Translation errors and oddities in LTROI - a compilation

For discussion of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Låt den rätte komma in
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CyberGhostface
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Re: Translation errors and oddities in LTROI - a compilation

Post by CyberGhostface » Thu Sep 16, 2021 4:24 am

One thing I heard is that Eli is referred not referred to as a she when it's from their perspective or Hakan's to preserve the twist but this was left out in the American trannslation?
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Re: Translation errors and oddities in LTROI - a compilation

Post by Siggdalos » Thu Sep 16, 2021 10:01 pm

CyberGhostface wrote:
Thu Sep 16, 2021 4:24 am
One thing I heard is that Eli is referred not referred to as a she when it's from their perspective or Hakan's to preserve the twist but this was left out in the American trannslation?
This is correct. I was planning to bring it up as it appeared in the text. Speaking of which...

Thursday 29 October

In LDRKI, the parts told from Håkan's point of view never specify Eli's gender except for at one point: when he envisions Eli as a "boy angel" (pojkängel) before pouring the acid on himself. In contrast, LTROI-Håkan explicitly thinks of Eli as "she" in this chapter and onwards, since hiding Eli's gender from the reader in these parts isn't doable in English the way it is in Swedish. More on this later.
Morgan was slurping his way through Four Small Dishes ...
Four Small Dishes (fyra små rätter) is a standard menu item on Chinese restaurants in Sweden. Apparently it's a swedified version of Chinese cuisine and a relatively modern invention that's only found here. See the Wikipedia entry (no English equivalent).
He had wandered aimlessly around [...] the Vällingby mall where the young people hung out.
"Mall" is a mistranslation. From what I can tell, Vällingbyhallen—the building Håkan visits—consists only of a sports hall and pool. In Friday 30 October it's translated as "the Vällingby pool".
Should he remove the mask? No. He didn’t know how to do so without raising suspicion.
This switches the meaning of the original, which states that Håkan does know how to do it, as he also ends up doing about a paragraph later.
He was running down the hill past the Gummi Bear factory when he got it.
LDRKI mentions sega råttor ("chewy rats"), which are similar to gummy bears except for the fact that... well, they're shaped like rats instead of bears.
‘Disgusting, isn’t it?’
LDRKI uses the childish word äckligt, which is better translated as something like "gross". There's several other places where äckligt becomes "disgusting" in the translation, which I think is an odd choice since it makes O&E sound just as much "like a grown-up" as Eli does when he says naturally.
‘He escaped from the zoo five years ago. They’re still looking for him.’
"The zoo" is a generic substitute for Skansen in central Stockholm (which will no doubt be familiar to anyone who's read Little Star).
‘If I turned out not to be a girl ... would you still like me?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just that. Would you still like me even if I wasn’t a girl?’
In LDRKI, Eli uses the same phrase in both the first and second question: Om jag inte var en flicka, "If I wasn't a girl". I feel that changing the first occurence to "If I turned out not to be a girl" creates a slightly different implication, one that's more definitive and on-the-nose. "If I wasn't a girl" is more ambiguous.
‘What you don’t have in your arms you’d better have in your head.’
Literal translation of Det man inte har i armarna får man ha i huvudet, a twist on the proverb Det man inte har i huvudet får man ha i benen ("What you don't have in your head you'd better have in your legs"), used in situations where one has to turn back to fetch something that one has forgotten (e.g. when carrying a bunch of items from point A to point B).
... and poured the concentrated acid over his face.
The Swedish text specifies that Håkan uses hydrochloric acid (saltsyra).

Friday 30 October
Like the rest of them, Oskar had a healthy respect for his gym teacher.
The original wording is blunter: Oskar var, som de andra, ganska rädd för magistern, "Oskar was, like the rest of them, pretty afraid of his teacher". Worth mentioning that in Swedish, Ávila is called "Magister Ávila", with magister being a (now outdated) form of address for male school teachers.
If they managed to beat the previous best time they would be allowed to play The Whole Sea is Raging in their next lesson.
"The Whole Sea is Raging" is a literal translation of Hela havet stormar, a game played in gym class and elsewhere. See this thread.
‘If it is good, if you work hard, next time we can play spöck-ball. [...]’
No room for discussion. You had to make do with the promise of ghost-ball, and the class hurried up and changed.
"Ghost-ball" is a literal Swenglish translation of spökboll (dodgeball). Spöckboll is how Ávila pronounces it with his Spanish accent, but keeping it untranslated obviously doesn't work in English and instead just comes across as weird (at least to me).
Eli remained where she was outside the door, she hadn’t yet been invited in.
As has been discussed on this forum many times before, in Swedish, JAL is able to disguise Eli's gender from the reader by never referring to him with any gender-specific pronouns in the first few parts told from his own/the omniscient narrator's POV. This is largely thanks to the existence of the very common Swedish reflexive pronoun sin/sitt, which gives no indication about the subject's gender, unlike English which has to use "his"/"her"/"their" and so on. In LDRKI, Eli is only called a "she" when viewed through the lens of other characters' POV (Oskar, Tommy, Micke and so on). Only in the Sunday 8 November (Evening/Night) chapter and onwards, after the matter of Eli's gender has been fully revealed to Oskar and thereby also the reader, does the omniscient narrator start using a gendered pronoun for the character: "he".

