#translatorposting

[eisbecherovka]

[eisbecherovka]

Translationposting: A Deep Dive Into Something Really Inconsequential

It's 2026. You're a nerd with an internet connection. Your girlfriend (yes, nerds have girlfriends now, if they too are girls) is resarching Drow Lore to write some fanfiction about Minthara Baenre, star of the 2023 Game of the Year Baldur's Gate 3. This leads you to do some idle reading of Drow Lore, which brings you to a wiki page about R. A. Salvatore, author of the Drizzt novels and Drow Lore Guy Extraordinaire. You skim his page, wondering what kind of sick life he must lead to have come up with stuff like the infamous violent pregancy orgasms. He seems like a pretty normal guy actually. And due to your day job, this is what catches your eye:

The books have been translated into Yiddish? No disrespect to the מאַמע־לשון‎, but... why? Yiddish has a tenth of the speakers of the next smallest language (Finnish) and would not provide a very large market for the books. D&D itself only received a Yiddish translation - done by a fan and free to download - in 2023, and it would be really bizarre to translate the books before translating the game. Some brief google searches involving "forgotten realms yiddish translation" and similar terms in both English and my poor attempt at Yiddish yielded no results except the impressive fanlation project linked here.

My first impulse was that someone had vandalized the article and added a language to the list that would be, I don't know, funny to have translated it into?

After creating a forgottenrealms.fandom.com account so I could view the page history, I determined that Yiddish was not a vandalization of the original article, but rather part of the original full article dating back to 2005 (its second edit, the first having been the creation of that intial stub for R. A. Salvatore):

Eagle-eyed viewers might notice one language is missing: Hebrew, which quite famously provides the alphabet for Yiddish. And some of the drow books HAVE been translated into Hebrew. At some point, someone edited the article to include this fact - but didn't stop to question a Yiddish translation. My new theory is that someone in the information chain, whether that be the original editor or one of their sources, saw one of the Hebrew covers and mis-identified it as Yiddish. Then, when someone who knew what language it actually was went to rectify the mistake, they only added Hebrew and did not delete Yiddish.

Will I edit the R. A. Salvatore article with my freshly-baked account to correct this misinformation? Maybe. Could I bring it up on the talk page or add some citations for the translations that actually exist? I could. Will I do that? Probably not as I am likely to forget this post the instant I post it.

If you have any leads on or have written a Yiddish translation of The Crystal Shard, The Dark Elf Trilogy, or any other of Salvatore's works, please feel free to contact me here or on Forgotten Realms Wiki @DrowInvestigativeJournalist.

Acknowledgement: Thank you to my research assistant and common-law wife @darkelfchicksick for their assistance in finding the Hebrew Salvatore books, translated by Uri Sagi.

[eisbecherovka]

Technical translation - and perhaps life in general? - is at its most fascinating when you're forced to seriously engage with something that is objectively pretty boring. Like right now I have a technical report from an organization called The Concrete Society open. Their slogan is "Your concrete community". The report is about engineering requirements for concrete floors, a topic which, I cannot stress this enough, would bore most people to tears. But not me. It's nice having something concrete to work with.

[eisbecherovka]

Microsoft has their brightest minds hard at work making the Word proofreading feature less capable and more condescending. "Some words are similar but used differently" Really?? Tell me more about how language works please

[eisbecherovka]

Paul Hemetsberger, Gründer des Online-Wörterbuchs dict.cc, wurde zum 22. Mal in Folge zum Österreicher des Jahres gewählt! Gratuliere Paul! 👏

[eisbecherovka]

The other thing that gets my goat about translation talk on this website is that it's almost always literary. Nobody talks about interpreting and nobody talks about translating technical writing (the biggest subfield of written translation!) or copywriting or information for tourists or immigrants; even within the literary umbrella there's not a lot of talk about fan translations as serious, introspection-worthy translation (on the fandom website!) And nobody talks about why people translate. Or who translates. It's all 1960s equivalence theory (on the postcolonialism website!) Get with the program, all the cool kids are doing Translationssoziologie now

[eisbecherovka]

Die deutsche Wikipedia muss unbedingt untersagen, dass man englische Begriffe im ersten Satz verwenden darf, die nicht mit dem verlinkten englischen Artikel übereinstimmen. Den Übersetzerinnen zuliebe.

[eisbecherovka]

I'm far from the first person to make this observation but mechanical engineering can get so sexual