Soul Music totally lost in translation for me
So this is the second discworld book I've read after randomly starting from Thief of Time. I mostly picked this one because I loved Susan in the other book and wanted to read more about her. Unfortunately I made the mistake of reading Soul Music in my native language Finnish. It took me a MONTH to finish this book because I was so bored due to not understanding pretty much a single reference, and a lot of it was due to the jokes being lost in translation for me. Here are some examples:
- The whole "elvish" this had to be explained by the translator in an extra text box, because it's pretty much impossible to translate to Finnish and the joke making sense. The word they used was "haltijasukua" (=related to elves) or "haltijamainen" (=elf-like) so it sounding nothing like the name Elvis just sort of lost the joke completely
- I also hated all the Finnish name translations 😭 Buddy was called "Patee" so I thought it was some sort of reference to the French dish pâté (don't laugh at me) and had absolutely no idea that it was a Buddy Holly reference. I was so confused lmao
- "Music with rocks in it" was translated to "Kivenkovaa musiikkia" (= rock-hard music) which I thought was so much less funny than the original one. Even the name of the book, "Elävää musiikkia" (=Living music) was kinda meh..
- And well I just didn't in understand like any of the references so the band scenes were super boring and repetitive to me, but that was partially due to me just not knowing the references anyway.
I loved Susan tho!
I'm curious to hear if other people have had similar problems reading in their native language.