Just wondering what experiences other Brokies from non-English speaking countries may have had with translations of the story...
I just finished reading the Dutch translation, and thought it was thoroughly awful
. It dates from way before the film, but after the movie they turned it into the cutest little hardcover book, containing just that one story. I couldn't resist, and thought it might also clarify the last handful of words I was too lazy to look up. So now I know that "wild colombine" is what we call akelei. It wasn't worth it, because in all essentials the translation just ruined the story. Even the title: "Twee cowboys" (i.e., "Two cowboys") - geeezzzz. Nearly every memorable phrase is mutilated in some way. "I wish I knew how to quit you" becomes "Ik wou dat ik wist hoe ik van je af kon komen", which is, literally: "I wish I knew how to get rid of you". "Let be, let be" becomes "Hou op, hou op", which is "stop it, stop it". When John Twist calls Jack's plan "half-baked", the translator for some mysterious reason chooses to avoid the perfectly synonymous Dutch "halfbakken", opting instead for "achterlijk", which means "retarded". The phrase describing Lureen's voice as polite but cold is rearranged so that its entire meaning changes: in the original, there's no doubt that she is polite; in the translation, there's no doubt her voice is cold as snow. Et cetera. et cetera.
It is a pretty depressing thought that fellow Dutchmen who can't read English have to make do with this. I am convinced that a better translator could have achieved far better results, and at the same time I wonder to what extent Proulx is untranslatable. Are translations into other languages any good?