https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/02/03/how-translation-works-book-title-edition/ Whatever FIX YOUR HEARTS OR DIE Menu * Home * About + A Brief Biography of John Scalzi + Availability for Interviews, Appearances, Writing Work and Optioning Existing Work + Books and Other Projects by John Scalzi + Contact Information + Guidelines for Publicity, Blurbing, Unpublished Work, Story Ideas, Social Media Boosting, Guest Blogging, Charitable Solicitations, Autographing, Educational Use and School Assignments + Scheduled Appearances + Site Disclaimer, Comment and Privacy Policy + The Canonical Bacon Page + The Scalzi Creative Sampler * Scalzi Enterprises * The Scalzi Family Foundation How Translation Works, Book Title Edition Posted on February 3, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi 35 Comments [225952260] [WHSJohnS2] As any translator will tell you, translating a piece of fiction isn't about simply transcribing words one-to-one from one language to another. It's about capturing a vibe -- making sure the tone and intent of the piece come through in words when a mere transliteration would fail. 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. The title of the Hungarian version of When the Moon Hits Your Eye is an example of this "translation, not transliteration" phenomenon. People in English-speaking countries know the title is a lyric from "That's Amore," a well-known standard most famously sung by Dean Martin. The title hits in a very specific way, because English-speaking folks have the context for the phrase and the song it's embedded into. But it's not a guarantee that the phrase hits the same way in other languages, or will have the same sense of play. The solution Agave, my Hungarian publisher, and its translators, decided on: Change the title to Csak a hold az egen, which are lyrics in the 1995 song "Szallj el, kismadar," which is the biggest hit from the biggest album of Republic, a well-known Hungarian band: "Csak a hold az egen" translates to "Only the moon in the sky," and it's the first line of the chorus of the song -- which is to say, the line everyone who is a fan of the band or the song will reflexively be able to sing. The song was a top ten hit in Hungary, and the album it was on was number one on the Hungarian charts for ten weeks. Have I ever heard of "Csak a hold az egen," or the band Republic? Until literally this morning, no! But the potential readers of this book in Hungary will almost certainly have heard of it, and it's a good bet that it will invoke the same sort of vibe and feel in them that "When the moon hits your eye" has in English. And that is the point. This is also why a human brain is important to attach to translation. A computerized translator can transliterate the phrase "when the moon hits your eye" into Hungarian ("Amikor a hold eleri a szemed," or so Google says), but that title won't hit the same way the localized title would. The computer isn't a human. It doesn't know. This is one reason among many why my contracts for non-English language versions of my books now come with a clause that specifies the text has to be translated by actual humans. A computer translation, at its best, will just get you words. A human translator, at their best, will give you the feel. And the feel is actually important. The feel is what makes fiction work. -- JS Share: * Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Threads (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) * Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) * Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) * Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) * Like this: Like Loading... Category: Uncategorized - A Korean Cover, and Thoughts on Foreign Sales Checking Out Dayton's True REST Float Spa - 35 Comments on "How Translation Works, Book Title Edition" 1. [562d1]John Scalzi February 3, 2025, 10:33 am Note that not every title translation I've ever had works for me. The German title for Old Man's War is Krieg der Klones, i.e., "War of the Clones," which is neither accurate (there are no clones in the OMW universe), and also extremely close to the title of a certain Star Wars film. But in cases like this, I fall back on the idea that my local publisher knows the market they're working in better than I do. If a title was ever actively offensive to me, I would ask it to be changed. Otherwise, I let them do their thing. 2. [f7708]Karen A. Wyle February 3, 2025, 10:38 am My mother wrote (I think) her masters' thesis on the difficulties of teaching literature in translation. One of her primary examples concerned Camus' novel "L'Etranger." The English edition used in high schools and colleges for many years mistranslated that title as "The Stranger," when the word actually means "The Foreigner." Your new novel's title poses a different challenge for the translator, one that the Hungarian translator has met superbly. 