[HN Gopher] Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts (2011)
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Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts (2011)
Author : tosh
Score : 129 points
Date : 2023-11-11 14:26 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gmkeros.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gmkeros.wordpress.com)
| lostfocus wrote:
| I remember that dumb ad. I think that was the moment when I
| finally decided to read his books in his original English
| instead. (It helped that at this time my English got good enough
| that I could read whole novels complete with puns and obscure
| references.)
| ur-whale wrote:
| > when I finally decided to read his books in his original
| English instead.
|
| Good for you.
|
| Sooo much is lost in the translations of Pratchett to other
| (even linguistically close) languages.
|
| I mean, the translator try their best to carry the word plays
| or funny anglo-centric cultural references over, bu very rarely
| succeed in matching the wit and timing of the original English.
| 10729287 wrote:
| French is one of the most famous translation and is known to
| be excellent. I can confirm although I never read it in
| English (I'm not good enough, especially regarding cultural
| references).
| ur-whale wrote:
| Yeah, I've read all of Pratchett in English, and read one
| or two in German and French.
|
| The French version, much effort went into it, and it is
| very good indeed, but nowhere near the original.
|
| Some attempts at translating Pratchett's humor fall rather
| flat or completely miss the point of the original puns.
| mcv wrote:
| If you want a really good translation of something: the
| Dutch translation of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien
| himself praised it[0]. Max Schuchart rewrote a lot of
| things completely to get the exact same vibe across to
| Dutch people that English-speakers would get from reading
| the English versions.
|
| It depends less on puns, though. Those are always hard to
| translate. The Dutch translation (the one book I've read
| the translation of) Terry Pratchett is okay, but not
| brilliant.
|
| [0] Edit: I thought Tolkien praised it. I'm sure I read
| that somewhere ages ago. Wikipedia tells a different
| story: that Tolkien hated it. Personally I think it's
| genius that names with a clear English vibe (like many
| hobbit names) get translated to names with a similarly
| Dutch vibe. Schuchart did not mess with the Elvish or
| other other languages as far as I know.
| bombcar wrote:
| There was a translation that caused Tolkien to write a
| guide to translating the Lord of the Rings - it's worth
| reading to get a feel for what he wanted.
|
| Of course Tolkien was a linguist so he could understand
| translation difficulties even in languages he didn't
| speak. He went so far as to add fictional translation
| difficulties to his own story.
| noirscape wrote:
| Tolkien was initially critical of the Dutch translation
| of LOTR, complaining that many of the nonclemature were
| too localized to his original liking[0].
|
| That said, from what I understand, Tolkien would later
| change his mind after the original Swedish translator
| took _even more liberties_ , which provoked him enough to
| write an official translation style guide, and in
| retrospective light apparently the Dutch translation
| would mostly end up conforming to those guidelines.
|
| The entire thing is pretty curious given the fact that if
| you want to get down to it, the framing devices of Lord
| of the Rings is that it is an alledged translation of a
| book called "The Red Book of Westmarch". Tolkien himself
| took liberties with this supposed translation, which is
| why many of the place names have some form of "common"
| English name, to make them more palatable to English
| readers. It's pretty interesting to see him then take
| offense at other translations.
|
| [0]: As someone who fell in love with Tolkien's work from
| the Dutch translation - eh, it's fine? Most stuff is
| fairly faithfully and accurately translated. The main
| issue is that the translator was an even bigger fan of
| purple prose than Tolkien and occasionally used German
| roots for certain words. Most of the literal translations
| used are translated to what amounts to kinda formal,
| stiff Dutch but others flow fairly well. The biggest
| difference is probably the title which is something
| closer to "In the grasp of the Ring", which... might be
| more accurate to describe the events of the book. It's
| hardly about the Lord of the Rings himself after all.
| mcv wrote:
| "In de Ban van de Ring" has roughly the same rhythm as
| "The Lord of the Rings" (triplets). "De Heer der Ringen",
| while a more literal translation, has a different feel to
| me. But maybe that's because I'm too use to the original
| translation.
