kaytara-art:

…of Be Ye Therefore Merciful, inspired by a commenter on Deviantart. I’m on 800 words of about 9500. Blimey, this might take a while. Also, my internal Russian vocabulary isn’t anywhere as big as it ought to be.

But the horrible thing is that it apparently only takes one Google search to find the complete version of Good Omens in Russian online (for the idiosyncrasies and such, for reference), and OH GOD, that HURTS. Whyyy. Whyyy.

A word of advice, people: If you have even passable reading skills in a language, choose the original over the translation every friggin’ time. No matter how often you have to look in the dictionary, no matter how slow the going is. It’s nothing compared to the horror of absorbing a translation that, even if not necessarily poor (though very likely to be), simply has close to NONE of the little nuances and details that make the original everything it is, and probably gets quite a few things wrong and even more things are lost in the translation - and the worst part is, you’ll read it and never even know what you’re missing.

(I mean, the translation assumes that by “lead balloon” Crawly in the Garden is referring to a friggin’ raindrop, when he’s clearly talking about the whole Eve incident. Gaaaah.)

(I didn’t even try to look up how they’d translated the jokes and puns. My sanity probably wouldn’t survive it.)

Понимаю ваши чувства. Вам попался даже не худший вариант перевода, но дело в том, что официального русского перевода Good Omens пока что нет, книга в России не издавалась. Есть только несколько вариантов фанатских переводов, поэтому ошибки неудивительны, хотя прискорбны.

Правда, я и официального перевода боюсь: стоит только представить, как по-русски напишут Aziraphale…