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#26 | |
A Voice That Gainsayeth
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: In that far land beyond the Sea
Posts: 7,431
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We have one more joke in the books than you!!!
Today I just accidentally came upon one thing in the Hobbit while reading the English original. While reading Gollum's riddle about "time" I was interested how it sounds in original; for I knew there was a sort of linguistic joke in there. What was my surprise when I realized that the sentence (or part of it, to be precise) is completely missing in the original! After a moment of thinking about it, however, I came to the conclusion that it's not that surprising after all. Translators often have to deal with untranslateable passages and have to translate them differently. Nevertheless, it's interesting: the Czech translator has made up one more sentence, which was not included in the original at all.
I immediately thought if there could be similar moments in any of the other translations; and if anyone knows about it. If I were sure there would be some positive answers, I'd make a new thread about that, but since I'm not sure if it is not unique case, I'll include it for now just in this post. The "extra sentence" comes right after the riddle. I'm not sure if the joke would be explainable, but I will try, just in case anyone is interested. In the original, we read: Quote:
The words "Slays king" are translated as "Krále školí" - if Gollum spoke normally, it would be "krále skolí". "Král" means "King". "Skolí" means "slays". "Školí" (derived from the word "škola" = school) means "teaches". The translator probably had to make it clear that Time does not teach kings (though it does as well), but slays them. Thus, he expanded the sentence: "Though poor Bilbo understood that lisping Gollum meant "slays king", and not some teaching, he still could not remember that any of the giants and ogres he had ever heard told of in tales had done all these things..." It's a little thing, but interesting, nevertheless. I am not much sure if it's funny the other way around. Probably not at all. But perhaps someone could provide us with another, (more) interesting "play with words" he knows from his translation?
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"Should the story say 'he ate bread,' the dramatic producer can only show 'a piece of bread' according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own." -On Fairy-Stories |
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