Hello!

I have finished the first draft of the translation, and now I am faced with a much more difficult task: making it make sense to other people. This is a thing writers are often faced with, because we know what we mean when we put the words on the paper, and we have all the context for it, but that doesn’t always make it out of our heads.

With the translation, there are things that make sense to me because I read it in German and it makes sense, but when I share them with other people, they are confused. For example, I shared a sentence I was stuck on with some writer friends, and they all got hung up on something completely different than the thing I was asking about. In German, it’s “in the window,” and that makes sense to me, like “I saw a man in the window,” and I don’t think he’s literally inside the window? But they all did, and I was confused about that. So right now it’s “through the window,” and I don’t like it. But when 5/5 people say they thought it meant literally inside the window, you just gotta shrugman and change it.

Another thing I am struggling with (beyond the polysemy I discussed last month) is German vs English sentence structure and what is and isn’t allowed. I did mention that last month, but I want to go a little more in depth today.

Germanic sentence structure

Once upon a time, about a thousand years ago, all the Germanic languages mostly had the same syntax (with some variation, even within the individual languages, don’t at me; this isn’t a graduate course). They were for the most part V2 languages, and to varying degrees Vfinal in dependent clauses.

What does that mean?

Linguists talk about language’s sentence structure in terms of where the subject (S), verb (V), and object(s) (O) are. English is an (O)SVO language; Japanese is SOV. German is V2, which means that the verb is in the second position in a main clause. (A main clause is a technical term for a regular declarative sentence, though it probably includes some other things. This is a good-enough definition for the purposes of this post.) In dependent clauses, however, German is SOV or OSV. (This has consequences to people who believe in Chomskyan syntax, which I do not, so I will not be discussing them.)

English used to be like that, but you can already see it becoming more flexible throughout the course of what we now call Old English (800s-1100), and today we pretty much always have the subject before the verb, even if there’s something else at the beginning of the sentence. Exceptions are seen in poetry and set phrases and sometimes when it just Feels Wrong.

Can we get some examples?

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. We’ve got a pair of prepositional phrases, a dummy subject (there), the verb, and the actual subject (technically a predicate nominative), which makes it OSV(S). You could also phrase it as “In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit,” which shows the old V2 structure but it sounds awkward (possibly because the original version is so ingrained in memory). Another alternative is “In a hole in the ground a hobbit lived” (OSV), which I do not like, and finally, the very basic “A hobbit lived in a hole in the ground” (SVO), which is literarily clunky.

The German translation I have of The Hobbit renders the first sentence thus: In einer Höhle in der Erde, da lebte ein Hobbit. Which I have to say I find surprising, because that da is unexpected (much like Bilbo’s party), because it’s not V2. (Now I want to see if I can find a different translation to compare.) But it’s also not not V2, because that little da means ‘there,’ but for a location: in a hollow in the ground, in that place lived a hobbit.

I realize now I should explain a bit more about what constitutes a position in a sentence for the purposes of this discussion. A sentence position is like a building block. This sentence (in German) has three places to put your building blocks, and the only one that can’t move is the verb (lebte). The two prepositional phrases constitute one building block (LOCATION), and because da is also a location, it can get squished into the LOCATION block with the PPs. Then you have your VERB block followed by the SUBJECT block.

Notice that the translator opted to keep “there” when it wasn’t strictly necessary; “In einer Höhle in der Erde lebte ein Hobbit” is perfectly grammatical and sensical in German (as opposed to English, where it sounded a little weird to me.)

The English original has four places to put building blocks: LOCATION - SUBJECT - VERB - PRED NOM.

I’m going to leave out the discussion of the dependent clause thing, because it’s not really relevant to what I want to talk about.

Flexibility

Both languages are flexible and inflexible in their own ways. Because German has that strict V2 structure as well as marks for case, you can start with the direct object if you want. In English that doesn’t work, and if you want to put the direct object up front for emphasis, you have to do weird workarounds.

For example: In German you can say Dich liebe ich (you (acc) - love (1.sg) - I (nom)), but You I love and you love I are not English. You’d have to say something like It’s you who I love to get that emphasis.

So one of the things German writers (and Germans in general, honestly) do is start with things other than the subject because it’s more interesting. 

German has a different ordering of adverbials than English: time - reason - manner - place. English as best I can tell without finding a reference is time - place, and manner and reason are flexible (I’m going to the store tomorrow to get bread / I’m going to the store to get bread tomorrow).

I was talking with the author of this book recently, and I mentioned how I had to “boringify” the sentence structure going into English a lot of times because the cool way they wrote it in German really doesn’t work in English. And they said that they did that because German is so stodgy and rigid, and the only way to be creative is to mess around with structure, as opposed to English, where you can play around with language more easily.

Can you, though?

As the Germans like to say, jein. English, being the patchwork nightmare that it is, is much more accepting of neologisms and nonstandard grammar. Is that true? In my experience, kinda? I’ve always chalked it up to my being a non-native German speaker and not having that sense for what can and can’t be played around with, but if a native German speaker whose writing has won awards says you can’t play around with German all that much, I’ll believe them, you know?

An example: I was relating the story of how I sewed my first referee jersey into a cute dress by Frankensteining two jerseys together. (I put in godets from the waist to the hem.) One of the Germans present was like ???, but the other Anglophones confirmed that yes, you can just take the title of a book and make it a verb to refer to the thing the main character did.

Back to the main point of this post

Yeah. So anyway. One of the things I have to do is restructure sentences to be English without losing the creativity/playfulness of the original. There are plenty of places where I kept the V2 structure (OVS/inverted) because it worked, or because it would end awkwardly with the verb. (I say this as if I’m more than 10 pages into the revisions, but here we are.)

There are other places, like one I just tweaked three different ways, that I had to move the adverbials in a way that sounded good but was still on the poetic side of things. I wish I could actually share these examples, but you’ll see them when it’s published. Maybe I’ll write a follow-up whenever that happens…

Additional challenges

When translating speculative fiction, you encounter things like made-up words for technology, nonhuman species, and that sort of thing. (I wrote an entire book about that, even.) In this case, a lot of the technology words are things that can easily be anglicized or are already English words, because technology is in English, right? Sometimes you have things that are less mellifluous when translated, but there’s an easy fix.

One of the bigger challenges with this piece specifically is that the author uses slang. When I took on the project, I decided I would leave them untranslated and include a glossary at the end. My rationale was this: the slang is based on existing slang and youth speak. The book is set in Europe. The origins of the words are Arabic, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, and so on, and changing it would make it less European.

Translation, not localization

Localization is a valid option in many cases! The Ace Attorney games are an excellent example and good use of localization.

In this case, localization is not an option. It’s a book by a German author set in future Europe (unspecified, but northern based on context clues). The way the characters talk is heavily influenced by present-day Europe and how the author envisions it changing in the future. To localize that to a US-English context would remove that (and make it an entirely different novel!) So when you read this book in English, you will have a similar experience as I did: encountering words not from the language the rest of the book is in and having to figure it out from context.

I can’t wait until you all can read it in English! If there are any German subscribers, you may already have read it.

Until next time!