New Translations

[jim]

Hello,
I have noticed a bunch of "new translation" recently popping up (Independently published) by David Petault.  Is there any information or reviews of these translations (quality, etc.).
Thanks!
-Jim

[Tad Davis]

I’m skeptical. I’ve only glanced at a few, and they seem to be readable. But when someone, in such a short period of time, releases translations of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Verne, Dumas, Victor Hugo, Nietzche, and Dante — and not short works, long ones like War and Peace and The Count of Monte Cristo — as well as adapting Milton’s Paradise Lost (and Regained) into “Modern Accessible English” — I have a hard time believing someone would have enough fluency with multiple languages to pull something like that off without taking huge shortcuts.

 

He might be using machine translation for some of it. I’m not opposed to that AS A STARTING POINT, as a way of generating a literal text (with all the caveats about the stupid mistakes a literal-minded machine will make). I’ve done it myself, as a point of departure. But it requires extensive review and revision and polishing over multiple iterations, and sometimes checking sentence by sentence back against the original text and, in a pinch, checking other translations to see what kind of sense they’ve made of a difficult passage, and that’s a time-consuming operation — not something that would make it possible to release translations of War and Peace, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, and The Count of Monte Cristo within a few months of each other.

 

If he’s starting off with a machine translation and just rewriting it without doing any of the additional homework, I’d be worried about the rate of unexamined errors. If he really is doing due diligence on all these books, then he’s a heck of a fast worker and has a lot more free time than I do! If he’s really translating all these books from scratch, and doing it accurately and well, then everybody else should just quit their jobs and take up needlepoint.

 

I would hesitate to say it’s not worth pursuing, though. The first canto of Dante seems reasonable, and the first few paragraphs of Twenty Thousand Leagues seem reasonable as well; but I don’t personally have the time to test my skepticism about the speed and volume of his output against the actual results. It should be noted in his favor that most if not all have been released as Kindle Unlimited editions, so I suspect he’s not trying to strike it rich with this. 

— 
Tad Davis
tad.dav...@gmail.com

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[Alex Kirstukas]

I’m afraid I have to echo Tad’s skepticism. With the rise of generative AI, there’s been a huge influx of people trying to make a fast buck by feeding a public-domain text into ChatGPT or similar, and asking it to translate the text into another language or style. There’s hardly any human input at all; the “translator” simply gives the AI a prompt of what to do with the text, lets it do its energy-guzzling work, and then self-publishes the result. 

(A few months ago, in an online group I follow, somebody posted an ad for a self-published ”illustrated edition” of Wuthering Heights “in modern accessible English”. And proudly admitted that both text and illustrations were 100% AI-generated!)

Until evidence appears to the contrary, I have to assume that’s what’s happening here. Kindle Unlimited pays by the page, which may explain the focus on lengthy tomes like War & Peace and 20K: one single AI prompt generates a ton of Kindle pages from which to (potentially) profit. 

As a conflict-of-interest disclaimer, I’ll add that I’m an actual human translator myself - and would rather not see that whole field of joyful creative endeavor taken over by startup entrepreneurs playing with robots.

On Feb 9, 2025, at 10:53 PM, Tad Davis <tad.dav...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Tad Davis]

Not to beat a dead horse, but here's an example of the kind of incoherence that results when you publish so many translations so quickly, however they're generated. 

In chapter 2 of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, Aronnax says:

Après les chassepots, les torpilles, après les torpilles, les béliers sous-marins, puis la réaction. Du moins, je l'espère.

Literally translated, this is:

After the chassepots, the torpedoes, after the torpedoes, the underwater rams, then the reaction. At least, I hope so.

Aronnax is clearly hoping for the day when the human race rebels against the arms race. (Oh, the naive optimism!)

In the most recent edition of his translation, William Butcher explains that "chassepots" are breech-loading rifles whose design was improved by Antoine Chassepot; and Verne's "torpedoes" may actually have referred to floating mines rather than torpedoes "in the modern sense."

In David Petault's hands, this becomes:

After the invention of explosive shells, torpedoes, and then submarine rams—what next? At least, that's what I hoped.

Gone are the breech-loading rifles, Chassepot or otherwise. But the bigger problem is that this translation is nonsense. How does "that's what I hoped" relate to the question "what's next"? And in what way does the question "what's next?" translate or even paraphrase the French phrase "puis la réaction"?

This may be making a mountain out of a molehill, but as I said, this is one phrase that caught my eye and is exactly the kind of thing that suggests a rush job (if nothing else).

— 
Tad Davis
tad.dav...@gmail.com

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[William Butcher]

"submarine rams" in "Petault"'s translation is at best misleading: it should be "underwater rams".

In 1870  Verne was too old to be called up for active duty, although buying “a chassepot rifle and 150 cartridges just in case”,  but did serve in the local Home Guard in the Franco-Prussian War.

bill

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From: jules-ve...@googlegroups.com <jules-ve...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Tad Davis <tad.dav...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2025 7:42 AM
To: jules-ve...@googlegroups.com <jules-ve...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [JVF] New Translations

 

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