Mystril86 said:
Actually, translating TO English is going to leave fewer mistakes (provided that the translator has a proper English vocabulary), than to almost any other language, especially with regards to the way the language of the book is, the proverbs and jokes etc. Why? Because the English language is the largest in the world, and it's the language that has been spoken for a large part of history in large parts of the world. It being spoken in so many places, and second hand by so many people of different origins, has left it with alot of proverbs of non-british/american origin. Most likely some of the proverbs used in Poland is also used by english speakers around the world, as it is with Danish and Swedish. Ofcourse, no translation will ever be perfect, nomatter who does it, but translating TO English will yield the best results.
I don't think so. Polish is very different language from English. Some stylistic choices Sapkowski made sound great in Polish and other Slavic languages, and stupid/artifical in English. For example: Sapkowski likes to use dialogs to describe world and characters "as a side effect". Instead of describing who speaks to whom, about what, and how everything looks, he often just shows the reader what characters say and leaves it to reader to deduce what happens, what's the relationship between characters, etc. In Polish each verb contains additional information. Simple example - the word "Przeszłyście?" means "Have you finished going over that?", and also you know hero speaks with a group of woman. If there were males in that group, it would be "Przeszliście?". If the speaker asked only if they started to go, but didn't care if they finished, it would be "Przechodziłyście?", etc. Each word has much more information because of flexion system, and this allows for much more compressed dialogues (but also makes it harder to learn the language..). In English you can read dialogue for a few minutes, and don't know even if the people speaking are alone, or what sex they are. Author has to describe it explicitly to you. In Polish every verb contains such information and some more. This makes for very different usage of language, and translator has to choose some other technique to get similiar effect that author did.
There are much more differences like that, not only on grammatic level, but also in idioms, cultural references, associations of names, colors, tropes, etc. That makes translation between languages from different groups more difficult than translation from Polish to Czech for example. In fact - all Sapkowski books were translated to Russian, Czech, etc right away, then to other languages of nearby countries (that share some culture with Poles) like Lithuania, then to Roman languages like French or Spanish, and only now to English.
All in all - English is a great language, it's modern "lingua franca", but it's not that exceptional. Other languages are just as rich, and have different features, so translation to English isn't always easier than to other languages.
BTW: Latin was the most important language for much longer than English is
.gif)
