Translations: good and bad

[sawyl]

A serendipitous conjunction on the Guardian books blog: Adam Roberts discusses how poorly Jules Verne has been served by some of his translators; while elsewhere, Imogen Russell Williams mentions the greatness of Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge's Asterix translations:

The nomenclature of the Asterix books in the standard English translation which I read - Impedimenta, Geriatrix, Getafix! - is far too sophisticated for a comic-aged child. It took 11 years of Latin for me to start appreciating the connotations of Impedimenta, for example: impedimentum, singular - an obstacle or hindrance; the plural form, impedimenta - the baggage of an army. Either describes admirably the plump little matriarch clinging to her harassed husband's back - and then there's the secondary meaning of "baggage", a trollopy woman. Aged 10, none of this occurred to me. I was just in it to see the Gauls kick seven shades of shit out of the Romans.

If only my translation of The Myth of Sisyphus was of the same standard. Sadly it's not. It's extremely literal, with the sort of clunking prose that results from a transliteration rather than a translation. Yuck.