Verne translated to Romansh

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Garmt de Vries-Uiterweerd

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Jul 30, 2021, 2:30:37 AM7/30/21
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It's been years since I first compiled my list of translated JV titles (http://verne.garmtdevries.nl/en/languages/). Since that time, I have kept running into new titles, and occasionally new languages.

Today I found a translation of "Le tour du monde en 80 jours" in Romansh, one of the four official languages of Switzerland:
(More specifically, I believe this translation is in Rumantsch Grischun, an artificial "unified" version of the different idioms of Romansh that are used in different areas of the Swiss canton of Grisons.)

This brings the total number of languages to 98 (including French). Two more to go until I have to change the statement that "His works have been published in almost a hundred languages"!

Cheers,
Garmt

Garmt de Vries-Uiterweerd

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Aug 22, 2021, 6:55:51 AM8/22/21
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Prompted by my recent find of a Romansh Verne translation, I revived my hunt for new languages, just to see if we could tick that 100 mark by now. And yes, it turns out we can. New translations continue to appear, and tools like worldcat.org keep adding new titles.

I can now add Latin, Hawaiian, Seychelles Creole, Tibetan and Dari to the list, bringing the total number of languages up to 103.

The Hawaiian edition of "De la Terre à la Lune" is available on Amazon, for those of you who are interested:

The search continues...

Cheers,
Garmt

Garmt de Vries-Uiterweerd

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Aug 22, 2021, 12:28:51 PM8/22/21
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Earlier today, I wrote:

The Hawaiian edition of "De la Terre à la Lune" is available on Amazon, for those of you who are interested:

DO NOT ORDER THIS BOOK, IT'S FAKE!

Digging further after my earlier discoveries, I found a Hausa edition of "De la Terre à la Lune", with the exact same cover design as the Hawaiian edition I had been so happy to find. Turns out this publisher offers the same book in an unexpectedly – and suspiciously – wide range of languages:

Versions of "De la Terre à la Lune" in Danish or Greek are of course quite common, and these might well be pirated editions or simple reprints of public domain texts. But one does wonder where those translations to Hausa, Igbo or Cebuano come from... or indeed if these are bone fide translations.

I noticed that the synopsis of the Dutch version (https://www.amazon.com/Van-Aarde-Naar-Maan-Earth/dp/9137922815) gives the impression of an automated translation, and then I saw the 1-star reviews for the Czech, Basque and Esperanto versions, commenting on the awful translation.

So, sadly, my suspicions proved correct. These texts cannot be counted as real translations, and I'm not going to add all these languages to my database.

Just goes to show how tricky this kind of research is. These books have a title, an author, a publisher, and even an ISBN. They might well show up in other catalogues at some point. How can you be sure that a book listed at some online shop is genuine, especially if you don't speak the language? Can I trust the Seychelles Creole or the Tibetan editions, just because they're listed on worldcat and are physically present in real libraries?

For what it's worth: the Latin collection of short stories is reviewed on other sites and seems legit, and the Romansh e-text at Wikisource looks all right as far as my knowledge of other Romance languages allows me to judge.

Cheers,
Garmt

mken...@aol.com

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Aug 22, 2021, 1:03:37 PM8/22/21
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There are also fake translations into German, see here:
The publisher didn't even enter the French text into his translation software, but a translation into Spanish.
He could/should have used the original translation into German instead, which is in the public domain:
There's no need to use a new "translation" instead.
As an aside: Automatic translations are much better now than they were five or ten years ago. Google Translate has improved, but at least at the moment, DeepL is even better. Of course you may know it already. If not, try it out. It's far from perfect, but it's great for texts that are not very complex.
It's free to use as long as you do not enter more than 5000 characters at once.

Garmt de Vries-Uiterweerd

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Aug 22, 2021, 1:55:15 PM8/22/21
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On Sun, 22 Aug 2021 at 19:03, 'mken...@aol.com' via Jules Verne Forum <jules-ve...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
As an aside: Automatic translations are much better now than they were five or ten years ago. Google Translate has improved, but at least at the moment, DeepL is even better. Of course you may know it already. If not, try it out. It's far from perfect, but it's great for texts that are not very complex.
It's free to use as long as you do not enter more than 5000 characters at once.

