Cross-pollinating: writing styles from other languages

[AndreaPaolo]

Hi everyone,
I self-translated my book from Italian to English and a colleague of mine was very interested in tasting my writing style, since I maintained a lot of Italian "sentences building" way in the English version.
I was wondering if some of you have similar experiences, for example porting a writing style from Japanese to English, from Russian to English ...., without the intervention of a mother tongue reviewer/proof-reader/professional translator. I would be interested in discovering other writing styles.
Thanks


Please avoid self promotion in posts.

 

[Meadow337]

Having read books that were translated by non-fluent / non-mother tongue translators my response is no thanks. It doesn't work, it sounds stilted and doesn't read well.

Unless done exceptionally skillfully transposing other language constructions for effect into English generally just results in bad English.

 

[Dmitri Dmitriev]

I agree. When you're lacking in fluency in one of the languages, you end up losing meaning in the work and just plain choppy writing.

Different sentence structures are one thing, and often account for the majority of grammatical nuances,
but translating certain words that have certain connotations behind them can be exceptionally difficult too.

 

[DATo]

I am reminded of the time the car company, Chevrolet, named one of their new vehicles Nova and then wondered why it didn't sell in Mexico .... totally oblivious to the fact that Nova translates loosely to "It doesn't go" in Spanish.

 

[sparkchaser]

I'd hate to read a literal translation of a German work into English.