hi my name is Nath and i like complaining about things and i’ve been sitting on this post since like May but i cannot hold back any longer! let’s talk about the Bulgarian translation of Ancillary Justice again. like last time, first i have the original English the way i see it on Amazon’s Kindle edition, except for the empty lines i added for reasons:
Still wary, I sat on the floor, leaning against another bench, and pulled a blanket up over my legs. As I had done every time I'd slept here, I opened my inner coat and put my hand on my gun, leaned back, and closed my eyes.
Two hours later a faint sound woke me. I lay unmoving, my hand still on my gun. The faint sound repeated itself, slightly louder -- the second door closing. I opened my eyes, just the slightest bit. Seivarden lay too quiet on her pallet -- surely she had heard the sound as well.
Through my eyelashes I saw a person in outdoor clothes. Just under two meters tall, thin under the bulk of the double coat, skin iron-gray. When she pushed back her hood I saw her hair was the same. She was certainly not a Nilter.
that’s near the end of chapter five. below is the Bulgarian translation courtesy of Bard, as i see it in my copy of “Правдата на Торен” except, again, for the line breaks (sorry)
Все още нащрек, седнах на пода, разкопчах якето си, сложих ръка върху пистолета, отпуснах се и затворих очи.
Събуди ме тих звук. Продължих да лежа неподвижно с ръка на пистолета. Тихият звук се повтори, малко по-силно - затворила се бе вътрешната врата. Погледнах през мигли. Сейварден лежеше твърде неподвижно - явно и тя беше чула звука.
Различих човешки силует, с дебели дрехи.
Новодошлата беше висока почти два метра. Когато свали качулката си, видях, че косата й е стоманеносива като кожата на палтото. Определено не беше местна.
if i have a Bulgarian-speaking follower i’d be glad for their take on this, but i doubt this happened since last time so, moving on, below is my translation of the translation back into English which i am still aware is poor form but i can't think of any other way to do it
Still on guard, I sat on the floor, opened my jacket, put a hand on the gun, relaxed, and closed my eyes.
A soft sound woke me. I lay unmoving with a hand on the gun. The soft sound repeated itself, slightly louder - the inner door closing. I looked through my eyelashes. Seivarden lay too still - clearly she had heard the sound as well.
I made out a human form, in thick clothing.
The newcomer was almost two meters tall. When she pushed back her hood, I saw her hair was steel-gray like the leather of the coat. She was certainly not a local.
okay so, what in the fuck, tbh? as with the previous passage, we have the sense of repetition of actions gone. then sentences/actions omitted entirely, and Breq looking through her eyelashes a couple sentences earlier. i mean, okay, looking through only slightly opened eyes and looking through your eyelashes is physically the same action, i guess, but it’s not like we don’t have vocabulary for both. so why, then, this translator felt the need to shuffle them? i don’t know. then we get to Strigan’s description. she goes, if i’m reading this right, from having gray skin in the original, to having skin of unspecified colour in the translation, but a gray leather coat instead (that is, at least i’m assuming the gray leather coat is hers since it’s the only coat in the scene due to Breq only having a jacket in the translation ha ha). as an explanation, i can only offer that in Bulgarian, leather and skin are called the same, and a person who is fluent enough in English to not translate in their head but simply read a text may, as a brainfart, write the wrong word even when they understand what the text actually means. even though it’s an error that’s more typical the other way around -- when one word has multiple translations depending on context and you pick the wrong one because you didn’t understand the contextual clues, after all, what kind of human person has gray skin, right? ughhh. again, i cannot help but think about the indignant translator who said that there are no translation editors here, and even when there are, no one compares the source and translation sentence for sentence because that’s simply how not translation works; but on the other hand i also cannot help but think how, under our legislation, translation is protected by copyright because, among other things, it’s as much a work of art as the original text because adaptation into another language aims to fully relay the original text, both factually and stylistically. this fails both. okay but like, does it matter for the book as a whole if Strigan has gray skin or not, someone might ask. okay, i might say back, how about we respect the way it’s written. once again, from all the reviews i’ve read in Bulgarian (which are, of course, written by the sort of people who publish online reviews of books) only the ones who read the book in English were positive. is that because Bulgarian people as a whole are narrow-minded and old-fashioned? might be so. might, when faced with the reality of the above translation, not be so. ultimately it’s probably not financially viable to translate for a couple thousand people and the issue of poor translations will be resolved by the practical elimination of the Bulgarian language. would be probably easier than educating Bulgarian citizens into loving and respecting their language enough so that questioning the ethics of translating science fiction becomes unnecessary. i’ve been Nath, and this is jackass 👍