In Fail Again, Fail Better, JAL mentions that he couldn't have the narrator call Eli "she" before the big reveal since that would've been cheating, but that this has caused problems in some translations—the English version being one of them. The subject was discussed in more detail in this thread and this one (though note that the point about JAL never calling Eli "he" is incorrect; as previously mentioned, he does start doing just that toward the end of the book).

Well, look at that. I said I wouldn't get long-winded on this subject but now I've gone and started doing so anyway. Moving on!
The picture on the TV screen changed to a panorama of the southern parts of the former Soviet Georgia, set to music.
A mistranslation. LDRKI mentions not the country of Georgia but instead the island of South Georgia, which makes a lot more sense given the context (the TV showing a documentary about penguins). Granted, this is an understandable mistake; the first time I read the novel, I hadn't heard of the island and also assumed that this part was talking about the country.

It's also worth pointing out that Georgia was in fact still part of the Soviet Union in 1981.
‘Yes. But ... you don’t have any clothes on.’
‘I’m sorry. Is that disgusting?’
Another case of äckligt being translated as "disgusting". This bothers me more than it possibly should.
‘Coome ... jelly beans ...’
LDRKI mentions the aforementioned sega råttor instead of jelly beans.
‘Eli. Will you go out with me?’
[...]
‘What does that mean?’
[...]
‘That ... you would want to be together with me.’
It's interesting to compare how the book and the film subtitles went about handling this exchange, since it's IMO absolutely central to how O&E's relationship develops but the original lines carry pretty specific cultural connotations that are difficult to convey with complete accuracy in translation. Here is the original:
LDRKI wrote:»Eli. Har jag chans på dig?«
[...]
»Vad betyder det?«
[...]
»Att ... om du vill vara ihop med mig, liksom.«
Har jag chans på dig? would, when translated word-for-word, mean "Do I have [a] chance on you?" From how I understand it, to fråga chans på ("ask chance on") is a way for preteens to ask someone to be in a (usually short and flimsy) relationship, i.e. "Do I have a chance of becoming your boyfriend/girlfriend?". The actual terms pojkvän ("boyfriend") and flickvän ("girlfriend") normally enter the picture only later, post-puberty. I believe the idea of fråga chans på had largely fallen out of fashion among kids by the time I grew up; at least, I don't have any clear memories of hearing the phrase at school.

Ihop, meanwhile, literally means "together" but is used colloquially to describe people who are in a (usually casual) romantic relationship (moreso than the more neutral connotations of the English word "together", I would say).

The theatrical subtitles for the film represents these two phrases with "Want to go steady?" and "Do you want to be my girlfriend?", while the Magnolia subtitles use "Do I have a chance with you?" and "Do you want to go steady?".

My own subjective judgment is that out of these three translations, "Will you go out with me" and "Do you want to go steady"/"Do you want to be my girlfriend" are the phrases that best match Har jag chans på dig and Vill du vara ihop med mig. In the original, Oskar doesn't call Eli a girl, but asking if Eli wants to be his girlfriend is effectively what he's saying, so "girlfriend" fits just fine even if it's not accurate to the original's literal meaning. "Do you want to go steady" is closer to the original and probably the one I would've used if it was up to me, though.

"Together" as a subtitute for ihop kinda works, but is IMO too loose and could be taken to mean different things (e.g. "Then we are together [as friends]"), unlike ihop which in this context refers exclusively to a romantic relationship.

"Do I have a chance with you?" from the Magnolia subtitles is the only translation choice that I would call outright bad. The phrase doesn't make much sense in English if you're not familiar with the original cultural context and could come across as having sexual implications, pretty much the opposite end of the spectrum from the innocent and childish connotations of Har jag chans på dig?.