| noirscape wrote:
| I agree with you; I think it's because of 2 things.
|
| 1. De Heer der Ringen sounds _very_ formal. It 's because
| of both the choice of "Heer", which is a literal
| translation of Lord but is more commonly used to describe
| an old, respectable man. (The connecting word of "der"
| only adds to it, given "der" isn't often used nowadays.)
|
| 2. "In de ban van X" also nicely doubles as a Dutch
| saying; being in de ban of something means being
| enthralled by it. Which fits well with the overall motive
| of temptations that the ring provokes in those around it.
| kergonath wrote:
| I have read both English and French versions of most
| Diskworld books. It is the best translation I have read,
| ever. Patrick Couton is outstanding. He carries all the
| charm and wit across languages, but is never a slave of
| Pratchett's words and does not hesitate to adapt what needs
| to be. His French puns are glorious. _Guet des orfevres_
| for Pseudopolis Yard is absolute genius, and so are many
| others. They always land well and are never jarring, and I
| find some of them better than the original. The Ch'ti that
| the wee free men speak is great. He managed to reproduce
| the difference in tone of the book series as well.
| Including the footnotes, which is most impressive.
|
| TL; DR: if there is one good translation, it has to be this
| one. If you read it in French, you are not losing much over
| the English original.
| totetsu wrote:
| How do the weemens way of talking come across in translation
| Scarblac wrote:
| The translators pick a fitting dialect of the target
| language, I think.
| loutr wrote:
| In French it's largely based on _picard_ , a dialect from
| northern France.
| totetsu wrote:
| https://youtu.be/W17uYuQA9Mc?si=3Ndlen5P2ZqeyZdn&t=52 Oh
| Its perfect.
| btilly wrote:
| The one series whose translations are very good is the series
| _Asterix and Obelisk_. The original is in French. I believe
| that most of the translations are good. Certainly the English
| one is.
| zem wrote:
| the translator (anthea bell) has also done a brilliant
| translation of leonie swann's "three bags full", a
| hilarious novel in which a flock of sheep try to figure out
| who murdered their shepherd. (at least, i assume it's a
| brilliant translation because the novel is both charming
| and funny in english.)
| henriquecm8 wrote:
| > (It helped that at this time my English got good enough that
| I could read whole novels complete with puns and obscure
| references.)
|
| It's been almost a decade since I started watching movies/tv
| shows, and playing games with original audio (usually english
| or japanese) and english subtitles instead of my native
| language, to help improve my english. But I to this day, every
| time I rewatch the movie Airplane, there are new jokes I hadn't
| understood before. It's one's of the reason I like to rewatch
| it every couple of years, the other being that it's my favorite
| comedy movie.
| sorokod wrote:
| Sometimes it is the core language and sometimes it is the
| jargon on top. After watching Apocalypse Now many times I
| recently found out that in Kilgore's " _Outstanding Red Team,
| outstanding..._ " , red team is an actual thing in Air
| Cavalry .
| Terr_ wrote:
| Even as a native English speaker, I'll occasionally re-read a
| Pratchett book and realize there was a minor reference or pun
| that I probably missed the last time.
| fabian2k wrote:
| Another pretty consumer-hostile thing German publishers sometimes
| do is to split books into multiple parts in the German version.
| This does have a legitimate reason in some cases as the German
| version will be longer and you can hit some limits on book size
| with already large books. But I've also seen it in cases where it
| was clearly artificial. And it results in essentially 2-3x the
| price for the same book, because of course each German book part
| costs around the same as the original full book.
| masklinn wrote:
| French publishers do (or did at one point anyway) the same
| thing. For instance the first section of realm of the
| elderlings (3 trilogies, so 9 volumes) was published as _19_
| volumes.
|
| And for some reason a few years later they republished it in
| only 7, which is just as insane (they literally cut in the
| middle of the 5th volume).
| LocalH wrote:
| Really shows how much these industries respect the actual art
| involved.
