What's the worst translation you've read?
I'm reading Snow Country right now and this is by far the worst translation, outrageously bad so much so that I'm sure if Kawabata saw this, he'd get this off print. Everything about this translation is clumsy, the phrasing is abysmal, the book is supposed to be like poetry. It's meant to flow, the translator Edward G Seidenstiker ensures the sentences never flow and moreover, he even adds lines that don't exist in the original novel. Every phrase is made to sound as lazy and contrived as possible, he translates every single "well.. now" to "presently" totally ignoring the intentions and somehow even forgetting the commanding tone "presently" carries in English and somehow, somehow idk how this novel won a nobel prize? Yes, the original japanese novel from what I've read is beautiful but not this translation, how are people impressed by this? Do they simply pretend to like anything that's considered "good"? For Japanese fiction, the only translator I've found capable of bringing out the writer's true intentions is Donald Keene and to an extent, the Murakami translators but that's because Murakami proofreads every novel. Meredith Weatherby and Edward Seidenstiker are the worst, they turn everything pretty into stiff, tryhard ESL prose. And it's not like Constance Garnett translating Russians, in which it's more peculiar than "bad", no this is just straight up wrong. Like actually wrong