Saturday 31 October
Too bad he hadn’t managed to arrange his life so he always had someone next to him.
A mistranslation of the original, which has almost the opposite meaning: Det var synd att han inte fixade att ha någon inpå sig hela tiden, "Too bad he couldn't deal with having someone close to him all the time". Fixa (past tense: fixade) does mean "fix, arrange", but in this case it's used as slang for "be able to". I think that this is an important bit of information about who Lacke is as a character (namely his inability to commit), but then, I suppose that trait is already pretty evident from the rest of the chapter.
Tommy looked at her thin back and was suddenly sad. [...] For all the people walking here with their flickering lights in the snow. Themselves only shadows that sat next to the headstones, looked at the inscription, touching it. It was just so ... stupid.
The original version of the second-to-last sentence is: Själva bara skuggor som stod vid stenar, tittade på stenar, rörde vid stenar, "Themselves only shadows that sat next to stones, looked at stones, touched stones". Replacing the repeated mention of the mundane word "stones" with something more proper causes the passage as a whole to lose some of its mocking tone. "Mocking" probably isn't the right word, but you know what I mean; it's about Tommy reflecting over the absurdity of the situation, which is reflected in his word choice.
In fact Tommy asked so much, became so interested that his mum regretted having brought it up in the first place.
This replaces the mention of Tommy's mother's name (Yvonne) with a generic "his mum". In LDRKI, this passage is the first time her name is mentioned. No clue why it was omitted here.

EDIT 2021-09-18: Elaborated on the note about the proverb. Clarified the note about Yvonne.
EDIT 2021-09-21: Restructured the note about "Har jag chans på dig" to make it easier to read.
EDIT 2021-09-25: Added a note about the acid.
Last edited by Siggdalos on Sat Sep 25, 2021 5:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
De höll om varandra i tystnad. Oskar blundade och visste: detta var det största. Ljuset från lyktan i portvalvet trängde svagt in genom hans slutna ögonlock, la en hinna av rött för hans ögon. Det största.

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Re: Translation errors and oddities in LTROI - a compilation

Post by Siggdalos » Wed Sep 22, 2021 10:16 am

PART THREE: Snow, Melting against Skin

Thursday 5 November
He loved his old cowboy boots but you couldn’t fit thick socks in them. [...] Sure he could get some Chinese takeaway for a hundred, but he’d rather be cold.
Eh? LDRKI uses kinesiskt smäck, with smäck meaning an object that's sloppily made or of little value, i.e. "rubbish" (in this case cheap boots). Is "takeaway" ever used in this sense in English? The definitions I could find that would fit in this context only revolve around takeaway food.
Oskar was walking with his teacher.
Similar to what I mentioned in the first post of the thread about the difference between mamma/"his mum", this section of LDRKI calls Marie-Louise simply fröken ("miss") and not hans fröken ("his teacher").
He had been going steady with Eli for five days now.
Now the translator switched to translating ihop (see the previous post) as "going steady", even though previously it was translated as "together".

Image
‘How do you know when you’re in love?’
The original line (Hur vet man att man älskar nån?) is more accurately translated as "How do you know you love somebody?"
‘You form a covenant with someone, a union. Regardless of whether you’re a boy or a girl you form a covenant saying that ... that it’s you and that person. Something just between the two of you.’
Here's the original line, with my attempt at a more literal translation in brackets. You be the judge on whether this makes a meaningful difference, because I personally can't decide on whether I think it does. Note that the word man in this context is equivalent to the general "you", while du is the singular "you".
LDRKI wrote:»Man ingår förbund. Oavsett om man är killar eller tjejer ingår man ett slags förbund att ... det är du och jag, liksom. Man vet det.«
[You enter a covenant. Regardless of whether you're boys or girls you enter a kind of covenant saying that ... that it's you and me, basically. That you know that.]
Another (IMO) important thing is that LDRKI consistently uses only one word for this concept, creating a strong link between all three scenes where it's brought up: förbund ("covenant/pact"). LTROI, on the other hand, uses a total of four different ones (!): "covenant" here at the start of Thursday 5 November, "pact" in the leadup to the basement scene later in the same chapter, "blood brothers" in Saturday 7 November (Night) (keep in mind that the original word mentions nothing about gender nor blood), and "alliance" a few paragraphs later in the same chapter.

