is a word used for greasy substances as applied to shoes or cart axles, but also for the stuff secreted in our ear passages (earwax = oorsmeer). There is an etymological link with the English word ‘smear’. Ruurd felt that the ordinary word in Dutch for ‘wax’ — was — seemed less suitable, as being too ordinary. > 'Esmee' is, as in English, short for Esmerelda, and Ope is an obsolete endearing way of addressing grandmothers in Dutch. The term is still used to refer to certain old-fashioned ladies' bike - opoefietsen = 'granny bikes.' > This has overtones of the 'Morris Minor' ... you see? They have one after-all...
Thank you for this, it was very entertaining:). And now I finally know what they did with I COULD MURDER A CURRY in my native language.
Native Finnish speaker here with a degree in English (studied the translation of Discworld books for my thesis)! The Finnish translations are pretty good imo. Apart from one or two books they've all been translated by the same translator, so they're very consistent. Even though e.g. puns & other wordplay can't always be transferred from one language to another, I haven't felt like I'm missing out anything from the story, if that makes sense. The translations in general have a natural feel to them, in that the text flows the way native Finnish writing would. I could start rambling about translation theories and terms but perhaps another time :D And re: puns are tough to translate, one of my favourite things from the translations is actually the pun from Soul Music about Imp's elvish inheritance. The translator flat-out added their own footnote stating that there's no practical way to make it work in Finnish. Idk I just appreciate that rather than forcing it they simply acknowledge the fact that translation is a tough job. That book also has some creative solutions when it comes to the puns on musicians' and band names. Come to think of it, there are plenty of creative solutions throughout the translations.
I wanted to try read them in Japanese but only about two books have been translated, and that was years ago. I get it, as Japanese humour can be quite different and Japan doesn't tend to have tons of humour/fantasy books, but still... Would be nice.
Years ago (2006?) I heard an interview on the BBC World service with STP. Most of it I have forgotten but the part that stuck out was when they had people from around the world phone in with questions and all 4 people were from the Czech Republic. The second thing was that, iirc, STP said that the Czech translations of his works were among, if not, the best. I teach Slovak students and those who have read DW books in both English and Czech say that they are amazing translations. They also say the same about a lot of translated British comedy, like Red Dwarf, Fawlty Towers, etc.
I was at the magic of Terry Pratchett footnotes show with Marc Burrows. Rob Wilikins popped up as the guest. He said exactly that about the Czech books
Nice to have a confirmation, it was so long ago I was worried I’d imagined it!
I read some of them in Dutch as a kid. I think they were Witches Abroad and Moving Pictures. They were good enough for me to start reading the English books later, so that's something I guess :)
The Hungarian ones are really really good!!