3. [8cc16]norb February 3, 2025, 10:43 am Translating a title also carries the weight of making the book interesting to the reader at a glance. On top of that, your humorous books also need to actually be funny across multiple languages. I imagine that challenge is not lost on you as well - also requiring a "human only" clause in your contracts. 4. [5073b]Noblehunter February 3, 2025, 10:54 am I hope you enjoyed the irony of using machine translation to get a dubious translation in your post about how machine translation is very limited. @Karen Ooooh. I think I'd have gotten more from the book in school with that level of detail to translation. One of the few things I remember clearly from university is a discussion on translating Foucault's Surveillir et Punir to Discipline and Punish and how the straightforward translation (I feel like there should be a word for rote word for word "translation") misses the mark. 5. [562d1]John Scalzi February 3, 2025, 11:01 am Noblehunter: I did so with the absolute awareness than someone who is Hungarian will show up and say "that translation isn't EXACTLY right" 6. [250ed]David Orr February 3, 2025, 11:13 am Translating humor in particular is super tough -- no AI system is close to this right now, and my guess is most human expert translators wouldn't be up to the task either. What do you do when AI capabilities advance such that they really can do a better job of translation than a human, when they capture the feel and the humor and make it work for the locale? Still humans only? 7. [102be]Bob N February 3, 2025, 11:16 am A long time ago, I was unemployed and looking for any kind of work. A well-known editor of schlock romance bodice-buster novels wanted a translator for French. I'm bilingual, so... yeah! I balked when ran into "light-year" used as a unit of time. I didn't get the job. 8. [54bfc]Bo Lindbergh February 3, 2025, 11:19 am What do you know, an opportunity to mention why I gave up on English-Swedish fiction translations. In the 1980s, for some reason, a respectable Swedish publisher printed an overconfident fan translation of a bestselling fantasy novel by a US author. The reaction "I could have done that better, and I know I'm not a qualified translator!" does dreadful things to one's confidence in a publisher.... 9. [aec28]Nick February 3, 2025, 11:27 am I am so glad for this post, because I had no idea where the ENGLISH title of the book came from. The Dean Martin song is vaguely familiar, but it's not at all part of my cultural experience (and I'm an English-speaking American). I definitely never would have guess that you used a lyric of it for the book. I had assumed it was something from the book itself, and I would need to read the novel to understand the title. 10. [f31cf]Obdurate February 3, 2025, 11:30 am What is the Spanish title? That's a sprawling language with very distinct markets. 11. [9adeb]little Alex February 3, 2025, 11:32 am One of my duties at my previous job is translation (mostly Chinese to English). I can definitely confirm your observation and thank you for making sure us translators will still have a job after AI becomes our overlords, LOL. 12. [f86b6]Suzette Ciancio February 3, 2025, 11:34 am Amen! 13. [7c9ac]Eva Sandor February 3, 2025, 11:34 am Hi John! A quick look at my extremely Hungarian name will show you that this article was fascinating to me. I was born in Chicago and raised in the USA so I don't know the top pop hits of Hungary, but I do want to give you just a teeny possible correction. "Csak a hold az egen" doesn't mean "there's only one moon". It means "Only the moon in the sky". I'll be Googling this song to see what the rest of the lyrics are, but I imagine they go on to say "only the moon in the sky... knows how much I love you" or some such. Thanks for the rabbit hole, LOL. The Chinese do say there's a rabbit in the moon. Seems they're right. 14. [562d1]John Scalzi February 3, 2025, 11:36 am Eva Sandor: Ooooh, my error, will fix! 15. [9a6da]Karen February 3, 2025, 11:36 am As a translator, Yes! And Thank You! 16. [5ad82]Jeremy Keith February 3, 2025, 11:40 am The late great Christopher Priest wrote about how the French translation improved on the (already arresting) opening line of his novel Inverted World: https://christopher-priest.co.uk/for-openers 17. [5073b]Noblehunter February 3, 2025, 11:46 am I checked with my Hungarian friend and they said "not... precisely" to the Google translation. The professional translation instantly made sense. 