To paraphrase myself from earlier, this bothers me as much as I feel that it should, which is to say "a lot".
Håkan imagined the violent men, the bitter women, the proud ones in their boiling pots, in their fire rain, wandering among them, looking for their place.
This should say "wandered among them, looking for his place" to match the original. As written, the sentence doesn't really make sense.
The memory of how he had disposed of the man down by the hospital raced through his head. He had been sloppy. He had screwed up.
The last two words here are a translation of sjabblat (infinitive: sjabbla). The word appears twice in Håkan's thoughts in Wednesday 21 October (AKA the first chapter), but LTROI's rendition of that chapter represents the word with "mess up". It appears again in the scene just before Håkan's death in Saturday 7 November (Evening) when Eli comes to his window and he thinks to himself that he will, for once, not sjabbla, but in that chapter it becomes "blow it".

All three translations—"mess up", "screw up", and "blow it"—are accurate, and I admit that I may very well be TOO nitpicky about this sort of thing, but this is yet another case where I think that the translation ever so slightly diminishes the text's impact by not being consistent with cases where JAL (I assume) deliberately repeated the same word choice as a way to refer back to previous chapters, as opposed to using synonyms.
The voice on the radio kept reciting names of various sea regions; Bottenviken and all the rest.
Bottenviken should have been translated, since it has a proper English name: the Bothnian Bay.
Oskar would strap on the mini-skis and attach a rope to the moped carrier with a stick at the other end.
"Moped carrier" is a substitute for flakmoped (colloquially flakmoppe), a three-wheeled moped with a rack in front that's common in the Stockholm archipelago. In Saturday 7 November the word is translated as "moped trailer". See this thread where the subject was discussed in detail.
‘Maybe Ängby?’
‘Ängby maybe.’
In LDRKI, Oskar says Ängby, kanske? and Eli replies with the same Ängby kanske, which IMO adds to the scene's funniness. In LTROI, the order of the words in Oskar's line was reversed.

Image

The part where O&E hide from the man is slightly longer in the original. One paragraph and one line were (I assume accidentally) left out of the translation. For comparison (with the part that's missing from LTROI in bold):
LDRKI wrote:De knölade snabbt in sig i en matkällare där de knappt hade rum att sitta höft mot höft, andades djupt och tyst. En mansröst hördes.
»Vad gör ni här nere?«
Oskar satt tätt tryckt intill Eli. Det bubblade i bröstet. Mannen gick några steg in i källaren.
»Var är ni nånstans?«

Oskar och Eli höll andan när mannen stod stilla, lyssnade. Sedan sa han: »Jävla ungar«, och gick därifrån.

[They quickly squeezed into a food cellar where they hardly had room to sit hip against hip, breathed deeply and quietly. A man's voice was heard.
»What are you doing down here?«
Oskar sat tightly pressed next to Eli. It was bubbling inside his chest. The man took a few steps into the basement.
»Where are you?«

Oskar and Eli held their breath as the man stood still, listened. Then he said: »Damn kids«, and left.]
LTROI wrote:They quickly piled into a cellar where they hardly had room to sit hip against hip, and breathed quickly and quietly. They heard a man’s voice.
‘What are you doing down here?’
Oskar and Eli held their breath as the man waited, listening. Then he said ‘Damn kids’ and left.
Unlike the missing E&H dialogue I talked about earlier in the thread, this doesn't really change anything. I think the description of how Oskar feels when sitting next to Eli is cute, though, so it being left out of the translation is a bit of a loss either way.
Then a grimace of pain contorted the child’s face, she got up on two legs and ran off in the direction of the school with long rapid steps. A few seconds later she reached the shadows and was gone.
In LDRKI's version of this scene, no indication is given of what gender Lacke thinks Eli is; the text continues to use the words barnet ("the child") and det ("it") throughout. LTROI is consistent with this up until the paragraph quoted above, where the text starts using "she".

