Only if they were walking. Maria Trappgränd is for pedestrians only.
IIRC, Maria Trappgränd actually consists of stairs. Which is why it’s named Maria Trappgränd. Trapp being Swedish for stair.
And the children are arrayed on the stairs as they sing their Goodnight Song.
that was funny.
Yeah, I read a lot of old books, like stories written in the 1920s and 1930s. A lot of time and effort is spent trying to reach someone, or trying to check in. Archie has to find a public phone to get more instructions from Wolfe, for instance, or to report in.
The name refers to a fictional boy detective created by a Swedish writer. Referring to Mikael Blomkvist as Kalle Blomkvist is an “insult” becasue it paints him as an amateur detective instead of the investigative journalist that he is.
/golfclap for jessecapp
That’s gotta be the best “I didn’t read anything in the thread so I’m going to redundantly explain what was already explained months ago in this zombie thread I resurrected just to explain what y’all already knew” post I’ve seen in years.
Grats!
:rolleyes:
ETA: That should be ‘the best “I didn’t read anything in the thread so I’m going to redundantly explain what was already explained months ago in this zombie thread I resurrected just to explain what y’all already knew and which I registered specifically to post” post I’ve seen in years’.
:rolleyes::rolleyes:
This kind of thing bugs me. Why can’t they have a translators note explaining this? If I hadn’t read this thread I would have spent the rest of my life assuming that “Kalle” was the Swedish version of “Mister”. :rolleyes::mad:
@furryman - It’s explained in the text of the book.
Funnily enough, there was a real Richard Rich in the 16th century. It wouldn’t be flattering to be compared to him either.
My wife and I watched all of Buffy the Vampire Slayer last year, and it’s already a period piece, because there are so many problems in the show that could be solved with a quick cell phone call. Yeah, you can use the “bad reception” and “the battery is dead” trick once in a while. But not every episode. “There is a vital piece of information that protagonist A must give to protagonist B before X happens” is a standard trope in pre-cellphone drama. How many dramatic situtations would be resolved if you just got a call, “Oh, the bride is a werewolf? Good, then we won’t go through with the planned midnight wedding. Thanks for the tip!”
Oh dear God, please NOOOO! Don’t ruin good books again!
There’s also no need to at all - thereare very good movies of Lindgren’s books out there already. They haven’t been made by Hollywood, but that is no reason to produce a terrible CGI action movie travesty.
In a supernatural show, they could use quite a good explanation - whatever phenomen (the hellmouth?) makes Sunnydale such a trouble-magnet also impacts cell phone reception.
In the Harry Potterverse, magic, like in Hogwarts, influences telephones and other Muggle devices that use electricity; since the spells seem to use some kind of energy, too, this is (superficially) logical (at least good enough for government work).
And if you have a flat tire on a country road out in the woods, “no reception” is quite likely. And “low reception” will quickly result in “low battery”, and without power, you can’t load. So no cell phone for the rest of the movie.
Another explanation (though probably not used often) is “I got so many spam calls, that my phone card for this month is maxed out and all shops are closed, so I can’t buy new credit, so my phone doesn’t work due to money problems till tomorrow”.
My mother has a cell phone for emergencies - that is, in case her car breaks down outside the highway emergency calling system. Any other time, it’s deep inside a box somewhere, so she’s not reachable on it. This means I act as if she didn’t have one.
They make it pretty clear in the text that it’s a gibe, and that Blomqvist doesn’t like it. Salander at one point comments that it’s as insulting to him as if someone were to call her Pippi Longstocking, or did you think that was Swedish for Ms.? 
In todays age, where there’s Google and wikipedia just a keyboard away? Why should they explain?
Do your American authors explain special cultural references to non-US readers? Why should others?
I did finally come across the lines Greg Charles referred to. They prove Steig Larrson is a good writer.
I was watching an anime where they included the translators notes explaining all the obscure cultural references. The real question is what would it hurt to include things like this?
Why bother with the redundancy of including explanations when it is explained in the book itself? If you just read the book, it’s explained. And when it’s written for a Swedish crowd, who’s to say what references are obscure to non-Swedes?
Professional translators, as a general rule, are taught to avoid putting little explanatory notes and addendums at the bottom of the page as much as possible.
For one thing, it’s an admission of failure on their part (because they’re supposed to work it some other way, either by finding an equivalent reference within their own culture, or simply leaving it as is and trusting the interested reader to look it up themselves), for another it detracts from the flow of the story (esp. if the detail is not essential to understanding the text), and finally because it brings attention to the fact that the text was translated to begin with and a spotlight on the translator himself - very inelegant. A translator, unlike a child, should to be heard but never seen :p.
I read a version of Don Quixote which included an explanation of all the obscure Spanish jokes. One of the best translations I’ve ever read IMHO.
Honestly, jokes are the hardest thing to translate right. Do you translate them word for word, even though it makes little sense in English ? Do you try and make a similar English joke, except it will be shit because you’re a translator not a comedian/author ? Or do you try and explain the original joke, bearing in mind that as Alain Chabat said (or more probably quoted) “humour is like a frog, you can dissect it to figure out how it works, but then it is not alive any more” ?
Or, to put it more bluntly: if you have to explain the joke, it’s not really funny, is it ?
That’s different because it’s a historical book in addition to being in a foreign language.
There are quite a lot of addendums to Shakespeare’s works around to explain the more obscure meaning of some of his words.
And there are annotated works for Sherlock Holmes and others, to give an exhaustive background of “the past which is a different country”.
So either do extensive annotations or none at all.
Exceptions are of course footnotes by the author, like Karl May who translated arabic and other foreign words himself, because at his time, they were far less-known; and inserting a foreign word with a footnote explanation was an easy way to make the story exotic.
The other exception is the translator putting in a footnote “untranslateable pun” if a word choice makes no sense otherwise.
That’s where you see the difference between a very very good translator and a passable one: can they find an equivalent joke in the target language, or do they just translate what’s written?
Even that is better than missing the joke - that ends up making no sense usually.
The other litmus points for quality beside jokes are cultural references (he’s just as bad a singer as … / as reviled as …). It’s terrible in TV dubbing when you need to work backwards from the translation and guess how the translator misunderstood/ missed a reference that would have made sense if he had gotten it.