18. [85649]Michael Fuss February 3, 2025, 12:04 pm When it comes to the German translations of your books I always wondered if Bernhard Kempen works on a strict: "No title shall stay unchanged!" policy. He also did that with the titles of Ann Leckie. How much of a fan of your works is your French translator Bernadette Emerich? The title got translated to "Le vieil homme et la guerre" [The old man and the war] with is a direct allusion to Ernest Hemingway's "The old man and the sea" In French that title rhymes to "Le vieil homme et la mer". 19. [ae70b]Aad Groeneveld February 3, 2025, 12:28 pm As a former translator myself I can attest to this, just being literal sometimes is just not enough. When still young I got the feeling some of the translations from English to Dutch in my beloved SF novels and certainly a lot of subtitles on the telly/videos weren't all that good, which in turn made me determined to try and learn English better than those translators. Like to think I didn't do too badly. 20. [05706]Terry February 3, 2025, 12:33 pm I am steadfast in the believe that AI is to tech as dirigibles were to air travel in the early 20th Century: An ultimately useless branch finished by a catastrophic dead end. 21. [d9094]Steve Primost February 3, 2025, 12:44 pm Or the reference to Rutgers in Starter Villain. Ouch! 22. [85649]Michael Fuss February 3, 2025, 12:58 pm @Terry I'm not that pessimistic about the development of AI when it comes to translations. I do believe that it will play an ever increasing role therein. As John wrote: For texts of utility. I could imagine that soon schools might teach their students how to write and formulate texts so that they can be translated automatically without errors and loss of content and context. In Germany we had to write essays of different kinds at school. I think you do the same in English lessons. When it comes to those utilitarian texts as i.e. reports, schools could teach how to write them best adapted for translation. One thing that this might do: Break the global dominance of the English language. If all texts of utility can be quickly translated from one language to another one major reason to learn English would evaporate. Perhaps, in a few years from now, students will be encouraged to learn a foreign language with the help of a service like Duolingo or Babble or something developed specifially with the requirements of schools in mind. Instead of learning a foreign language for utility, you would learn it to get to know another country. Maybe to be able to spend time there without having to rely on translator apps. In this case I think Spanish, French, Italian, Greek or even Turkish would win over English in Germany. The respective countries attract much more German tourists than the UK. 23. [98ac3]Tunde February 3, 2025, 1:26 pm I had a huge grin on my face all day (and a giant earworm) since I saw the Hungarian title. Kudos to the translators who came up with this especially because there is another famous Hungarian song literally about how the Moon is made of cheese. But while the Republic hit thematically also closer to the Dean Martin one as it is about love the cheese song addresses dogs and why they are howl at the Moon :) I do think they were excellent on a lot of levels. Thanks for appreciating them 24. [85649]Michael Fuss February 3, 2025, 2:04 pm The interesting thing about the possible AI development I describe: Literature translators will get more important. Nowadays there are many people who can read (English) novels in their original. Some of the people are as weird as doing that for fun. Should less people learn foreign languages to that level, literature translators will get even more important than today. 25. [f7dc9]Laura Wideburg February 3, 2025, 3:17 pm Having worked as a translator from Swedish to English, I can confirm this is absolutely true. Good for you to insist on human translation! Our brains can match culture to culture in a way a computer can't. Translation is an ill-paid and ill-understood profession in the United States (I know it's better in Europe), which is one reason I left the profession and now just teach Swedish instead. 26. [85649]Michael Fuss February 3, 2025, 3:37 pm @Laura: And translations from Germanic languages into English (and vice-versa) are easier when compared to other languages. Those languages share a lot of structural things that languages outside this family don't share. Two examples from French (Romance language) It doesn't have a verb for "to need something". You can only have a need for something "avoir besoin de" When it comes to obligations: These are expressed impersonally. Instead of saying "You must go to school!" French would say "It must be, that you go to school." "Il faut que t'ailles a l'ecole". And since you or rather your parents have to pay a fine, if you don't go to school, "il faut que" gets the sense better than "devoir". And the further the