| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | How to find a quote from a book? Thread poster: Gabriele Demuth
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Luca Tutino 
Italy
Member (2002)
English to Italian
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| Ask the author of the source text (via the agency if necessary) | Mar 13, 2016 |
neilmac wrote:
I totally agree. On at least one of the few occasions when I've had to translate quotes, I tweaked or improved upon the original "official" translation.
I think that you missed the point. The English source text includes a translated quote from a German book and Gabriele needs to find the original German quote. Obviously, she is not looking for an inexistant official translation, and she cannot quote by using her own back-translation. There are only two options here: find the original passage or, if possible, turn the phrase into an indirect quote. The first option is much better but it might require too much time for a small translation.
Another possible good solution would be asking the author of the source text.
| | | | neilmac
Spain
Local time: 02:51
Spanish to English
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Gabriele Demuth wrote:
Sorry, I don't agree. It doesn't matter how good or bad that quote is translated in the German translation of the book. If there wasn't a German translation then there wouldn't be a problem - but there is and it seems that it has been around since the 1950s.
[Edited at 2016-03-13 10:09 GMT]
Sorry, I didn't understand your situation. It seems that what you are looking for is not a translation, but the original German phrase as it appeared translated in your current source text.
Nevertheless, as I said earlier, I usually have no qualms about improving existing translations if I think my version will be more up-to-date or better in some other way.
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Gabriele Demuth wrote:
How would you deal with that? Turn it into indirect speech?
I think I would have told the client I couldn't find the exact quote from the book since the German version doesn't appear to be in the public domain and available online (thing which already required quite a bit of research and time), and that physically looking for the German translation would fall outside the scope of the job. I would have then proposed to either translate the passage myself or use a paraphrase.
| | | | | Buy the book! | Mar 13, 2016 |
Luca Tutino wrote:
Another possible good solution would be asking the author of the source text.
Once I had a Spanish translation of a quote that I needed to translate back into English, and I tried contacting the author. I did get a reply but by then it was too late - I had already bought the book and skimmed the content until I found what I was looking for!
It took me no more than half an hour, though I had already spent half an hour trying to find the quote on the Internet!
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| search for distinctive phrases | Mar 14, 2016 |
I generally try very hard to find and quote from existing translations. Obviously it does make a difference whether it is a translated quotation from Foucault in a German or English academic publication or a little snippet on a tourism website.
Google Books is very useful. The book itself does not appear to be there, but most quotations contain one or more passages containing distinctive combinations of words that are very likely to be translated in a specific way. Doing a general s... See more I generally try very hard to find and quote from existing translations. Obviously it does make a difference whether it is a translated quotation from Foucault in a German or English academic publication or a little snippet on a tourism website.
Google Books is very useful. The book itself does not appear to be there, but most quotations contain one or more passages containing distinctive combinations of words that are very likely to be translated in a specific way. Doing a general search of the web or a search of just Google Books with the author's name plus one of those phrases (and maybe a few other keywords) will often turn up what you are looking for.
Project Gutenberg is rarely helpful for translations, because most of the translations on it are antiquated garbage and it only contains works in the public domain. It can be useful for finding original texts, but the German version of Project Gutenberg (through Spiegel) is also a pain to use anyway.
Edited to add: And the question seems perfectly clear now, although it seems to have been edited at some point. You are translating a website from English to German. The English website contains a quotation in English from a well-known English book about Sicily. This book has been translated into German and you feel this German translation is likely to also be reasonably well-known among users of the website, so you want to quote from the existing (translated) German book and not just translate the passage yourself.
[Edited at 2016-03-14 07:57 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Gabriele Demuth
United Kingdom
Local time: 01:51
English to German
TOPIC STARTER
Michael Wetzel wrote:
Edited to add: And the question seems perfectly clear now, although it seems to have been edited at some point. You are translating a website from English to German. The English website contains a quotation in English from a well-known English book about Sicily. This book has been translated into German and you feel this German translation is likely to also be reasonably well-known among users of the website, so you want to quote from the existing (translated) German book and not just translate the passage yourself.
[Edited at 2016-03-14 07:57 GMT]
Sorry, I thought that was clear as I only have on language pair.
Update:
I have found a very friendly bookseller who has the book, he/she sent me a picture of the contents page as he/she (understandably) could not read 317 pages to look for a quote. Unfortunately, I couldn't open the file for some reason, to look at the contents page, but my guess is as good as their's, so I think I have done all possible (within the scope of a 1000 word translation) to find the quote and decided to use indirect speech/rephrase.
Thanks for all your suggestions!!!
| | | | | The Bible - just for the record | Mar 14, 2016 |
If anyone ever needs to find a quote from the Bible and its numerous translations, the answer is at:
http://www.biblegateway.com
They have some 200+ translations of the Bible into 150+ languages, all searchable.
Unless you are deep into biblical studies, such translation queries will be free.
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