57 replies to this topic

[Bloodhound]

Here's a question for all the non-native-English speakers on the forum, especially those who've read A Song of Ice and Fire in translation...

How did the translators whose work you've read deal with the 'My-name-is-Reek,-it-rhymes-with-meek-/-leek-/-weak-/-freak-/-bleak' rhymes?

I used to be a literary translator myself (translating from English into Dutch), and I have to say, I would have hated to translate Theon's rhymes, because none of the Dutch equivalents to the English rhyme words rhymes with any Dutch word for 'stench' or 'stinky person'. And since the rhyme words, far from being random words, actually reflect Theon's situation, this poses a problem. So I'm wondering, how did Martin's official translators go about these rhymes? Did they come up with other rhyme words which somehow fitted into Theon's context? If so, what words, and what do they mean? Did any translators go so far as to change the name Ramsay gave Theon ('Reek') just to make the rhyming easier, or did they drop the rhymes altogether because they found it impossible to come up with rhymes which matched the context? Inquiring minds wish to know...

Thanks in advance for any light you may shed on this subject and any examples you may provide us with!

Edited by Bloodhound, 15 February 2012 - 01:37 AM.

[Ygrain]

I will yet have to see the result in Czech but given that the translation is rather poor on the whole, I don't put much trust in dealing with the rhymes ("hands of gold are always cold" simply got a literal translation and that was it). "Reek" was earlier on translated with a noun ("stinker" equivalent), and there happens to be a word for "weak person" that has the same ending, so these will most probably rhyme, but the leek/sleek/meek etc. - no chance. The same for "her name is Jeyne, it rhymes with pain" - no Czech word ends with "yn". Personally, I'd try using her full name, since Poole rhymes with the word for "salt", which offers connotations for tears, or rubbing wound with salt.

[Bloodhound]

'Salt' would not be a bad solution to the Jeyne-pain rhyming issue, I suppose. A good translator could probably make that work. The best 'Peyne' rhyme I could come up with in Dutch is geween, which means 'weeping'.

Another translation issue I've been wondering about is 'The Bear and the Maiden Fair'. I don't know any language except English in which 'bear', 'fair' and 'hair' rhyme, which poses obvious translation problems. I'd love to see how Martin's official translators went about that one!

[Villemo]

in these thread you can find some interesting information about translation too
http://asoiaf.wester...ek/page__st__20

[bgona]

These rhymes are one of my favorite parts of Theon POV! The rhymes make me laugh and after think in how low-esteem that he has (all the words he uses to rhymes are reflecting how he feels) but also it highlights he uses this memory tecnic for survival. He still been Theon in his inside.

Reek in Spanish had been translated as Hediondo and it will be hard to find words, but I am sure they will find someone to fit in the context. Or maybe they will change the name to Apestoso or some similar so they can have more rhymes.

[Buckwheat]

The Slovene ACOK translates "Reek" as "Njuh", and there is plenty of words ending with -uh (all of them nouns), most of them having negative connotations, together with "smrduh", which actually means "stinker". So I do not think the translator will leave all those Reek-rhymes out. All of the rhymes may not be as good as the original, but they will catch something of the original, I sincerely hope. I have to see it when it comes out.

Ygrain, on 15 February 2012 - 01:09 AM, said:

The same for "her name is Jeyne, it rhymes with pain" - no Czech word ends with "yn". Personally, I'd try using her full name, since Poole rhymes with the word for "salt", which offers connotations for tears, or rubbing wound with salt.

Same here, nothing ends with -yn in Slovene. I also think the translator might go with Poole, but even that would be hard to rhyme with anything."Metulj" (butterfly)? No way.

About the Bear and the Maiden Fair, some words have a rhyme, but it does not sound as good as the original - there is no language in which this song would sound as good as "A BEAR THERE WAS! A BEAR - HAIR - FAIR!"

