Finished the Danish version of Murderbot Dairies - En Dræberbots Dagbog.
It's fun. It's an enjoyable few hours. But you can feel it's made by a small publisher, Delphiki, who likely don't have much help. There some grammar and three or four formatting mistakes, but not anything I haven't seen from larger publishers.
I love the choices in describing genders. Danish, Swedish and most Norwegian, have two grammatical genders: common gender and neutral. And we have 5 to 6 pronouns depending how you count. (Han, hun, den, det, de and some will also use hen).
Danish is a hard language. One small-talk topic among Danes is do discuss our language and grammar, because even we are uncertain on how we should say something. It is very much a context language. Plenty words have different meaning depending on the rest of the sentence. (for instance "overse" means both "missed noticing" and "being in charge of", and in this book additionally a name). And we use a lot of figures of speech.
So not to be to critical and acknowledging that translation is hard and it has to be more interpretation. I do not agree with all the choices. For instance not translating/explaining "hub" (though how to make "netværksknudepunkt" short is also hard) but they do call it SecEnhed and explain its a mishmash of word. (Sorry @oneiriad it was not translated by mashing sikkerhed and enhed) And they use Ond (evil) for hostiles rather than Fjendtlig(enemy like). I think my experience is affected by my background. It seems like the translator is not fluent in Danish tech language, because I have been trained to use other words and phrases in a scientific context. It does remove some of the fluidity for me, but I don't think people without my background will notice.
But no matter what. I would be happy to recommend it to a friend and I believe they will get the same experience and the same story as reading it in English.
When I posted the front page before, plenty said they liked the artwork. The artist is just called Guilio with no more details. But on the publishers blog they say it's an Italian comic book artist, and after doing some art comparison, I believe its Giulio Macaione (Facebook) who do a lot of queer art.
I hope they will translate more books. But the Publisher's facebook, blog and other update sites, have been silent since August 2023- So I don't know. (Maybe I should e-mail them.)
