October 17, 2003
Holy Smokes
I'm reading "Holy Fire" by Bruce Sterling at the moment. So far, I like it okay. I'm only about 100 pages into it, though.
In "Holy Fire", Sterling sends his protagonist off to Germany and there is this little paragraph in German. In very bad German. No, it's not, as Doug suggested, a version of a German in 100 years from now, the time the book is set in. It's just grammatically extremely poor:
[..] mit lichtreflektierend Farbpigmente. Very modeanzeigen. O so frivol! Radikales Liftings und Intensivpeelings. Der Kampf mit dem Spiegel. O so feminin! Schönheits-cocktail, die beruhigende Feuchtigkeitscreme. Revitalisierende! Die Wissenschaft der Zukunft! Die Eleganze die neue Diva! (Page 106 of the paperback edition)
I'm counting 13 grammar and spelling mistakes. In five lines of text!
It's not the first time that I notice very poor German in English novels, either. Why is that?
Is it that big guys like Sterling don't get edited anymore? Is it that the editors just skip the foreign language parts? Is it that writers like Sterling think their grasp of German is so good they don't need any help? Do they use Babelfish?
Please. Do your readers a favor and splurge the $3 a professional translation of the quoted paragraph would cost.
Or ask me:
[..] mit lichtreflektierenden Farbpigmenten. Very modern [modeanzeigen ist not a word]. Oh, so frivol! Radikale Liftings und Intensivpeelings. Der Kampf mit dem Spiegel. Oh, so feminin! Schönheitscocktail, die beruhigende Feuchtigkeitscreme. Revitalisierend! Die Wissenschaft der Zukunft! Die Eleganz der neuen Diva!
I hope Sterling resists the temptation to put more German into this novel. One paragraph I can skip. Two or more will make this book unreadable for me.
Posted by claudia at October 17, 2003 09:11 PM