Russian translated into English or French, what would be better/less awkward to read?
>>7743395
Depends on the book. For Dostoevsky, the idiot is better translated to French and the devils is better in English.
>>7743414
Ugh....so neither French nor English is closer to Russian in any way?
I thought maybe French grammar would better capture the Russian language.
>>7743516
They're pretty opposite m8. It feels like every Tolstoy book I read someone mentions the difference between the intimacy of French and the distance of Russian.
>>7743516
English and French are very close. Russian is completely different.
>>7743541
Tolstoy wrote long passages of War and Peace in French so if you read it in French you at least get to experience some of the original untranslated work.
Apart from that, there's no reason you'd want to read Russian books in French.
Both are terrible for translating Russian.
>>7743516
The sound of the language itself is an even bigger issue, since a character's tone is the most important element to translation in Russian literature. The way syllables work in Russian are nothing like any Western language, and so it becomes very difficult to convey tone--in English, if you speak it everyday, you read dialogue and you can pick up on the tone intuitively even if you're going subvocal, you're processing how the character would sound. Russia's totally foreign sense of syllable means that different words will be selected to convey different tones. This became enormously crucial when you have numerous characters and each is strongly distinguished from another by his tone.
To give an example of what I'm talking about, here is the Russian pronunciation of "idiot" (the title of the novel by Dostoevsky): http://forvo.com/word/%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BE%D1%82/
>>7744279
Idiot sounds pretty similar I'm Russian and English, desu
>>7744279
so I should read The Brothers Karamazov in classical Arabic?
>based Nabokov translating his own books
The only russian author with perfect english translations
>>7745213
if only his books weren't second-rate
>>7745213
>implying perfect translations exist
languages itself excludes one another. nabakov's translations are as bad as the next person's.
>>7744279
The "way syllables work in Russian" is actually pretty simple, I'm not sure why you're giving it that much attention.
Now sentence structure, on the other hand...
>>7745287
so, french or english?
>>7743395
French for old translations (19th-), English for new ones. It only makes sense as a general rule. If you want to get into exceptions, bring up specific books and maybe someone will be able to tell you.
>>7745213
His English translation of Lolita is excellent.
>>7744279
Can you explain what you mean by tone?
what a dumb thread
>>7745290
I'd actually go with English, since French is way too littered with articles and auxilliary verbs and whatnot which would be useless in translating from Russian. Though both are pretty bad imo
>>7745321
alright, thanks
>>7745298
is this version still in print? or is there a more modern one
