from Hacker News

How Translation Works, Book Title Edition

by janpio on 2/3/25, 9:33 PM with 21 comments

  • by krisoft on 2/3/25, 11:03 PM

    That being sad human translators are very often under imense time pressure and that sadly leaves a mark on the translations.

    To stay with hungarian example: in the original of Fifty Shades Of Grey Christian is a big fan of the band Kings of Leon. Somehow the translator managed to translate the band name as Lion King. Which drastically changed the vibe of some scenes. Most probably the translator wasn’t familiar with the band and had to translate it super fast.

    Similarly in the hungarian translation of Harry Potter Slytherin's Locket was translated as Slytherin's Lock. And when in the next book the context made it clear that indeed we are talking about a locket not a lock they just changed the name of the item like nothing happened. :)

  • by RheingoldRiver on 2/3/25, 10:40 PM

    This is the only thing I think of now when I hear "that's amore" - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/science/moray-eels-eat-la...

  • by rererereferred on 2/4/25, 6:28 AM

    Sometimes translators make weird decisions. Ocean's eleven in Latam Spanish was "La gran estafa" (The great swindle), which to me sounded much more generic, then came Ocean's twelve and they called it "La nueva gran estafa" (The new great swindle). On the 3rd movie they had to give in and called it "Ahora son 13" (Now they are 13), losing the connection to the others completely. For the next one they didn't even bothered and called it "Ocean's 8: las estafadoras" (Ocean's 8: The swindlers).

    Bonus: the original movie from the 60s was named "Once a la medianoche" (Eleven at midnight). I would have preferred they kept that name.

  • by tkgally on 2/3/25, 10:44 PM

    This is a nice essay, with an excellent example of the challenges and art of literary translation. But the author seems to assume that "computer translation" is limited to services like Google Translate or DeepL: put in a text, get a translation, with no consideration of the context or purpose. Properly prompted LLMs yield much better results and are already helping human translators produce better translations than they could on their own. Whether a completely automated workflow is possible for translating literary texts in an artful and engaging way—I don't know. But I wouldn't reject that possibility out of hand.

    Addendum: The above comment has received at least two up votes and two down votes: in the hour after I posted it, I saw it go from 1 point to 3 points and back to 1. Perhaps people who disapprove of it could say why?

  • by romaaeterna on 2/4/25, 12:50 AM

    On this subject, it is worth reading Tolkien's letters to publishers and translators about the translation choices regarding his works. His philology comes into full play.

  • by thomassmith65 on 2/4/25, 10:30 AM

    We're already not far from being able to do something like...

    (Dean Martin "That's Amore") - (English) + (Hungarian)

    https://kawine.github.io/blog/nlp/2019/06/21/word-analogies....

  • by IsaacZerh on 2/3/25, 10:27 PM

    "Common phrases in one language don’t exist in another; cultural references in one country mean nothing elsewhere, and so on. This is why a computerized translation is fine for a bland business email but will utterly fail for a novel."

    I'm sure it's going to be indistinguishable very soon, if not already.

  • by phatnguyen on 2/4/25, 4:20 AM

    Tech is evolving fast, and while current AI struggles with nuance, humor, and emotional weight, future advancements might surprise us. Maybe the best approach isn’t ‘humans only’ but a synergy where AI handles structure and humans refine the feel?