[Ygrain]

The bear and maiden fair in Czech uses an allusion to a fairy tale/fable about a bear which has eaten everything ("medvěd, co všechno sněd") and an attempt at a weak asonance in the plural ablativ of "hair" ("ve vlasech")

But here I don't blame the translator much, because bear-hair-fair is a translator's nightmare. Translating English poetry to Czech sucks even normally, what with the various endings and affixes and the average word length 2-3 syllables (and more), as compared to the broad English selection of monosyllabic words. There is inevitably a loss of pace and extending the length, or a heavy loss of content. I took a course in translating poetry at uni, just for fun... tough job.

[Val the Wildling Princess]

We are still waiting for the official spanish translation and only the Old Gods know when it will be out But I'm afraid that we don't have any word to make the rhyme sound as great as it sounds in the original version, spanish translation for Reek is "Hediondo" I think the translators are gonna have to work hard with this one. Same with Jeyne, the spanish word for pain is "dolor" and it certainly doesn't rhyme with Jeyne at all.

[Winter's Lady]

I haven't read the german translation, but I doubt they could make it sound good, without bastardizing the meaning. The german word for Reek is "Gestank" or "Mief", try making a good rhyme with that...
And also pain is "Schmerz". Certainly does not rhyme with Jeyne. Doesn't rhyme with anything really, besides "Herz"(=heart). The german translation sucks anyway,
I started the series in German after I saw the show in English, but quickly gave up because translated names of people and places just sounded wrong. I don't see why it should be so hard for people to understand 'King's Landing' or 'Eyrie'...anyway, I'm rambling.

[fossegrim]

Only the first book has so far been translated into Norwegian, so no help there. I can imagine something like "Stank, it rhymes with bank/tank/sank/dank/hank" which is stench, rhyming with bank/tank/gather/idle/handle, but there's no way to make it rhyme with the context. What seems more realistic is to do away with the rhymes and give him different epithets, which would also allow a more subtle name than Stank, like maybe Dunst, which is a more sneaky sort of stench I guess?
They definitely can't keep his name as Reek, which is pronounced like the Norwegian "rich", but which does rhyme with words like yield/creek, whitefish and corpse/equal.

[Kate Poem]

In Polish "Reek" was translated as "Fetor". It rhymes only with "przeto" (therefore).

[Bloodhound]

Villemo, on 15 February 2012 - 02:22 AM, said:

in these thread you can find some interesting information about translation too
http://asoiaf.wester...ek/page__st__20

Thanks! That was an interesting read. I'm still hoping for more input, though. I'm hoping to see that at least some of the rhymes can be rendered into other languages. Like, for instance, the hands-of-gold-are-always-cold line brought up by Ygrain, which actually works in Dutch: 'Handen van goud zijn altijd koud.' It's a perfect rhyme, nothing forced about it. Woo hoo!

Ygrain, on 15 February 2012 - 05:47 AM, said:

The bear and maiden fair in Czech uses an allusion to a fairy tale/fable about a bear which has eaten everything ("medvěd, co všechno sněd") and an attempt at a weak asonance in the plural ablativ of "hair" ("ve vlasech"). But here I don't blame the translator much, because bear-hair-fair is a translator's nightmare. Translating English poetry to Czech sucks even normally, what with the various endings and affixes and the average word length 2-3 syllables (and more), as compared to the broad English selection of monosyllabic words. There is inevitably a loss of pace and extending the length, or a heavy loss of content. I took a course in translating poetry at uni, just for fun... tough job.

Oh, don't I know it. Translating poetry is hard. The main problem I ran into when translating English poetry into Dutch was that English is a subject-verb-object language, whereas Dutch is a subject-object-verb language. This difference comes into play in long, run-on sentences, which sound OK in English with the object at the end, but sound rather bad in Dutch with the verb tacked on at the end. Word length is also an issue, with Dutch words generally being much longer than their English counterparts. I usually tried to observe the original rhyme scheme (where possible) but could not be bothered to try and render the metre.