Saturday 7 November
This was the only bus that went to Rådmansö Island ...
Even though its name means something like "Judge's Island", Rådmansö (where Oskar's father and JAL's father lived) is actually a peninsula, so calling it "Rådmansö Island" is misleading.
To coax speech from this shapeless raw material with a scalpel.
The original sentence goes on to say: som Rodins skulpturer växte fram ur obearbetad marmor ("the way Rodin's sculptures emerged from unworked marble"), which was left out here. A small touch which adds to the image of Håkan as someone with a lot of knowledge about culture and art.
A thousand pinpricks.
As if her skin were being twisted in two directions at once. [...] She moved her foot away, pulled on her socks. Moved her foot back into the sunlight. Better. Only a hundred pinpricks.
"A thousand pinpricks" is a translation of tusen nålar ("thousand needles"), the Swedish name for an Indian burn: a classic schoolyard torture method where you take hold of someone's forearm with both hands and then twist in different directions, causing the victim to feel like their skin is being pricked by "a thousand needles".
When she walked into the light from the horrible window behind the registers it got like that again.
LDRKI says that the window is otäckt ("not covered", in this case meaning it's one of the store windows not covered by advertising posters), but the translator seems to have misread it as otäck ("frightening, horrible"). An understandable mistake (I misread it too at first) and "horrible window" still fits in context, but I found it slightly funny.
She looked carefully at all the cans: crushed tomatoes, mushrooms, mussels, tuna, ravioli, Bullen’s beer sausage, pea soup ...
"Bullen's beer sausage" is a translation of Bullens pilsnerkorv, which doesn't actually contain any beer/pilsner. See Wikipedia and this thread. "Mushrooms" is a generic substitute for champinjoner (champignons).
‘A child. Living out a strange twisted fantasy.’
‘Who grew out her nails? Filed her teeth down? I’d like to see the dentist who ...’
See what I noted above about the genderless way Lacke describes Eli during their first encounter. The Swedish version of this exchange doesn't use any gendered pronouns either.
Jimmy heaped condiments on his pizza ...
"Condiments" is a generic substitute for pizzasallad, a cabbage salad that comes with pizza by default in almost every pizzeria in Sweden. It's such a standard element that I was surprised to learn that it's not universal. Here is an old blog post discussing it.
Lots of food in this part for some reason...
Last edited by Siggdalos on Sat Oct 02, 2021 9:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
De höll om varandra i tystnad. Oskar blundade och visste: detta var det största. Ljuset från lyktan i portvalvet trängde svagt in genom hans slutna ögonlock, la en hinna av rött för hans ögon. Det största.

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Re: Translation errors and oddities in LTROI - a compilation

Post by metoo » Thu Sep 23, 2021 5:37 am

A little more about the word sjabbla.
I believe JAL's choice of this particular word is very deliberate. It has a connotation of sloppiness, that the one who does it isn't as careful as he ought to be. That Håkan uses the word about his own failures reveals the shame he feels about his inadequacy, and his wish to be the perfect helper for Eli.

About food cellar / matkällare:
I once made a posting with pictures of the food cellar in the apartment house where I was living. That house was built in the same era as the house at Ibsengatan where Oskar / John lived, and the food cellars would be very similar.
http://www.let-the-right-one-in.com/for ... are#p53363
Image
But from the beginning Eli was just Eli. Nothing. Anything. And he is still a mystery to me. John Ajvide Lindqvist

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Re: Translation errors and oddities in LTROI - a compilation

Post by Siggdalos » Mon Sep 27, 2021 5:49 pm

Saturday 7 November (Evening)
... when his dad was done with the dishes they played tic-tac-toe.
"Tic-tac-toe" is a bad translation of luffarschack ("hobo chess"), which has the same rules as tic-tac-toe except you're usually trying to get five in a row instead of three and the playing field can extend indefinitely instead of being limited to a 3x3 grid. As with many of the other things I've mentioned, this has of course been discussed on the forum before; see this thread.
Three games in a row had now been encircled and marked with an ‘O’ in the middle. Only a little one, where Oskar had been thinking of something else, had a ‘P’ on it.
"P" is short for pappa. It should've been represented with a "D" for "Dad" here, since the word pappa does not otherwise appear in the translation.
The Deep Brothers. Oskar could not actually make out the words but he knew the song by heart.
We live in the country,
And soon we found,
We needed some animals to run around.
We sold the china, and bought a pig ...
"The Deep Brothers" is a literal translation of Bröderna Djup, a comedy band that originally consisted of a group of brothers whose actual surname was Djup (meaning "Deep"). The song being played here is their most famous one, Vi bor på landet ("We live in the country") from 1979.
‘Here comes Fritjof Andersson, it’s snowing on his hat ...’
[...]
And with a song, with a game we go to Spain and ... somewhere.
Refers to Fritiof Anderssons paradmarsch ("Fritiof Andersson's parade march"), a 1929 song by Evert Taube. Fritiof is a recurring sailor character in many of Taube's songs and this particular one (as far as I can tell) is about Fritiof leaving winter in Sweden to head south to warmer places, eventually amassing a caravan of friends that he travels with. The line Oskar can't remember is: Den går med sång, den går med spel till Spanien och Bordeaux ("It [the caravan] goes with song, goes with music to Spain and Bordeaux").
Not translation-related, but the mention of Spain is pretty fitting considering where O&E end up in LTODD.
The person on the roof spread his or her arms, brought them up overhead. Something was suspended between the arms and the body; some kind of membrance ... webbing.
The original's wording (Någonting sträckte sig mellan armarna och kroppen; en hinna .... membran) is slightly ambiguous, but I interpret it to mean that the taxi driver and the old man actually see Eli's wing membranes grow out of his body; they're not present before he lifts his arms. Assuming that this interpretation is correct, the translation should say "Something stretched between the arms and the body".

