The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[ownedbycats]

Downloading descriptions for damn near any public domain book.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by hildea

I've never seen that, I guess my reading isn't culturally important
Which books have you seen it on? Am I too cynical if I guess they are overwhelmingly written by white men?

Do a quick Internet search on it. That phrase has been used too blasted often.

[Aleron Ives]

I guess my reading isn't culturally important, either. I've never seen it.

[DNSB]

I've seen it a couple of times. Pompous was the kindest description that came to mind.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by hildea

I've never seen that, I guess my reading isn't culturally important
Which books have you seen it on? Am I too cynical if I guess they are overwhelmingly written by white men?

Maybe one prolific publisher of PD texts on Amazon, mostly from Gutenberg and not well formatted.

I don't think it's to do with "white men" as such. They are just stupid and arrogant.

It's often not even true.

[Renate]

"As received directly from the hands of the ancients."

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by hildea

I've never seen that, I guess my reading isn't culturally important
Which books have you seen it on? Am I too cynical if I guess they are overwhelmingly written by white men?

From the search I just did. Seems like it's attached to a lot of really really boring books.

I guess they can make these books seem important since nobody will read them anyway.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

"This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible."

If I see that paragraph one more time...

It Google Translates as 'We stole this from Gutenberg. Don't blame us if the formatting sucks.'

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

It Google Translates as 'We stole this from Gutenberg. Don't blame us if the formatting sucks.'

Indeed

[issybird]

The way retail and review sites conflate various translations of works under the single title. I want to know the characteristics and what readers think of a specific edition, not the work as a whole. Translations matter. A lot.

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by issybird

Translations matter. A lot.

As somebody knowing two german and the polish translation of LOTR - Yes, you are damn right.

As somebody being a (GER) state-certified translator of Polish; THANK YOU. There's a s*load of people ignoring the work behind it.

[Aleron Ives]

I've found We Love Translations to be a useful resource on that point:

https://welovetranslations.com/

You get to read the first page in different translations to see which one you think is best. Lucy can't review every translation of every book herself, but she has a good catalogue of classic works thus far.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

As somebody knowing two german and the polish translation of LOTR - Yes, you are damn right.

As somebody being a (GER) state-certified translator of Polish; THANK YOU. There's a s*load of people ignoring the work behind it.

Piggybacking on, not a rant, but while I always use free sites for public domain works originally written in English, money spent on good recent translations of pre-20th century non-English works is money very well spent.

[Renate]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

As somebody knowing two german and the polish translation of LOTR...

Have you ever heard the 30 hour German radio play from 2003?
I'm not a big LoTR fan but I found it enjoyable and well made.
I can't seem to find a free download now.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by issybird

Piggybacking on, not a rant, but while I always use free sites for public domain works originally written in English, money spent on good recent translations of pre-20th century non-English works is money very well spent.

Mostly. I found two exceptions. Fortunately only bought one of them.
Apparently a lot of the older translations of Jules Verne aren't great. I did wonder when reading some.
There are some new translations of German and Norwegian folktales out or just coming out. I'm tempted, but the German ones are later than the periods I'm interested in. The Norwegian ones may be good, coming soon.