Funny how translations of Dostoyevsky is a contentious topic in English-speaking world. In ru-speaking world, we bicker about Harry Potter and Lord of Rings translations :) There’s a particularly inflammatory translation of HP which causes people to swear that they won’t let their children read it.
There is a black market of illegally printed “proper translations”. I had to buy a full HP anthology for my younger sister off some guy’s Corolla, paying in crypto. Same guy was selling counterfeit LEGOs. It was low-quality paper and flimsy covers, but the translation was “correct” and that’s all that matters.
Dostoyevsky is one of the greatest writers who has ever lived. I think getting Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Nabokov translated well is far more important than getting Harry Potter translated well.
There are more tickets sold to Avengers than there are tickets sold to Persona. But one is a work of art that will likely be viewed 100 years from now, and the other is for mass market consumption that no one will watch 20 years from now. Aesthetics for a work of art are far more important than the numbers sold, or the quirks of the author.
That it isn’t the same translation they read as children and that was used in movies.
It is not a particularly high-brow debate, as HP, unlike Dostoyevsky in en-world, is read by everyone. People usually concentrate on proper names. Rowling uses a lot of “meaningful” names like Snape, Sprout or Ravenclaw, and translator have a choice of adapting them or leaving them be. Either choice leaves somebody unhappy. The same problem was with LotR a generation before. (LotR broke through the iron curtain only in 90s).
When I read HP in original, I realised that the “proper” translation is also extremely bad. I don’t know what I should do when/if I have children. Either I’ll start working on my own translation during the pregnancy, or I’ll teach them English from the birth.
The situation in Lord of the Rings has an added twist: many of the names are Old English, Anglo-Saxon or even Goth, and the translator faces a choice between leaving them alone and trying to translate them into Old Czech (Old Slavonic...), Old Finnish or whatever, which will nevertheless change the cultural context.
I hear Star Wars is a pain to translate because of the meaningful names.
“Darth Vader” was sometimes translated as “Dark Father”, but that his role as Luke’s father too obvious - a role the initial translators didn’t know existed.
Probably because it was simpler and less prone to political interpretation (a dark lord sitting in the east of the continent with a ton of humanoids that work like slaves to wage a war to the rest of the world).
As someone with an English "bottom" as in bottom-lands surname, I appreciate the deliberate silliness of "Longbottom" while leaning into a very traditional British sounding name.
It's silly in English too. Perhaps some British readers might be familiar with the name and its history/origins, but for most English readers, I suspect, it just sounds a bit silly, like he has a very tall butt.