| jayjader wrote:
| There was (still is?) a French law that mandates the maximum
| sales price for soft-cover/paperback books:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law (if you can read it,
| the French version of that wikipedia article is much more
| detailed). The intent behind the law being to attempt to keep
| "culture" accessible to all incomes, notably by preventing
| resellers from price-gouging books at the expense of the
| publisher(s).
|
| This has resulted in many larger tomes being split up when
| translated to French - for example, the first 5
| (English/Original) volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire are sold
| as 15 (translated to French) books in total : https://fr.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/Le_Tr%C3%B4ne_de_fer#Publicati...
|
| I am also very disappointed at how often French publishers
| seem to decide that they can chop up these stories willy-
| nilly without it degrading the quality of the art
| (re-)productions that they are selling us.
| LittleNemoInS wrote:
| The price is fixed by the editor, there is no state
| mandated price.
|
| The purpose of the law is to have the same price for a book
| in every bookshop (with a 5% discount possible). This was
| supposed to help small booksellers, who could not compete
| against big corporations. And it kinda worked, as there are
| more than 3500 independent bookshops in the country.
|
| The split up is not linked to the uniform price, I think
| it's more a cultural thing.
| namdnay wrote:
| no the french law is to protect publishers and libraries by
| setting a minimum price for books :(
|
| and now they've updated it to say you can't offer delivery
| for less than 3 euros...
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| In Bosnia in the 80s, I read this novel which was amazing but
| confusing.
|
| Decade later, I learned it was the middle third of the Original
| dune novel, starting literally in the middle of Harkonnen
| attack, as they ponder the ancient cannons without any mention
| of shields etc.
|
| It was quite the trip :-)
|
| I don't think it was hostile though. I think it had to do with
| this one guy / club doing the translating and needing both time
| to do the work, and money from first part to live through /
| finance the next part. I could be wrong, I was 10 at the
| time...
| CurtMonash wrote:
| I read the third book of the Zelazny's Amber series before I
| read the second, back when the series was new. I didn't do it
| on purpose, but I wasn't careful to avoid the risk either.
|
| That was the first time in my life I read three novels the
| same day. It was 2 days before qualifying exams for my PhD. 1
| day beforehand I was going to cram, but the day before that I
| wanted to clear my brain.
| mcv wrote:
| First time I read The Lord of the Rings, I was 12 or so, my
| dad was reading The Two Towers, my older brother was
| reading The Fellowship of the Ring, so I decided I should
| just start reading The Return of the King.
|
| So my first memories of LotR are Pippin riding Shadowfax
| behind Gandalf.
|
| When my dad finished book 2, I dropped book 3 and switched,
| and then to book 1 when my brother finished the first book,
| so that was a bit of a fragmented experience.
|
| Maybe there's also a lesson here to read books with your
| kids, or at least where they can see you read. It's
| contagious.
| bombcar wrote:
| My dad ended up buying the famous pirate Ace version of
| the Fellowship of the Ring - and it had absolutely no
| indication it was the first part of a combined trilogy so
| he thought it has a VERY abrupt weird ending until he
| later learned there were other volumes.
| mcv wrote:
| My dad had all three, my mom had only the first (of the
| same edition), so we had two copies of Fellowship at
| home. I guess I should have started in the other copy,
| except when I started we were on vacation and we didn't
| bring the duplicate Fellowship with us.
| CurtMonash wrote:
| And the last volume consists entirely of verbs ...
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| Do you have an example?
|
| I'm aware of books, which come in three volumes and this seems
| completely unnecessary. Subutex by Virginie Despentes comes to
| mind but that was already in the original.
|
| I'm not aware of a German trilogy, which wasn't a trilogy in
| its original edition.
|
| Thus, genuinly curious.
| vlz wrote:
| They did this with the "Song of Ice and Fire" (i.e. Game of
| Thrones) books for example. If you look at the translations
| here:
|
| https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?4543
|
| You will see two titles for German, French, Italian for each
| one title in English but only one each in Spanish and
| Russian. In the former cases, the story was split into two
| books with different titles.
