This was raised a while ago in my LotR story. My response/explanation is HERE and HERE). There's also quite a bit of discussion on the topic in the thread itself.

I won't go into detail, but in my opinion, slang and idioms can be inserted into any translated story. By that I mean that the story itself is taking place in some far off world/place where no-one speaks English but is being run through a translation convention to communicate it to readers.

Real translation is more of an art than a science. That is why online translators are so clunky, when compared to an experienced speaker of the languages. Take the example of the idiom, 'Speak of the devil'. A similar idiom exists in many languages, but imagine an experienced translator was working with a French passage. While translating it into English, he comes across the idiom, 'Quand on parle du loup' (When one speaks of the wolf), a good translator would turn this into, 'Speak of the devil', and not use the literal translation. Unless, that is, they are deliberately trying to preserve the form of the text over its meaning.

Basically, it's a translation convention; not a transliteration convention.

However, I very much doubt most fanfiction writers consider the issue in that much depth. My personal bugbear is inconsistently applied translation conventions.

 

In Fellowship of the Ring Gandalf says "There is some new devilry here." It's a word with an etymology beyond Judeo-Christian traditions, ya know.

Though I agree that "speak of the devil" is not a colloquialism that's likely to have developed in Middle Earth.

 

Okay, how about this one.

Seeing as she doesn't have a penis or a strap-on to peg him I can only assume the author is using bugger in place of fuck.

 

Wow that's pretty hot.

 

Funny, one of my pet peeves is doing the exact opposite. While I am okay with dynamic equivalence (what you're referring to as translating one phrase into the other), it can only go so far.Formal equivalence (speak of the wolf inf French = speak of the wolf in English) is just as valid for translators. In fact, depending on what they're doing and the context, it may be a more valid method of translating.

The reason it's a pet-peeve of mine is because anglicizing something to that degree sometimes hurts the storyline. The best example I can think of for this is actually a translation from Hebrew to English. The translation found in many bibles is "The apple of God's eye." The literal translation is "the little-man of God's eye." The first translation is the closest English rendition, but it still misses the full point. "Little man" means someone is so close to God relationly, they're face to face with him and can therefore see themselves in God's iris, a very important point in the narrative.

When I read fanfiction and read people making similar mistakes, i.e. so anglicizing a different culture that it loses all hints of that culture, it pretty much just becomes a replica of the English or American world. One of the best ways to stop that is to allow the idioms to remain somewhat foreign, but translated close enough that it makes sense. "Speak of the wolf" is a perfect example of that. It still gets the same point across, it's different than the English, and moreover, there may be a play on words with the man's character that "speak of the devil" misses.

(BTW - Speak of the wolf isn't transliteration. Transliteration would look like:speak of the loup, when you're literally moving a word or phrase from the original language into the new language, such as: per se).

 

Generally I agree with you that a better translation is one that conveys all the layers of meaning the phrase had in the original language. However, you must be careful not to layer contemporary meaning unto the text. For example, if the devil is already mentioned, the refernce to the "devil" and "underworld" in the old testament are extremely different than those found in later Christian translations. Very few scholars interpert the bible the way ghe translators did.

As for " the apple of God's eye", the most meaningful way to translate it would be the pupil of God's eye. This conveys both meaning to the original text, one being a part of his reflection on his pupil and the other being derived (in a similar way to how it's derived from Hebrew) from the latin word pupilla (female ward) which is close to the original deriviation that means seeing the Jews as God's daughter.



Yikes. Bible talk. Brings me back a bit... oh well.

 

The Tale of Two Wastelands in Fallout fanfic. For those unfamiliar it's the concept that the Vault Dweller from FO3 and the Courier from FO:NV are the same person through some convoluted logic.

It's all pervasive, completely unnecessary in most fics and just terrible.

 

Didn't know it had fanfics about it.

It's still the best NV/FO3 mod of all time, though.

 

When a pairing distorts a fanfic's story, twisting the plot and everything else to revolve around it.

When an author keeps pairing off the main character with the unlikeliest of people just because they're their favorite.

When an author is incapable of writing a story without a pairing at all.

 

I feel like points 2 and 3 are only bad because of point 1.

 

I've started avoiding stories with pairings completely. It's just safer that way. Then again, I'm unusually picky.

 

I started doing that a couple of years ago. Unfortunately searching trying to search for stories with main character X with no pairing is extremely inefficient, mostly because of tagging issues.

Either The story is tagged with that character only but has a pairing anyway, or it's not tagged with any characters (these I never find because I'm not searching with zero filters), or it's tagged properly but because its tag type is a subset of everything else you have to skip by all of that anyway...

tl;dr finding those stories is hard, finding good ones is even harder.

 

People that don't read critically when reading fanfiction. I've had several people make ridiculous guesses in reviews on the AU I'm writing at the moment because they seem to just assume the canon answer is the answer, and don't actually read what's being written.

I even had someone say "oh, obviously Dobby is involved here" when I had literally just killed Dobby off.

But also reviews that are only about any ships that are or are not in the fic. Whether it's people desperately guessing that this ship or that ship will be included, or people complaining that their ship hasn't been included, it's the worst - they never comment on the actual plot of the story.

 

Yeah, I get a lot of people telling me parts of some of my stories are actually wrong. It's weird, and I'm just like "did you even read what I wrote? I specifically stated exactly what happened."

 

Yeah I don't mind people making speculative guesses now and then, though some of them are quite frankly bizarre, but does anyone else get annoyed when the review purely consists of the reviewer saying what they think will/should happen? It gives me no feedback or anything useful (I already have my plot written out) and there's no response I can give without giving stuff away.

Edit: ALSO when people haven't read your story closely enough and assume you've made mistakes. I explained why Colin was in my story 3 times in the story itself, yet in the last chapters I still had people saying "but why is Colin here he was muggleborn".

 

Shit reviews are the worst. It's not like I don't get some pretty great ones on my fic. Just recently I got some awesome feedback that was immediately followed by one-liners that might as well have never existed for all the feedback they provide. I mean, I like it when people like my stuff, but one can't help but hope more reviews would be actual reviews rather than "I like it plz update" or "this sucks".

 

As a reviewer I have to ask: Would you rather just have a thumbs up as opposed to a one liner?

I only say this because sometimes as a reviewer you don't want to repeat what everyone else has said especially when they have already critiqued what you want to say. At the same time you don't want to just read and feel like you haven't praised the work.

 

I think I'd actually prefer someone outright post "this sucks" rather than "wtf is going on tho???". Then again, that's probably legitimate in my case lol.

Speculative guesses are fun, and often funny, but spoilerific instances tend to peeve me... just a little. Someone reviewed with bookmaker-style ratio odds thingies once, which left me in a sort of emotional limbo.

In a similar vein to AU reviews, I recently received one where I was ordered to stop writing the fic and make it original, because it apparently "butchered everything". Now it's completely fair to have a grievance or a thousand about a piece of work, but when your feedback is literally "do what I say and be done with it", you can't expect the recipient to heed it.

 

Obviously I would prefer more detailed feedback, even if it's repeating what others have said - I know something definitely needs to change if multiple people have an issue with something, rather than it being one person's preference.

That said, I still appreciate a short one liner as long as it feels personal/specific. Saying something like "Love this cliff hanger!" is significantly better than saying "Love this!" From the first, I can gather that my plot is going well, that I'm writing suspense well. From the second, it tells me literally nothing.