linguistic distance from the original language, the larger do these structural differences get. 27. [87be4]Jake Wildstrom February 3, 2025, 3:38 pm I'm actually a fan of Republic, and am tickled that "Szallj el kismadar" is apparently regarded as a Hungarian equivalent, cultural-penetration-wise, of Dean Martin's "That's Amore". Or maybe it's just the most moon-intensive lyric they could find which would be at all familiar to Hungarians. (translating "Csak a hold az egen" as "only the moon in the sky", is, as far as I'm concerned, essentially accurate. The only alternative I can imagine is replacing "only" with "just", which is a matter of a choice among synonyms, not a substantive change in meaning) 28. [5846b]Curt Hagenlocher February 3, 2025, 3:50 pm A wonderful book that's (in part) all about the difficulty of translation is Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot. I recommend it highly. 29. [d4b90]James W Williams February 3, 2025, 4:12 pm Fascinating stuff. My Hungarian friend Gyuri and I have talked often about the difficulties of translation, so I thought he'd enjoy this post. We once compared the brilliant English translation of Lem's Cyberiad with the Hungarian translation and it was fascinating. 30. [4784c]Daniel von Brighoff February 3, 2025, 4:32 pm @Michael: Another fun fact about "il faut que" is that, from a linguistic point of view, you don't have to analyse it as a verb at all. It's defective (meaning it's only conjugated in the third-person singular) and seldom used in any other tense besides the present. Technically the negator "ne" can come after "il", but colloquially this is dropped, leaving only a following "pas" to express negation. So you can analyse the spoken sequence /ifok/ as a special phrase-initial adjective that requires the following verb to be in the subjunctive. This may seem like an odd approach to take until you realise that lazim works almost exactly the same in most varieties of Arabic. (Sometimes quite distant languages end up coming up with very similar solutions.) 31. [fe194]DB February 3, 2025, 4:45 pm You talk about translation: I'm interested in pronunciation v. spelling. I know little about how Hungarian is pronounced, so I was interested in listening to the song that "Csak a hold" comes out sounding like "Chock a whoole" at least to the ears of this English-speaker. 32. [753f8]Vrouwke Jansen February 3, 2025, 4:59 pm Well, here's another one who mostly gave up on translations from English to, in my case, Dutch. In sci-fi and fantasy, if it gets translated at all to Dutch, I find myself arguing with the translator most of the time. The translations often feel off, stilted, too much of English showing through. I'd rather miss the occasional cultural reference, then, and read in English. I mean, I love it when someone decided a book just needed that kind of dedication. I have a number of books in both languages just to enjoy the beautiful solutions to language puzzles translators came up with. Also, on a global scale, Dutch is not spoken by that many people, so if a translation happens, that's neat. But original Dutch culture is not that big on sci-fi and fantasy, and that doesn't help with the referencing I guess? Anyway: good translations matter. They are an artform and I'm glad attempts are made to preserve it. 33. [85649]Michael Fuss February 3, 2025, 5:16 pm @Vrouwke And those translators don't get the idea to try and publish their own SFF novels? Some stereotype about the Netherlands: I could have imagined fantasy novels of angry magical queens of the sea and how a kingdom has to cope with that. 34. [8601a]KSB February 3, 2025, 5:29 pm In the legal system, when we have litigants who do not speak English, courts use "interpreters," not "translators." It's a meaningful distinction. 35. [39ef6]Macika February 3, 2025, 5:31 pm My Hungarian wife made sure I knew of Republic. Leave a comment Login Name (required): [ ] Email (required): [ ] URL: [ ] [ ] Remember personal info? Comments: Show Preview Edit [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [loader] [ ] Notify me of follow-up comments by email. [ ] Notify me of new posts by email. [Submit] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] D[ ] WHATEVER Taunting the tauntable since 1998 John Scalzi, proprietor - JS Athena Scalzi, EIC - AMS About the site Whatever Days February 2025 S M T W T F S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 << Jan Whatarchives Whatarchives [Select Month ] Search [ ]Search The Big Idea [5240396198] What's the Big Idea? Authors explaining the the big ideas behind their latest works, in their own words. See the latest Big Ideas! Authors/Editors/Publicists: for information on how to participate, click here. 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