Stuck / Malazan rereading

 

Shitty Spanish Translation.

First of all, I want to state that Malazan Book of the Fallen is my favorite book series, hands down, so my annoying ranting is not about the contents of the books, but of the Spanish translation.

Now, I have been stuck for a while, mussing some review of a book that opened some emotions in me I didn’t know I had… it happens.  After that I started a rereading of Malazan Book of the Fallen. I was hyper because book 10 just arrived and thus, completed the 10 books in Spanish. The first reading was 7 in Spanish, 3 in English and it was a hard switch for me, so I wanted to read everything in Spanish and then everything in English (a bit of fangirl, I know). But it was not meant to be. You see, in book 7, the publisher closed down and it was such a shame, they have been doing a wonderful work, the translation was top notch. Years later another publisher continued the series, great news, right? Not the least. Book 8, was… off, I felt a big switch, not so big like switching language, but still, I cannot seem to get in this book as the other ones for one reason or another. And then book 9 … it was utterly trash. I have never seen a book so wrong! full of mistakes, they kept switching character names (it began in book 8) and you know, there are a lot of characters (looooooooooots) to keep track for doing something like this, translation mistakes, lines of text that didn’t get translated at all (hell… who is going to notice, right?) and terrible, terrible errors in context, entire paragraphs that seemed like nonsense, because… it was nonsense, they got the context wrong and then translated something unrelated. Another annoying thing, they make gender mistakes (she? He? whatever!) and took names of races as personal names. It was like an embellished google translate on steroids. I dropped the book around page 160 (I really tried) and continued with my english copy. For book 10…. Well, they did some revisions, but it was very very lacking still. In the Dramatis Personae, not going far, they got wrong a whole group of characters and another missing (hell… who is going to notice, right?). That was not a good sign.  I got to page 60 and was pissed. Those were expensive books… expensive shit (at least for me). I guess I am still pissed. Another sad part, is that there are some readers that don’t read in English and they are the hands of these shameless publishers.

FYI. The first publisher was La Factoría de Ideas (I still miss them!). The second publisher, the crappy one is Nova, from Penguin (Penguin? Yeah, that shocked me)

End of rant. Still pissed… sigh.