Interesting question: when is a translation "real" and when is it "fake"? At what point do we call a machine translation "real"? And do we use different criteria for literary texts than for, e.g., EULA's, or reviews? 

Jan Rychlik

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Aug 22, 2021, 2:20:27 PM8/22/21
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It seems obvious that all the translations are automatically generated https://m.libreriauniversitaria.it/#!/publisher/libri-stranieri/Porifera-Press
I don’t know the Czech version, but the anotation is a mess.
I think no automated translation can be called literature. As for translation from other than the original language, it is not fake, but quite common praktické in case of minor languages.

22. 8. 2021 v 17:03, 'mken...@aol.com' via Jules Verne Forum <jules-ve...@googlegroups.com>:


There are also fake translations into German, see here:
The publisher didn't even enter the French text into his translation software, but a translation into Spanish.
He could/should have used the original translation into German instead, which is in the public domain:
There's no need to use a new "translation" instead.
As an aside: Automatic translations are much better now than they were five or ten years ago. Google Translate has improved, but at least at the moment, DeepL is even better. Of course you may know it already. If not, try it out. It's far from perfect, but it's great for texts that are not very complex.
It's free to use as long as you do not enter more than 5000 characters at once.

garmtd...@gmail.com schrieb am Sonntag, 22. August 2021 um 18:28:51 UTC+2:
Earlier today, I wrote:

The Hawaiian edition of "De la Terre à la Lune" is available on Amazon, for those of you who are interested:

DO NOT ORDER THIS BOOK, IT'S FAKE!

Digging further after my earlier discoveries, I found a Hausa edition of "De la Terre à la Lune", with the exact same cover design as the Hawaiian edition I had been so happy to find. Turns out this publisher offers the same book in an unexpectedly – and suspiciously – wide range of languages:

Versions of "De la Terre à la Lune" in Danish or Greek are of course quite common, and these might well be pirated editions or simple reprints of public domain texts. But one does wonder where those translations to Hausa, Igbo or Cebuano come from... or indeed if these are bone fide translations.

I noticed that the synopsis of the Dutch version (https://www.amazon.com/Van-Aarde-Naar-Maan-Earth/dp/9137922815) gives the impression of an automated translation, and then I saw the 1-star reviews for the Czech, Basque and Esperanto versions, commenting on the awful translation.

So, sadly, my suspicions proved correct. These texts cannot be counted as real translations, and I'm not going to add all these languages to my database.

Just goes to show how tricky this kind of research is. These books have a title, an author, a publisher, and even an ISBN. They might well show up in other catalogues at some point. How can you be sure that a book listed at some online shop is genuine, especially if you don't speak the language? Can I trust the Seychelles Creole or the Tibetan editions, just because they're listed on worldcat and are physically present in real libraries?

For what it's worth: the Latin collection of short stories is reviewed on other sites and seems legit, and the Romansh e-text at Wikisource looks all right as far as my knowledge of other Romance languages allows me to judge.

Cheers,
Garmt

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Jean-Michel Margot

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Aug 22, 2021, 5:45:21 PM8/22/21
to jules-ve...@googlegroups.com, Garmt de Vries-Uiterweerd

I fully agree with Garmt. I'm using DeepL for several years now, translations mainly English and French, and the result is always far better that Google translate. J.-M.

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mken...@aol.com

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Aug 23, 2021, 7:57:21 AM8/23/21
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>It's free to use as long as you do not enter more than 5000 characters at once.
Hello again, I've just seen that you can also translate up to three files per month for free; up to 5 MB file size:
Best wishes
Matthias

Jan Rychlik

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Aug 26, 2021, 9:52:02 AM8/26/21
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Once again on “fake” translations: I learned that a Czech publication of Le voyage d’études is scheduled for this year. It is the Czech translation from Esperanto, for long available on-line, which actually preceded the 2006 translation from French. This is an extraordinary example, but there were quite numerous Czech translations of Verne from German back in 19th c-y and some of them keep to be reissued till now.

22. 8. 2021 v 20:20, Jan Rychlik <jan.r...@seznam.cz>:


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