I have just recently finished reading a piece of detective fiction by Baantjer (the Dutch mystery writer) and found it wonderfully plotted but flawed in language usage. A street person with little or no education will speak like a college professor at times and at others like a teenager. Sometimes characters will speak in Dutch phrasing and other times they use colooquial American phrasing.
I mentioned this to a Dutch friend of mine on line the other night and he said my discription of Baantjer was way off base, and it must have been his American translater that butchered the story.
Anyone else come across this type of thing? Granted, we usually just say, “This is garbage,” and don’t bother finding out why. But I was wondering if Shakespeare ends up being butchered or Hemingway’s tight writing ends up the purple prose of some translater. Does the delighful, street smart Stephanie Plum end up sounding like an Oxford don?
Or on the otherside, are we missing some wonderful writing by some Japanese author because the American translator has no idea of how to translate his words into emotions.
Battle Royale by Koushun Takami - Fantastic book, but a friend of mine who’s read the original says it isn’t as good as the original. Same thing for the film version - great film, but there’s apperently a lot of nuance that just gets cut out in the translation.
Going the other way, Samuel R. Delany has reported that when his book Nova was translated into French, there was a big change.
The book is a retelling of the Grail story, and Delany notes in the text that no one ever completed a story of the Holy Grail was jinxed as soon as he completed it, so the only way to avoid the jinx would be stop stop before he finished the last
In any case, the French translator decided to finish the last sentence.
He died, of course. 
I think Delany also pointed out that the translator changed, “depilitory cream” (to remove a beard) to “shaving cream.” So you had the narrator putting on shaving cream and then wiping it off for no reason.
Finally, the person involved was getting occupational therapy – OT for short. The translator replaced that with “Old Testiment.”
While trying to improve my German, I thought buying a couple books in German would help. Something more fun to read than a textbook or flashcards and easier than tackling something like Goethe… So I bought a copy of Grimm (not bad) and a copy of The Hobbit, or as the German title had it Der kleine Hobbit. The translator made two unforgivable changes. One: They changed Baggins to Beutlin (they left Bilbo alone) and two: They replaced all the drawings by Tolkein with these ugly-ass original illustrations. I never made it far enough to see what they did to Gollum. Actually, I just looked. You would not believe how Gollum looks. The animated version of The Hobbit and Return of the King has a better character design than this. Gollum looks like a reject from a D&D Monster Manual. If I ever get a chance I’ll scan it in and give a link.
The translation wasn’t very good either.
I’m reading B. Traven now, and there are moments where it feels translated, which can be annoying. I never felt that when reading, say, Borges. I don’t know whether it’s more that some writing styles translate better, or that some translators are better than others – I suspect more the latter.
By the way, for a hoot, if you speak any Spanish, check out the poems of e e cummings translated into that language.
Jules Verne was reportedly butchered by his English translators, especially Mercier Lewis/Louis Mercier. Walter James Miller pointed this out at length in his two volumes, The Annotated 20,000 Leagues and The Annotated From the Earth to the Moon. Up to a third of the books were completely discarded, and much of the rest of the translations were abysmal – “The Badlands of North Dakota” became “The Disagreeable Country of the Dakotas”, and “a pressure of 3 tons per square 3/8 of an inch” was how they rendered “3 tons per square centimeter”. Lewis also butchered the translations of the names of different sea creatures. He left out so much f the technical discussion that a science fiction fan was able to write an article in the 1950s in Glaxay claiming that Verne didn’t know his science. He did – bt the relevant passages had been cut out by Lewis. He also excised political views he didn’t like, as well as much characterization. Miller gleefully pointed out every deficiency in his annotated editions. Sveral years later he published his own translation.
In general, Verne translations since about 1960 have been pretty good, avoiding the problems of Mercier and other awful translators. The first complete translation into English of The Mysterious Island just appeared a couple of years ago.
Every time a manga translation comes out the fanboys start to whine about how it was horribly, horribly butchered. Japanese does have all these levels of politeness not easily captured in English, and those little suffixes like -san or -chan or whatever doesn’t always have a good English equivalent.
There’s also the issue of idioms and wordplay. I raised a few mental eyebrows when I read in a Chinese translation of Meitante Conan (Case Closed) that a detective refers to the criminal he is chasing as his “lover”. Turns out it’s a homonym in Japanese that the translator took a bit too literally. (I suppose, if it were to be rendered into English, the closest I can think of would be “catch” - the double meaning would still be somewhat there.)
Jerry Pournelle oftens tells the story of the German translation of his The Mercenary. It seems the German publisher gave a military fiction book to a communist translator.
“Peeved” was not the word for his reaction to the way it was translated.
William Weaver has translated books by Umberto Calvino and Umberto Eco, among others, into English from Italian. When I read his translations, the text flows; he captures the book’s spirit.
When I read stories and books by Calvino and Eco translated by other people, it sometimes feels like a different author was writing and I wish Weaver had been asked to do the translation…
I’ve also read two different translations of The Sceond Martian Invasion, aka The Second Invasion From Mars by the Russian brothers, Akadi & Boris Strugatski. One version (in an anthology called Vortex 1, from the early 70s, iirc) was great. I’ve read it several times. I also have another, more recent translation, which I’ve plodded through once.
So, all I’m saying is that the translator can make a huge difference.