Saturday 7 November (Night)
‘Habba-Habba-soudd-soudd!’
[...]
One of them stood up on his seat and sang loudly: ‘A-Huleba-Huleba, A-ha-Huleba ...’
The song is Hubba hubba zoot zoot, a 1981 gibberish song by the pseudonymous group Caramba.
With the exception of Oskar, two people got off at Blackeberg, from other subway cars. An older guy he didn’t recognise and then a rockabilly guy who appeared very drunk.
The latter guy is a raggare, a subculture that's roughly equivalent to American greasers or rockabillies.
If the last post was food-themed, I guess this one is music-themed...
Henrik took a bag of liquorice boats out of his pocket and held them out to her. Maud shook her head and Henrik took three boats, put them in his mouth and shrugged apologetically.
"Liquorice boats" is a translation of lakritsbåtar, liquorice-flavored boat-shaped candy that's often sold together with hallonbåtar ("raspberry boats").
He sees a woman with a brown shawl over her head and her hands clamped tight over her stomach and Oskar thinks ‘Mama’.
While LTROI creates a distinction between how Oskar and other modern-day characters refer to their mothers ("Mum") and how Eli refers to his mother ("Mama"), LDRKI uses the same word for both (mamma). Maybe "Mum", unlike mamma, would've sounded too modern and therefore out-of-place in Eli's memories. I'm not sure when "Mum" and "Mama" started being used in English; Google's Ngram Viewer seems to show that the two words are contemporary and were used to about the same extent in the English-speaking world (or rather in English literature) in the 1700s, but I'm no linguist.
‘It really happened, didn’t it?’
The original line is Det är sant, alltså ("So it's true, then"). I've always thought it's a bit unclear what Oskar means by this, but I assume that he's talking about Eli's vampirism and that this has now been proven to be true by the magical memory-sharing. Of course, Oskar later decides that he needs more proof. In the translation, however, the line instead turns into one of asking if the vision he just saw was a memory of a real event. I could be off on my interpretation of the Swedish line, but even so, I don't see much reason to change the word-for-word meaning of the sentence in this way.
... read a few pages of The Abominable Man from Säffle, and then sleep.
Refers to Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle, a crime novel from 1971. In English it's just titled The Abominable Man. Säffle is a town in western Sweden.
‘Oskar. I’m a person, just like you. It’s just that I have ... a very unusual illness.’
LDRKI's Eli says Jag är en människa, precis som du. The word människa means "human" (as in a member of the species Homo sapiens) but can also be used as a synonym for person, which has the same meaning as the English word "person". Människa can be used in many situations where the English "human" would sound too formal or scientific. Thus, it's context that decides whether människa is best translated as "human" or "person". In this case, I think I would've gone with having Eli say "human", since the line is about him trying to convince Oskar that he's a human with a disease rather than a non-human monster.

