Courtenay, I don't even think it was the German translator's fault. The translator gets hired by the publisher, but before that I assume somebody higher up at the publishing house reads the book in question at first in English, because severe changes from original books were a common thing at German publishing houses which I already noticed before I had access to the Internet.Courtenay wrote:I know I keep saying this, but I do believe that if a translator can't simply translate what the original author actually wrote (or as near to it as possible), they should just leave it alone... Honestly, a lot of these Blyton translators sound like they have even less respect for the integrity of her work than the editors in 2010 who rewrote (and dumbed down) the Famous Five!!
In September 1994 on a trip to Canada, I bought "The Kennedy Women" by Laurence Leamer which just was published in the US. Back at home a friend told me that Bertelsmann is already working on the German translation. I received the German version for Christmas 1994 and had the chance to compare both books.
The German version has only 50 pics (the US version has 85) which would not have been that bad, had Bertelsmann decided to include the more interesting photos of not so well known Kennedy relatives. But they decided to publish the pics that every Kennedy aficionado already has seen a thousand times and left out the interesting pics of lesser known relatives which are only contained in the US version.
Bertelsmann shortened the genealogy/family tree pages from 9 to 2 pages.
Both books have about the same size and the same font. Nevertheless the German book has only 850 pages, the US version more than 1.000 pages.
This was not one isolated instant, I noticed the same with French author Régine Desforges (The Blue Bicycle), Judith Michael and very extreme with "Charm School" from Nelson DeMille where more than 100 pages are missing from the English original text (I read both versions parallel and wrote down what is missing).
Many German readers complained in amazon.de about these butchered translations, but the German publishing houses just don't care.
There should be a law that books have to be translated in their entirety and not just fragments.
Sorry, but this is a topic where I get really passionate.
Back to EB. Bertelsmann most likely made the translator merge both book series and maybe even gave them orders to stay below a certain amount of pages.
Or the German editor didn't care for Prince Paul. Unfortunately I have no clue what really happened.
We might never find out.
But I'm convinced that EB must have been Bertelsmann's best selling children's book author # 1.
Maybe way back in the 1960's the German publishing houses still tried to make it easier to read for a young German readership, so they decided to skip Prince Paul instead of widening their (the German children's) horizons?
Same goes for Bluechert who published the Famous Five, before Bertelsmann took them over (unfortunately I don't know anything about how and why that happened, but in case Wolfgang or Tony know more, please tell me about it) and for Erika Klopp Verlag (Adventure series, FFO & Dog series). I noticed several slight changes and left out sentences in the German translations from the Adventure series.
All three German publishing houses have one frustrating thing in common: they did publish the EB books with much less illustrations than in the British old, original hardcovers.
I found that out in 1981 when I bought all 8 Adventure series books in hardcover at Foyle's in London.
Then a few years ago I compared my English hardcovers of the Famous Five series with my German hardcovers and they had done the same. Often 20+ Soper illustrations are missing.
Erika Klopp Verlag had their own illustrator for the FFO & Dog translations. But they kept a certain amount per Adventure book of the Stuart Tresilian illustrations.
Sorry, this has gotten much longer than intended.