Reading Stormlight in translation

[yulyulk]

Hi everyone, I'm curious if any of you have read Stormlight in a non-English language? I wonder how things like the shard names, or "voidbringers", or spren were translated. For instance, in a Spanish translation, does a windspren become a vientospren? Or things like crem, chull, parshmen, or even "journey before destination" etc. I speak some Turkish and Spanish and I could not imagine translating the Knights Radiant order names into either language...like what is an Elsecaller?!

 

[BreezeCauthon]

Unfortunately not, but I gotta say I wish I could speak Polish, because that cover art is AWESOME.

[KandraAllomancer]

I've read the first two books in Polish. Here's my old post about Order names:

Generally speaking, the obvious translation problem are Nounverbers, while Nounnouners are simpler to translate:

• spren names are relatively easy, for example windspren becomes 'wiatrospren' and voidspren becomes 'pustkospren'
• some names are not translated consistently: Surgebinder becomes 'Mocowiązca' (literally 'Powerbinder' for the lack of a single word that would mean Surge in this context), but Surgebinding is 'Wiązanie Mocy' ('Binding of Power')
• some Orders are translated into two words, which seems to sound quite good e.g. Bondsmith gets translated as 'Smith of Bonds' ('Kowal Więzi')
• other names are shortened, which sounds worse: Voidbringers become 'Voiders' ('Pustkowcy'), Soulcasters become 'Soulers' ('Duszniki'), Windrunners become 'Winders' ('Wiatrowi') etc.
• finally some names are just weird: Skybreakers are translated as 'Niebiańscy' (literally 'the Heavenly Ones', which is going to cause problems with the clashing Fused name) and Elsecallers become 'Przenosiciele' (literally 'Transmitters')
• words like crem, chull or parshmen are not translated at all

Edited December 27, 2020 by KandraAllomancer

[yulyulk]

Thank you @KandraAllomancer, that's the kind of thing I was curious about.

I managed to acquire a Turkish copy of The Way of Kings, and skimmed it to see how things were translated.

• Some names, such as "Stormblessed", "Gallant" (the Ryshadium), and "cosmere" were not translated at all, and instead a glossary at the back explained their meaning.
• Surgebinding became "dalgabağlama", which means... wavebinding(?) and sounds very awkward to my ears. Tho to be fair, "surgebinding" also sounds rather weird in English. Stormlight, Windrunning, Soulcasting etc were all translated literally, with varying levels of awkwardness.
• "Parshmen" & "chull" were left untranslated. "Crem" became "krem", for pronunciation reasons I suppose.
• "Voidbringer" became "yokelçi"(nothing-envoy), but they also translated "Herald" as "Elçi", which is an interesting parallel
• They also translated the book's ketek while retaining its symmetry! This might be easy or hard depending on the grammatical structure of a language, but it worked in Turkish.

[CosmereComrade]

Hi there! i've read every single Cosmere book in spanish (with the exception of the dawnshard novella since i didnt know when it would be published in spanish and I really wanted to read it before RoW, and white sand)

Windspren is actually translated as vientospren, so that one you guessed correctly!

For most of the other things they leave them in as in the English edition, with some little tweaks here and there, as in:

Parshmen is Parshmenio in Spanish.

However, for the radiant orders we have translations, which are slightly different, while mantaining the meaning of it (in spanish we can't form new words from the conjunction of two other words)

Those would be:

Truthwatcher -> Vigilante de la verdad

Windrunner -> Corredor/a del viento

Skybreaker -> Rompedor/a del cielo

Bondsmith -> Forjador/a de vínculos

Elsecaller -> Nominador/a de lo otro

Stoneward -> Custodio/a de piedra

Lightweaver -> Tejedor/a de luz

Dustbringer -> Portador/a del polvo

Edgedancer -> Danzante del filo

Willshaper -> Escultor/a de la voluntad

When I tipe the /a it is because you need to ad or substract that letter depending on the gender of the person (great language difference tbh)

Also voidbringer would be Portador/a del Vacío

This happens the same way with the shard's Intentions, and while Honor remains the same way, (so does Odium, which is actually originally latin, so we spanish speakers can read it normally) other intentions don't.

As is: Mercy -> Piedad, Preservation -> Conservación, Endowment -> Dotación and so on.

Also, in spanish this can make things slightly more complicated to translate. I always remember that one scene with Kaladin, when he jumps in the arena to save Adolin from his unfair duel, when he says "Honor is dead".

In english this means both things at the same time: The concept of honor is no longer supported by the people, and the actual Shard Honor is dead.

In spanish you can't say that, you need to put a "the" before honor to make the sentence have sense. But in doing that, you no longer have the second interlretation!

So, in spanish you could say: "El honor ha muerto" or "Honor ha muerto".

 

I hope i've helped you with this, and if you want to know more funny translation things I'm happy to help

[CosmereComrade]

Oh, I forgot to mention, we also do translate Keteks, but in RoW it wasn't entirely symmetric 

[Weltall]

On 12/24/2020 at 5:35 PM, yulyulk said:

Hi everyone, I'm curious if any of you have read Stormlight in a non-English language? I wonder how things like the shard names, or "voidbringers", or spren were translated. For instance, in a Spanish translation, does a windspren become a vientospren? Or things like crem, chull, parshmen, or even "journey before destination" etc. I speak some Turkish and Spanish and I could not imagine translating the Knights Radiant order names into either language...like what is an Elsecaller?!

I've got a Japanese copy of the The Way of Kings and there's an interesting mix of approaches to translating various terms, not all of them what I'd have expected going in.

Some proper terms are simply transliterated into katakana such as Stormlight (ストームライト) and Sphere, along with personal names of course. Stormlight Archive however got rendered literally into Japanese, as 嵐光録.

Other terms are referred to with an equivalent Japanese term, such as the Knights Radiant becoming 光の騎士 ('Shining Knights'). The term Shard(bearer/blade/plate) also get the direct treatment (破片) and the Windrunners were translated literally into Japanese as 風走り団, drop the last character to get Windrunning.

Still other terms split the difference and used a mix of katakana and kanji. Surgebinding became サージ結束, with Surge being transliterated into katakana and 'binding' rendered with an equivalent Japanese word. That same word also got used to translate Lashing, with appropriate Japanese words before to designate the three types. Spren are similarly split, with that term transliterated into katakana while the adjective is literally translated, so windspren are 風スプレン, honorspren are 名誉スプレン etc.

Then there's the direct mention of Shards by name and they're rendered in kanji (養成/憎悪) but with furigana written on top of it (カルティヴェイション/オディウム) indicating that they're meant to be read as 'Cultivation' and 'Odium'. It's a way to have the non-Japanese word and indicate that it's important while still providing the meaning for the readers who may not know them.

I would have expected a lot more of these terms to have been transliterated into katakana and as a result I have no idea how future volumes would have handled the other Orders, though I could probably guess at them for fun. But they never translated beyond WoK so there's no official word on them.

Oh, and the Immortal Words were translated into Japanese and set off in bold. 死の前に生、弱さの前に強さ、行き先の前に旅

Edited January 12, 2021 by Weltall