The translation of the third sentence is slightly inaccurate. In Swedish he says Tänk bara att jag har ... en väldigt ovanlig sjukdom ("Just think of me as having ... a very unusual illness"). It's a small distinction, but if I were to put into words what I feel the difference is: in Swedish, Eli offers a way for Oskar to think of him while maybe also acknowledging that it's a simplified and slightly inaccurate view, whereas in English it's presented as though "person with an unusual illness" is how he literally thinks of himself. I guess.
But then that other thought came out, the terrifying one. That Eli was just pretending. That there was an ancient person inside of her, watching him, who knew everything, and was smiling at him, smiling in secret.
LDRKI uses the word hånlog (infinitive: hånle), literally "mock-smiled"; to smile at someone in a derisive, condescending way. "Smirking" would've conveyed this better than simply "smiling", I think.
That’s right. She never slept those times she came over. She simply lay there in my bed and waited for the sun to come up. I must be gone ...
... and live. LDRKI includes the "live" part of the line (Att fly är livet ...), which I would say is highly relevant here.
‘Prove it to me.’
‘Prove what?’
‘That you are ... who you say you are.’
"Who you say you are" should be "what you say you are". LDRKI's Oskar asks Eli to prove Att du är ... det här som du säger, "That you are ... this that you say [that you are]", i.e. a vampire.
Grey fatigue in his body. Tears in his head.
A mistranslation. The original says Grått i huvudet ("Grey in his head"), which the translator must've misread as gråt ("crying, tears").
The last thing he saw was how the wet compress in front of his eyes changed colour and grew pink as the man chewed on his face.
"Chewed on his face" sounds pretty weak compared to the original's åt upp hans ansikte—"ate his face".
He yawned so wide his jaws cracked. Eli also yawned. Oskar turned his head to her.
‘Give it up.’
‘Excuse me?’
In LDRKI, Eli replies Förlåt. Since it has a full stop and not a question mark, it should've been translated as "Sorry" (an apology for the fake yawn), not "Excuse me?" (I didn't hear/I don't understand what you mean).
Far away he felt someone stroke his cheek. Didn’t manage to articulate the thought that, because he felt it, it must be his own. But somewhere, on a planet far far away, someone gently stroked someone’s cheek.
The first sentence should say "he felt someone stroke a cheek" to match the original and make sense with the rest of the paragraph.
De höll om varandra i tystnad. Oskar blundade och visste: detta var det största. Ljuset från lyktan i portvalvet trängde svagt in genom hans slutna ögonlock, la en hinna av rött för hans ögon. Det största.

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Re: Translation errors and oddities in LTROI - a compilation

Post by gkmoberg1 » Fri Oct 01, 2021 4:39 am

Siggdalos wrote:
Mon Sep 27, 2021 5:49 pm
... read a few pages of The Abominable Man from Säffle, and then sleep.
Refers to Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle, a crime novel from 1971. In English it's just titled The Abominable Man. Säffle is a town in western Sweden.
I missed this completely! Finding the Martin Beck books by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö was a bit of hobby for me while I was working in Cambridge [MA, not UK]. Simply finding the novels was the challenge. I had to give up on the local book shops but found the Cambridge Public Library had most of the series.

I'm so glad JAL gives them a mention. Sjöwall & Wahlöö 's works are/were ground breaking for the Scandi noir genre. I've managed to find and read the first four. 'The Abominable Man' is farther along. Wow, now I'm inspired to get back to finding and reading these.

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Re: Translation errors and oddities in LTROI - a compilation

Post by Siggdalos » Fri Oct 01, 2021 5:18 pm

PART FOUR

This part's title is...
Oh wait.

Image

It doesn't have a title in English? Vafalls?
In LDRKI, Part Four is titled Här kommer trollens kompani!, which is also the first line of the quoted text from Bamse i trollskogen (called Bamse in the Magic Forest in LTROI, but better translated as "Bamse in the Troll Forest"):
LDRKI wrote:Här kommer trollens kompani
Här slipper aldrig nån förbi.
In LTROI, this quote is rendered as:
LTROI wrote:We are the troll company,
we don't let anyone go free!
A more literal (though non-rhyming) translation would be:
Here comes the trolls' company
Here no one ever slips past.
I think Segerberg's translation of this is mostly fine, except that I think the "Here comes" bit should've been kept since it alludes to how Part Four is largely about external threats (Håkan, Lacke, the police) closing in on Eli.

Anyway, I don't see why Part Four couldn't have been called "We are the Troll Company!" in English (or "Here Comes the Troll Company!" if we go with my translation). It wouldn't be any weirder than the Swedish title, and certainly not any weirder than making Part Four the only one of the novel's five parts that doesn't have a title.

