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Comment by larusso | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a great translation I struggled a bit at first. Gimli from Lord of the Rings is named in English: Gimli, son of Glóin. In the German translation his name is Gimli Glóinssohn. So back to English it would be Gimli Glóinson

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By the way, there are two German translations. One “original” by Margaret Carroux which is closer to the English original and who collaborated with Tolkien back in his days, and a newer one from the late 90s by Wolfgang Krebe which tried to transform the text to something closer to spoken German. In the original Sam calls Frodo “Master” or, I believe sometime “Sir”, which is to be understood in the gentry commoner relationship. There is no real equivalent to “Master/Sir” in German. Carroux used “Herr” which sounds rather archaic to post-medieval Germans; Krege uses “Chef” which sounds too modern for the text.

If I remember my childhood’s Carroux translation correctly she used “Gimli, Gloins Sohn”, so not the Scandinavian construction, but a grammatically correct, but still archaic sounding, German construction which is near the original and still got the vibe of Gloinson.

Translation is tricky business.

Yesterday I watched a Harry Potter movie with my GF. I was a huge Potter-head back in the days, she haven't read the books. So I tried to explain to her the huge discussions around the acronym RAB in the books, and how the Norwegian translator had guessed on RAS to match how other character names were translated. Led me down to this article which has a whole section on "difficulties in translation" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harry_Potter_transla...

So how the mirror of Erised had do get a proper backwards name in Norwegian, the O.W.Ls needed a fun acronym as well, Tom Marvolo Riddle is translated as Tom Dredolo Venster to make a matching sentence akin to how it in English is I am Lord Voldemort. Gotta make the songs and poems rhyme, etc.

The Norwegian translation is a work of love, and the translator Torstein Bugge Høverstad got quite famous here for his work.

I have to imagine that Tolkien would have been delighted to discuss how to translate LoTR.

Some books I have read have left terms untranslated (typically rendered in italics) where the concept doesn't really translate. That might work quite well for master/sir.

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