/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18686426]

I have a question for /lit/izens who are non-native English speakers:
Do you always look for a translation to your native language first or are you content with just reading English?
Like let’s say you want to read The Count of Monte Cristo and you are from Finland and don’t speak French.
Accounting for the fact that French translates to English much more easily than it does to Finnish, do you read the Finnish translation or the English translation?

[Anonymous No.18686485]

My native language, as it is simply better to read in than English. I only read in English if it's the original language of a work or if the book in question hasn't been translated to my language.

[Anonymous No.18686996]

>>18686426
I look for translation in my language even for English novels desu. Why bother reading in another language?

[Anonymous No.18687053]

>>18686426
usually since there tend to be more/better translations into english than my native langauge, but 9/10 the obscure scientific works I want to read have better translations into it (at least compared to the english)

[Anonymous No.18687181]

>>18686426
I used to feel like a cuck. I'm native spanish speaker, and reading books that were originally written in french or portuguese, in english, didn't feel right. Now I simply don't give a shit. It's easier and more convenient to go after the english translations.

[Anonymous No.18687198]

>>18686426
If the book is written in English or German, I read it in English. If the book is written in French or Spanish, I'll read it in French or Spanish. Any other language and I'll get a Portuguese translation.

[Anonymous No.18687213]

>>18686426
I always go for English translations because they're often the easiest to acquire and are of decent quality.
Too long I've been subjected to shoddy Portuguese translating to trust it.

[Anonymous No.18687384]

>Do you always look for a translation to your native language first or are you content with just reading English?

I always look for a translation to my mother tongue first. Only if I can't find it do I look for the English one. First of all, my native tongue is a Romance language, so it really makes no sense to read translations of other Romance languages in English. In the second place, there are languages that are neither Germanic nor Latin-based (think of Russian), so it also makes no sense to read them in English.

[Anonymous No.18687397]

>>18686426
I usually go for what is cheapest which is usually English
There is more available in English
If the original is German I might go for a translation in Dutch but otherwise I prefer English anyway

[Anonymous No.18687402]

English usually if I don't speak the language, unless it's a greek text in which case I read it in german

[Anonymous No.18687475]

>>18686426
I speak German and there's usually good translations for stuff that isn't english. English books I read in the original. Sometimes there's things that have better translations in English (Murakami for example works together with his English translator and the German versions sometimes get translated from them instead of the original Japanese) then I go for English as well.

[Anonymous No.18687505]

>>18686426
If the source is written in a language I speak, I read it in that language. Otherwise, I look for a translation in English. I have this irrational belief that English translations are of higher quality.

[Anonymous No.18688102]

always mother tongue first, mostly because i already spend most of my time on the english speaking interwebz and you can very easily start favouring english terms and sort of dump a modified version of them in your own language. Here in germany it's very common for University fags and too-online political activists to loose touch with their own language, so they call vaccines (Impfstoffe) Vakzine, or something i once saw, some feminists whining about Misogynie (Frauenfeindlichkeit) and that behavior is a prime negative example of how i never want to end up