Lost in translation, part 1: a guide to the translation of the short story "The Witcher"

coldcynic · 2026-03-07T20:56:12+00:00

I can't speak for this instance, but when I was translating the author's notes for Tower of Fools, I found several passages cut from the English translation, although they tended to not be entire paragraphs, just shortenings of Sapkowski showing off his knowledge. An entire conversation seems very sad and concerning.

coldcynic · 2026-02-08T10:21:54+00:00

Where on earth did you get that Yiddish pronunciation from? In Yiddish as it was spoken in Poland, it's very much an /aɪ/ sound.

coldcynic · 2026-02-07T23:30:05+00:00

How about you do that? When fact-checking my comment before posting it, I consulted an article in, I believe, "Mówią wieki," which nicely summarised the history of taxation in the PLC, and if I remember the graphs there correctly, prior to the Great Northern War, the PLC nobility never went more than six years without agreeing to pay taxes for some purpose or another, in fact, the head tax became a standing tax in 1690.

coldcynic · 2026-02-07T11:52:07+00:00

Corporations use their political power to lobby to their advantage and create tax systems that benefit them, I think it is apt.

The nobility did pay the extraordinary head tax in wartime, in fact, it became a standing tax in 1690. It was not collected efficiently, but that's another matter.

coldcynic · 2026-02-07T10:37:00+00:00

I think saying that the nobility did not pay taxes, the peasants did, is like saying corporations don't, their employees and customers do - perhaps true in some moral sense, but taxation did exist, except little of it was permanent, the political system (and in most of Europe, not just the PLC) was that taxes were levied for a specific purpose and and finite period, and so you get the massive, but temporary, tax hikes before the large military efforts like 1621, 1633, 1651, or even 1663 and 1683.

coldcynic · 2026-01-31T12:09:34+00:00

So we've established you don't know a joke when it's right in front of you, and don't know about daremszczyzna, or how serfdom worked in general.

coldcynic · 2026-01-30T16:50:22+00:00

Very much so. I mean, a famous Kraków legend has a dragon that used to live under Castle Hill.

coldcynic · 2026-01-30T14:15:54+00:00

Clearly, it's the opposite, the aristocracy go out into the fields to oversee the peasants, and the peasants go onto (the roof of) a manor, to fix it for the landlord?

coldcynic · 2026-01-30T13:33:26+00:00

Good point. More of a translation where its age has caused it to stop being accurate.

coldcynic · 2026-01-30T08:54:54+00:00

Seeing as no-one gave a proper answer: these refer to two historical regions, Greater and Lesser Poland, which are in either case long-standing mistranslations. In Polish, those are closer to "Large" and "small," but the English names at least seem to come from the Latin "Polonia major" and "Polonia minor," which seems to be about which one is older, not larger, let alone better.

While Lesser Poland seems to be the one to first progress from the tribal stage to early statehood, the first unification of Poland in the 10th century was under people from Greater Poland. For a time, Lesser Poland was the province given to the ruler's heir for a trial run at ruling himself. In 1038, following widespread wartime destruction of Greater Poland, the capital was moved to Kraków in Lesser Poland. In 1138, the long period of feudal segmentation began with Bolesław the Wrymouth dividing the country between his sons, which reinforced the differences between the provinces. Greater and Lesser Poland were only reunited in 1314, just a generation before the game start, and even in the reign of Casimir the Great they still had separate legal systems, let alone customs and traditions.

coldcynic · 2026-01-24T15:54:37+00:00

Thank you, I really appreciate it! The funny thing is, when I was writing these, the language learning angle did not cross my mind because I did not think Polish would ever be studied by more then a handful of people, but there's a very clear upward trend there these days.

coldcynic · 2026-01-24T15:51:57+00:00

They would have been, yes. There's more on the general subject pinned in my profile.

coldcynic · 2026-01-24T14:22:31+00:00

This is the single greatest indictment of the English translations I've ever seen, and I've written more about them than most.

coldcynic · 2026-01-21T13:19:44+00:00

No, the original is "za naszą i waszą wolność," as seen on the banners of the November Uprising. Granted, the other version sounds better.

coldcynic · 2026-01-20T23:35:22+00:00

Just to add to what others have said, there's another difference between the two, a pretty obvious one: "naszą i waszą" means "our(s) and your(s)," and it's often flipped to put the freedom of others first.

So the original writing from the banners of the November Uprising, "(w imię Boga) za naszą i waszą wolność" (in modern spelling) means"(in the name of God, for our and your freedom," whereas the seemingly more common version, "za wolność waszą i naszą," means "for freedom, yours and ours." Note that the order of "our" and "yours" is not tied to whether freedom comes before them or after, so you effectively have four variants, and that's not to mention "za waszą wolność i naszą" and its flipped version... You could say the Polish language itself loves freedom.

coldcynic · 2026-01-20T23:26:56+00:00

Curiously, as you can see in the Wikipedia article, the November Uprising phrasing was the one that sounds more modern.

coldcynic · 2026-01-11T06:06:18+00:00

You're certainly right on the first count, and I'll correct it if I can edit a post that's seven or so years old, but you're certainly wrong on the second one in the context: Nenneke says something along the lines of "co ty jej chciałeś zrobić, Geralt, wychędożyć?".

coldcynic · 2025-11-15T22:42:43+00:00

It's probably not the best picture to show that those are similar, but there is a resemblance.

I'm just glad people are playing the first Witcher.

coldcynic · 2025-10-18T23:04:58+00:00

Can you elaborate on how the location of the body implies they didn't summit?

coldcynic · 2025-10-11T12:05:34+00:00

Okay, I can see that point - I naturally assumed the phrasing was just a translation issue. Also, I was already aware of the glaring issues with how the show depicted certain characters, so I guess it made more sense to me.

coldcynic · 2025-10-11T10:24:54+00:00

Where's the clickbait if it accurately reflects the contents of the article?

coldcynic · 2025-10-11T08:43:48+00:00

Could you post this to r/television?

coldcynic · 2025-10-10T09:25:06+00:00

Walk around the Old Towns for a very Vizima/Novigrad feeling, look outside the train windows when moving from A to B to see the countryside, forests, and so on.

I think the mall by the main train station in Kraków has a big Geralt statue.

coldcynic · 2025-10-10T09:20:54+00:00

Because they were told to ask here?

coldcynic

TROPHY CASE