Edited by Bloodhound, 15 February 2012 - 07:31 AM.

[Neriwyn]

I checked on the wikipedia and "Reek" becomes "Schlingue" in French. It will be hard to make nice rhymes with that ! It would have been much easier with "Puant" (stinky), we have a lot of words ending with "ant" in French...
So wait and see, the first part of ADWD will be published in March.

[bgona]

I jusf imagine one rhyme in Spanish "Me llamo Hediondo que rima con cante hondo" Sorry, I just couldn´t help it.

[just an Other]

Having worked as an english to greek translator, I can tell you this would be an absolute bitch, which you can't ignore in anyway because it is central to the whole tone of Theon's chapters. Personally I would dispense with the rhyme to come up with some sort of lyric in metre or possibly change the word order in order make the rhyme with a greek word rather than "Reek" or "Jayne". Needless to say this would require more work than the rest of Theon's chapters combined.

[Lykos]

In german it´s also stinker, which is actually the exact same word and nothing rhymes with it except : drinker, "Trinker" - semaphore, "Winker" - the name Katinka.

I think they should have named him something like scat, "Kot" in german. Kot rhymes with dead, "Tot" - distress, "Not" - idiot "Idiot"....

[Dementia]

Awesome thread. I've always wondered how translators do their job, and not just in rhyme. Words can have such subtle meanings... I wonder if there would be an option to just not translate those sections? For example (in my very poor Spanish): Mi nombre es Reek rima con weak.

I recall a lot of old timey authors, Poe springs to mind, would put in passages and phrases that weren't translated.

[jessalyn]

Oh, I'm glad to hear that the Hebrew translation is סרחן -- that should make it quite easy to rhyme with things. And it's quite appropriate! Makes me want to read it in Hebrew now and find out what words they've used.... 8)

[Lykos]

Also I just noticed that the phrase, it rhymes with.., doesn´t sound good in german: "Es reimt sich mit..." , better would be, sounds like...: "klingt wie.." . The little word "mit" really screws up the rhythm.

@bgona
cante hondo - I(male) sing low ?

Edited by Lykos, 15 February 2012 - 10:35 AM.

[Bloodhound]

Dementia, on 15 February 2012 - 10:14 AM, said:

Awesome thread. I've always wondered how translators do their job, and not just in rhyme. Words can have such subtle meanings... I wonder if there would be an option to just not translate those sections? For example (in my very poor Spanish): Mi nombre es Reek rima con weak.

No, that's not an option in most cases, although I used to wish it was sometimes. For instance, the first book I ever translated was set in Australia, and the dialogue featured a lot of Australian slang, e.g. 'mate', 'crook' (sick) and 'Pommy' (Englishman). At one point, the main character (an Englishwoman who had just arrived in Australia) expressed surprise at those words, saying to herself, 'So they really do use those words!' I had a hard time translating those words into Dutch. I ended up leaving out all the 'mates' because there is no Dutch equivalent, and I more or less 'translated away' words like 'crook' and 'Pommy'. In hindsight, I probably should have left those words as they were, i.e. untranslated, but my proof-reader seemed to think that was not a good idea, and being new at the job, I deferred to her. Until she told me, in all seriousness, that a double-glazing salesman was a salesman who wore Coke bottle glasses, at which point I realised she was full of shit and had no idea what she was talking about. But I digress...

Dementia, on 15 February 2012 - 10:14 AM, said:

I recall a lot of old timey authors, Poe springs to mind, would put in passages and phrases that weren't translated.

That's different, I think. When Poe used his French, it was fashionable to use French, and most of his readers would have been expected to understand the passages in question. Using French was a way of showing how well-educated and sophisticated you were, so lots of authors did it. I'm always amused when I come across French passages in nineteenth-century Russian novels. It seems completely out of place, and yet it wasn't, because at the time the Russian elite would have been fluent in French.

Edited by Bloodhound, 15 February 2012 - 11:11 AM.