Names of Characters in Foreign Editions.

[Who's Wee Dug]

Sjoerd3000 nice avatar.

[Sjoerd3000]

Sjoerd3000 nice avatar.

Thanks. yours is nice to

[Cheery]

For some reason, mine got all blurred. Ah, well...

[Who's Wee Dug]

Cheery draw yourself a new one.

[Cheery]

Yes, I'll maybe have to draw the whole thing smaller from the beginning. Then it won't get that blurred (I guess).

[GrayGriffin]

Hey, anyone have a list of all Chinese translations? I can do the literal translations of them for you guys. Just don't get simplified Chinese...

[Tonyblack]

You can see some of the various covers from around the world - including Chinese editions on Colin Smythe's website HERE.

[GrayGriffin]

*looks titles over* Seems like most of those are more-or-less literal translations. The Color of Magic is still The Color of Magic, or, more literally, Magic's Color. The Light Fantastic gets translated into The Fantastic Light-in Chinese, adjectives always come first. Mort is Death's Apprentice, as seems to be the norm in most of these translations. Equal Rites becomes Equal Rights, losing the pun.

And that's all the Chinese books they have. I'd post the characters, but I'm too lazy to type them. Yes, I live in Taiwan but am too lazy to type Chinese.

[Tonyblack]

*looks titles over* Seems like most of those are more-or-less literal translations. The Color of Magic is still The Color of Magic, or, more literally, Magic's Color. The Light Fantastic gets translated into The Fantastic Light-in Chinese, adjectives always come first. Mort is Death's Apprentice, as seems to be the norm in most of these translations. Equal Rites becomes Equal Rights, losing the pun.

And that's all the Chinese books they have. I'd post the characters, but I'm too lazy to type them. Yes, I live in Taiwan but am too lazy to type Chinese.

I quite like the artwork on the Taiwan covers.

[bikkit]

Hogfather is Papa Purco in spanish. I saw it in a bookshop and could only understand the death of rats

[GrayGriffin]

Chinese covers are often interesting.

RANDOM POINTLESS FACT: For A Series of Unfortunate Events, not only were the covers redrawn, but all the internal illustrations were redrawn in the same style. Somewhat disorienting.

[Jan Van Quirm]

Chinese covers are often interesting.

RANDOM POINTLESS FACT: For A Series of Unfortunate Events, not only were the covers redrawn, but all the internal illustrations were redrawn in the same style. Somewhat disorienting.

Only disorienting if you've not seen the other [mainstream?] version? Artistically I'd be insulted if I drew something that was good enough for the cover, but not be asked to do the interior illustrations, which are often far more interesting to do

Added later on reflection - Visuals for some writing are a pain 'cos you're more likely to accept the artwork over your own vision - like Josh with giving Twoflower 4 proper eyes so in some way it's more of a compliment to the reader's own imagination not to have any illustrations at all - or even bother with cover art. 'Branding' is something that we're all used to in a consumer society to the point of actually 'needing' it - all wrong when you think it through but of all the senses vision is king as that is what draws us to most things where a psychological or aesthetic 'in' is needed. I know the other senses play their part (and may have to if you don't have any sight at all) but eyes are very important and from a cerebral aspect is the richest 'in depth' as they are the windows to your - brain Hard-wired in fact, which is why you should maybe not be judging a book by its cover - but over a distance, how it looks is key in luring you into picking it up... and why, if you need to commission a different style cover then the other illustrations ought to go with it or it would look ever more disorienting.

[GrayGriffin]

Yeah, but most of the time, if there are interior illustrations, they just use the original cover.

[Dandelion]

Two - maybe - interesting tidbits about an early german translation:

The 1985 german version of The Colour of Magic was published by the Goldmann Verlag as "Die Farben der Fantasie" (The Colours of Fantasy) - seems the translator got a bit mushed up with The Light Fantastic..

In that edition, during the event taking place on the TWA flight, Dr. Rjinswand a.k.a. Rincewind, 33 bachelor and born in Sweden (though Rijnswand sounds more dutch than swedish to me) meets Jack Zweiblumen a.k.a. Twoflower.. only that in the german version Twoflower already has been translated from the start to Zweiblume (singular) and mutates to Jack Zweiblumen (kinda plural; Two Flowers) for that event.

That was the only german translation of a book from TP I ever read. I got me an english version of TCoM shortly after and had at least 50% more fun reading it.. and so I luckily chose to only get me original versions of all his work. Too much of TP's humour can't be translated, I think. And I'm lucky to know enough about Great Britain to at least understand 75% of his "typical british" (and untranslatable into german) jokes.

[Tonyblack]

Welcome to the site Dandelion!