The authors of fiction books strive to set a certain mood, to intrigue, to convey the spirit of the era. They often use metaphors, idioms, made-up terms and parables in their works. In books, we often meet various scientific or historical facts that ultimately affect the fate of heroes.
The use of specific speech patterns, a certain structure and words invented by the author makes a plain text a raucous detective story or a good fantasy. Thus, various teleports, lightsabers and deductive methods of investigation appear on the books’ pages. Or, for instance, we can meet the fictional people headed by the clumsy prince Barakhlyush (“Arthur and the Invisibles”).
These details make the work reader-friendly, but at the same time, they significantly complicate the work of linguists on translating a book into other languages. Since each work should be adapted to a new language, taking into account all the innovations of an author, his style, and genre peculiarities of a text. Any indiscretion can turn a literary masterpiece into a strange bunch of words, and, thus, translation of books should be entrusted only to a professional!
The variety of genres
Among specialists, a literary translation of books is considered to be one of the most difficult. While completing such tasks, linguists need not just to make a point of the text to a reader. More importantly, they should convey all the richness of an original text, namely, the writing style, the philosophy of the work, the emotionality, the characters’ temper, etc.
The genre peculiarities of the work are equally important. Laying down on the job and without taking this factor into account, a linguist can easily turn a detective story into a children’s fairy tale or make of a deep historical drama a light-hearted romance novel.
The OrdenTop team of experts never makes such mistakes. Our linguists specialize in translating books of any genre. In doing so, each new project is undertaken by the recognized industry experts who know about the nuances and genre peculiarities of a work.
The nuances of literary translation
When working on fiction books of different genres, translators waylay a lot of pitfalls. In doing so, even many experienced linguists drop a clanger. Here are a few of them:
- misuse of polysemantic words (an author of a book can use a word with several lexical meanings in completely different situations);
- inadvertence when adapting proper names;
- attempts to translate idioms, phraseological units and other set expressions word-for-word (thus, by the efforts of linguists “Ladybird” can turn from a ladybird into a female bird);
- inadequate interpretation of names (for example, so-called experts translate “Patriot Games” by Tom Clancy as “Patriot James”);
- problems in conveying the writing style (sometimes it is difficult for linguists to recreate the figures of speech or a sentence structure used by an author of a book);
- incorrect adaptation of a work to the cultural characteristics of another country.
At the same time, it is important to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good. This principle is applied when the OrdenTop linguists translate fiction books. When adapting such a narrative, they have to rewrite an author’s text in a new language to some extent. At the same time, it is important to avoid “gag” and not to “improve” a book. The translator is required to convey the writing style and character of work as accurately as possible. Our team does this better than anyone!
Make your book a bestseller
Only the best translators and editors who perfectly know the language and are passionate about making translations of books work in the OrdenTop team. Our experts have already adapted over 3,000 books for private authors, publishing houses, companies, libraries, educational institutions and non-profit organizations.
Do you want to be the next Hemingway? Please feel free to contact us!
