The current situation with Spain's edition of The Liveship Traders
Hello everyone!
First of all, I want to clarify thatI tagged this as spoilers, but there will be only a few lines quoted here, for the purpose of giving examples and context whenever needed to some of the issues this post is about.
Now, to the main point: Robin Hobb's ROTEL had been out of print for a while in Spain (it's been about 10 years since the Tawny Man series was published there), and late 2024 it was announced by the publisher Nocturna Ediciones that Farseer was getting picked up for a revised translation (put a pin on that...) and would be published in 2025. On december of 2025, they also shared an announcement confirming new editions of Liveship.
Now, this was fantastic news for sure! Nocturna is also a pretty stablished publisher and they also publish other stablished fantasya and sci-fi authors like Neal Shusterman, Jay Kristoff, Christelle Dabos and many national authors, so it was initially quite reasuring that out of all the options they were the ones chosen by Hobb and her team.
The Farseer trilogy was published in 2025, and though the price was not ideal for a paperback (around 22-25€ per book) and it did spark some debate, people were mostly happy with the revised translation.
Fast-forward to this week, when we finally got Liveship. The price already raised a lot of concerns (25-26€ per paperback, here's a link where you can check some of the respones by the community), but there is a larger issue that is -rightfully so-, creating an outrage: the so called "revised translations" are, in fact, not revised or done with very little care.
These are some examples of the things spotted so far by some readers in the first few hundred pages (most can be found in this thread on X and its replies):
- Wintrow's age was mistranslated as 30 instead of 13, just like it happened in the 1990s editions
- Chapter 9: translated "the crunching of shod feet on the sandy rocks" as "the crunch of the wet snow on sandy rocks"
- Multiple cases of "her/him/it" used incorrectly (like refering to a female character with male pronouns/articles)
- There are up to 4 different translators working on the same book. I can't say for certain to what extent this may have impacted the quality of the translation, but it is definitely not common practice to have more than one or two and really makes you wonder if something went wrong considering all the details mentioned above.
- Awful paper quality, making it even hard to read some pages due to how the print on the other side is showing through.
Again, this is a 26€ paperback with revised translations. It is diabolical to get the license to such a wonderful world and treat it like this. So far, as of May 19th Nocturna has not aknowledged any of these issues.
I am really hoping we can give this some traction here and in social media, so that hopefully miss Hobb and her team get to see how big the negative reaction is to how they're treating the series so many people love. Let's get some justice for the Spanish-speaking folks.
Thanks for taking your time reading until here!
editing for clarity: this is not a post made just so Hobb can mayyybe find out (i know there are official ways to reach her and her team) but more of an informative post to hopefully bring this to attention of the ROTEL community to show some support by spreading awareness.
edit 2: as of morning of May 21st (EU time) these issues are still not adressed by the publisher