Sunday 8 November
The Traneberg bridge. When it was unveiled in 1934 it was hailed as a minor miracle of engineering.
LDRKI uses the description smärre nationell stolthet ("something of a national pride").
Benny Molin was an exception.
In LDRKI his surname is Melin rather than Molin. Not sure how that E turned into an O.
The offender was determined to be extremely violent, in official terms.
Completely fucking crazy, in other words.
"In other words" is a generic substitute for i folkmun (literally something like "in people's mouth[s]"), meaning everyday/colloquial speech. I think "in colloquial terms" would've been a better way to preserve both the meaning and a bit more of the morbid humor of the original passage.
The infection.
She didn’t really see it, of course, but she had an ever-increasing perception of what it was.
The original wording gives a slightly different impression of this experience: plötsligt fick hon en allt omfattande förnimmelse av vad den var, "suddenly she received an all-encompassing perception of what it was".
So when the subway came thundering out of the tunnel from Iceland Square this morning ...
"Iceland Square" is a literal translation of Islandstorget, an area and subway station between Ängby and Blackeberg. Earlier in the book (Thursday 22 October) the name is left untranslated, but from this point onward it's rendered as "Iceland Square". I have no preference either way, but the inconsistency is a little bothersome.
He was wearing a suit and a pale yellow-striped tie that made Tommy think of the picture from the war: ‘A Swedish Tiger’.
See Wikipedia's explanation of En svensk tiger.
In the articles that mentioned him there had been a strong streak of ... ghoulish delight.
LDRKI uses the word skadeglädje, "schadenfreude". In fact, the Swedish skadeglädje and German Schadenfreude (from which the English word is borrowed) have the exact same literal meaning ("harm-joy"). Translating it as "ghoulish delight" instead of using the direct English equivalent strikes me as a pretty weird choice.
Bror Ardelius, temporary minister of the Vällingby parish, was the first to notice it.
Bror means "brother", both in the sense of a male sibling and in the sense of a religious title. I have no idea why it was left untranslated here.
He gave the congregation a somewhat bewildered smile and nodded to Birgit who led the choir.
[...]
Birgit looked at him for guidance and he gestured with his hand: go on, get started.
Similar to what I mentioned earlier in the thread about the mysterious Åke, this is another case where the translation fixes a mistake from the original. In LDRKI, the character is referred to first as "Birgit" and then, two paragraphs later, as "Birgitta". JAL sometimes doesn't have the best of memory when it comes to very minor characters.
From the Daily Update ...
Translation of the radio news program Dagens Eko ("Echo of the Day").
De höll om varandra i tystnad. Oskar blundade och visste: detta var det största. Ljuset från lyktan i portvalvet trängde svagt in genom hans slutna ögonlock, la en hinna av rött för hans ögon. Det största.

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metoo
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Re: Translation errors and oddities in LTROI - a compilation

Post by metoo » Fri Oct 01, 2021 5:54 pm

Siggdalos wrote:
Fri Oct 01, 2021 5:18 pm
Bror Ardelius, temporary minister of the Vällingby parish, was the first to notice it.
Bror means "brother", both in the sense of a male sibling and in the sense of a religious title. I have no idea why it was left untranslated here.
The reason is that Bror is the minister's first name.

16,517 Swedish men have Bror as one of their names. Of these 4,609 use it as their first name.
But from the beginning Eli was just Eli. Nothing. Anything. And he is still a mystery to me. John Ajvide Lindqvist

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Re: Translation errors and oddities in LTROI - a compilation

Post by Siggdalos » Fri Oct 01, 2021 6:17 pm

metoo wrote:
Fri Oct 01, 2021 5:54 pm
Siggdalos wrote:
Fri Oct 01, 2021 5:18 pm
Bror Ardelius, temporary minister of the Vällingby parish, was the first to notice it.
Bror means "brother", both in the sense of a male sibling and in the sense of a religious title. I have no idea why it was left untranslated here.
The reason is that Bror is the minister's first name.

16,517 Swedish men have Bror as one of their names. Of these 4,609 use it as their first name.
:think: Huh. I'd never stopped to think that that was an option. The fact that the Swedish text repeatedly calls him "Bror Ardelius", and never just "Bror" or "Ardelius", certainly gives me the impression that it's a title. Then again, I guess it wouldn't be capitalized in that case, and JAL does do the same thing with Max Hansen's name in Little Star.
De höll om varandra i tystnad. Oskar blundade och visste: detta var det största. Ljuset från lyktan i portvalvet trängde svagt in genom hans slutna ögonlock, la en hinna av rött för hans ögon. Det största.

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Re: Translation errors and oddities in LTROI - a compilation

Post by metoo » Fri Oct 01, 2021 8:00 pm

Maybe the reason for consistently using the full name is to create a distance to the character?
But from the beginning Eli was just Eli. Nothing. Anything. And he is still a mystery to me. John Ajvide Lindqvist

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