| btilly wrote:
| My wife tells me that Russian publishers sometimes just
| translated a whole series...and then kept "translating" books
| that didn't exist. She only found that out after coming to
| America, trying to read the originals, and finding that what
| she thought of as the books at the end of various series often
| didn't EXIST in the original.
| Popeyes wrote:
| I remember Fay Weldon taking some money for product placing
| Bulgari products in her novels. So it's a thing that some authors
| are happy to do.
| rob74 wrote:
| It's one thing if the author decides to do it (although it
| might not go down well with their readers anyway) and a
| completely different thing if a publisher does it without the
| author's knowledge. But, to say something positive, it was at
| least identifiable as an ad and not "seamlessly" integrated
| into the text.
|
| Some not-so-reputable print magazines still do something
| similar to this day: embed ads that have more or less the same
| layout as the actual articles, praising some product. However
| these must be clearly labeled with the word "ANZEIGE".
| wrp wrote:
| Does the law in other countries require advertorials to be
| labeled? I seem to remember cases in the USA, but I haven't
| been looking.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| Actually definitely in Germany. But with product placement
| a "supported by product placements" is enough afaik.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Specifically her novel "The Bulgari Connection"
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| I read a series as a teen that I'm fairly sure had some product
| placement - characters mentioned multiple times how much they
| liked Smuckers preserves.
|
| Interestingly, the series had multiple viewpoint characters
| with each book narrated by one, and one of them had much more
| product placement than all the others - I only remember
| Cinnabon being mentioned outside her viewpoint books, or her
| being the one to mention a brand. I wonder whether it was a
| result of the author method writing, as that character was also
| the most ruthless of the group.
| cubefox wrote:
| I saw this type of ad only once, in an old Bruce Sterling novel.
| I found it funny (it referenced the story in a clever way) and
| thought it was some new innovative approach to advertising which
| hadn't caught on. I didn't knew this was actually an old thing
| for Heyne.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Yeah, in the ones I've read the characters themselves are
| eating the soup and commenting on how good it is! It's funny,
| but I can well see how an author might not be amused by
| advertisers putting words in their characters' mouths.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| See also, what happens if you try this game with harlan ellison:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB_hekYXWiw
| Slow_Dog wrote:
| This explains the naff "Captain Crunch" section of Neal
| Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon". Not that you can get it where I
| live; it would have made sense to do a "Weetabix" section with
| the same theme.
| lkramer wrote:
| I figured that was a homage to
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/capn-crunch-whistle
| celticninja wrote:
| It absolutely was
| toth wrote:
| It's funny, I know exactly what passage you mean and even
| though it's been many years since I read Cryptonomicon it's one
| of two specific passages I vividly remember reading and
| enjoying. This is even though I've never had Captain Crunch in
| my life.
|
| (The other passage was the one about one of the characters
| using a computer while in prison and setting up a profusion of
| xterms scrolling through random files because he suspected he
| was being spied on using van Eck phreaking.)
| rvbissell wrote:
| So, not the imperial pint of semen?
| wedn3sday wrote:
| Such a great book. Two of the big stand-outs to me have
| always been the bit about his ex-girlfriend doing a whole
| research project about his beard, and the phrase "anally
| copulating shopping carts" pops into my head every time Im at
| the super market.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Old-fashioned targeted advertising!
|
| Little did they know how prophetic they were...
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| I know you joke, but this advert is surely completely
| untargeted?
|
| It's definitely untargeted in the modern meaning (they don't
| pick which adverts to insert into the book when you buy it
| based on a profile of you). And even under any other meaning, I
| can't imagine German readers of Pratchet are much more
| bewitched by the charms of powdered soup than anyone else.
| i_am_jl wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure about the second bit; in my experience
| there's a significant overlap between Pratchett-readers and
| consumers of instant soup.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| shoop
|
| According to Cohen the Barbarian
| bombcar wrote:
| It's even more deceptive because if an author you like
| recommends a thing, you are much more likely to try it. So
| deceptively convincing the author or even worse just
| sneaking it in is breaking trust.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| Interesting. But in which direction does the arrow of
| causality point? Were they* advertised to because they*
| like instant soup, or do they* like soup because they* were
| advertised to?
|
| * Oh okay then, "we".
| SamBam wrote:
| Sure it's targeted, it's targeted at buyers of cheap pulp
| fiction. You say you don't think the readers are "more
| bewitched by the charms of powdered soup," but do you notice
| them selling river cruises through France? A Great Books
| history course? Rolex watches?
|
| Advertisers understood the idea of a target market even back
| then.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| The absence of brands which might be expected to target a
| very narrow market segment doesn't really help us
| understand if this ad for a mass-market product was
| targeted. But you're right, it probably was to some extent.
|
| I guess my main point was that this is a completely
| different category from present-day individually targeted
| ads. Bank then Rolex didn't need to invade anyone's privacy
| when choosing to advertise in "More Money Than Sense
| Monthly"
| erremerre wrote:
| Don't you dare to delete the ad with a black marker, because
| doing so it is clearly unethical, just like those internet ads.
| tmtvl wrote:
| I know what you mean, as long as you paid for it nobody has the
| right to tell you that getting rid of ads in a book or webpage
| is wrong.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody seems to have caught on to the obvious
| sarcasm in your comment
| kriro wrote:
| Loved this part: """They did it to Iain Banks, too, and
| apparently at a con he tore out the offending page and ate it."""
| Slimbo wrote:
| And both men are sadly no longer with us. Coincidence, hmm?
| vitiral wrote:
| Death smiles at us all... or not so much smiles but looks at
| us with a frozen grin while he hums a little tune.
| swyx wrote:
| and sometimes he pets his horse Binky
| marssaxman wrote:
| I would like to read more about that incident - which book was
| it!? - but I can find no other reference, alas.
| helmutschmidt wrote:
| Not complaining, just wanted to say that i see this mentioned
| every once in a while and it is still hilariously sad to see we
| had idiotic ad experiences before youtube.
| ordu wrote:
| In "Moving Pictures" Dibbler tried to do just that with... well..
| moving pictures. Only it was not a 5-min soup but Harga Ribs. I
| think even phrasing was the same "why not try..."
| "...nuorishing..."
| rsynnott wrote:
| Moving Pictures came out in 1990, and this only came to a head
| in 1994, so _probably_ a coincidence.
| swyx wrote:
| i'm amazed that Terry didnt insert this into one of his Moist
| von Lipwig stories, seems like a very Moist thing to do
| alexwasserman wrote:
| Covered a month ago too:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37762092
|
| Why black out some text? Is that actual story text blacked out?
| nxobject wrote:
| It doesn't look like it - this is an example from a Star Trek
| Novel: https://johannes.freudendahl.net/2019/01/werbung-in-
| romanen/
|
| The only redeeming quality is that the ads seem to be typeset
| to cover a whole physical page, so you could just tear it off
| without losing any actual story text. But you don't need the
| black lines to do that...
| Maken wrote:
| So, are the black lines there just to pad the page? Seems
| quite wasteful.
| riffraff wrote:
| This is great. It's odd because this kind of stuff is pretty
| normal in TV (quiz shows, sports etc) but I had never imagined it
| might happen in books.
|
| I can see how Sir Terry might have been deeply annoyed back then,
| but this was very fun to learn now.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Wasn't this pretty common for comics during the 70's/80's?
|
| https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tfJ2jdP-UbY/UETPI7yXmdI/AAAAAAAAF...
|
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2c/32/80/2c32806b8a19c33614d4...
|
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e0/3f/7e/e03f7eec694bf14dfb09...
|
| I guess the difference being that Marvel approved the
| advertisement.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Compared to your average youtube interstitial this is benign.
| Thank god for adblockers.
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20231113180707/https://gmkeros.w...
|
| https://archive.ph/s6wbk
| jhbadger wrote:
| They did this to William Gibson too! For some reason _Count Zero_
| (the middle book of the Sprawl / _Neuromancer_ series) was
| translated as into German as _Biochips_ and had the embedded soup
| advertisements. In way, that 's fitting for the corporate-
| controlled cyberpunk future he depicted.
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