Well, in GoT the "dynastic looks" of at least one character play a rather important role. I was a bit surprised they didn't try to accentuate that.
Name one character where they deviated significantly from their canon appearance. It's not like they cast all Lannisters as brunettes, and the plot-relevant aspects all hold true.
That's why I am really interested how they will pull off the House of the Undying scenes.
I'm half afraid they will skip that bit altogether. They cut out all the subtle aspects of AGOT as well, after all (I'm still quite disappointed we haven't seen Eddard's Tower of Joy dream, alone for the fact that Arthur Dayne et al. would've made a terrific sight).
I first read it in Czech years ago, but the translator decided to start translating surnames from the 4th book on
and in general her translation was getting lazy and sloppy.
I don't mean geographic names, I mean surnames, the dynastic names. For instance, Glover seems to be derived from "glove", so she translated it accordingly. Stupid cow.
I
HATE this in principle, but I hated it even more since she suddenly did this with the 4th book in the series. It's incredible that the publisher even printed this abomination.
If by "speaking" (?) name you mean something that even in English clearly points to its meaning, such as when it's derived from a nickname, I think it's appropriate. On the other hand, surnames such as "Stark" have a meaning, but they're certainly not meant to be translated (she didn't dare touch that one, but she came up with some insane Czech translation of Greyjoy IIRC).
Anyway, I am sick of translators who are obsessed with translating eeeeevvvveeeerything because we poor idiots couldn't possibly understand anything they might have left out. It's especially bad in Czech because we have this stupid notion that our language is the richest one in the whole world and therefore it must be protected from any foreign contamination
And the Czech translation of ASOIAF isn't really that good anyway, I'd do a better job myself, probably.
Interesting that you say this, because the German translation did exactly the same thing and I hate hate hate this.
And it's extra bad because otherwise the translation was actually pretty decent. Then starting with ASOS translated proper named started sneaking in. Recently one of my friends whom I've converted to Asoiaf via the HBO series bought the books and in the new edition, they've literally translated everything, except when they inexplicably didn't. And "Casterly Fels" sounds really wimpy.
Btw. For the translations I think it's correct to translate the names, after all, GRRM chose them because their speaking. Gulltown, Kings Landing an so on. Quiet Isle would sound f.e. totally wrong in a Czech Book, not? But of course, these need to be translated correctly. With character names this gets tricky. But do you have an example of a "speaking" surname that got translated? Surely you don't object to Rattleshirt or the Weeper being translated?
I can't answer for Czech of course, but I suppose the same principle holds true for all languages. And my experience with this practice is that it doesn't work and only creates problems.
Of course there is no problem with names that are clearly indicative of something, like the Iron Throne. It's a throne made of iron, it's pretty obvious that the name is descriptive, even for the characters in the story.
The problem is, translators often don't stop there. Often it's difficult to draw a proper line: let's go with my above example of Casterly Rock. It's a castle inside of a rock, so the "Rock" part is clearly descriptive, isn't it? But if you only translate that part, you suddenly have half-translated names where the other part is still English. That's pretty dissonant and hurts the willing suspension of disbelief. Plus, often in the translated language, words can't be compounded like in English, making constructions like Casterly [translation of rock] grammatically wrong.
What then? Rename Casterly as well? How? It's a proper name, named after the previous owners of the castle, who are named after a river, iirc. Can the translator simply make up a new name for them, that's sufficiently German-, Czech- or whatever-sounding?
And once you start translating some nonedescriptive surnames, you have to translate all others, to avoid dissonance. Then you have to translate all first names, and all placenames related to surnames, etc. It's pure mission creep.
This is going to bite you in the ass extra time when you're dealing with a writer like Martin who likes to play with names and subtle double meanings. Bad research can kill you there. For example, there's a case in the German translation where translating would've been a
good idea. Why do I mention this? Because it shows translators don't care if translations are beneficial for understanding or flavour, they just randomly translate or don't translate.
It's the scene with Catelyn on her father's deathbed. He's fantasizing and mumbling about his regrets, and one of the words he mentions is "Tansy". Catelyn thinks it's a name, and the translator simply goes along with that and doesn't translate it, which would've been fine so far. Catelyn assumes it's the name of a whore her father had when he was younger, but immediately wonders while he's bringing this up during all the talk about how he disappointed his family. But tansy is also a flower, and (spoiler):
Readers of the translation were never able to make this connection.
Plus, and for me that's a pretty major part: GRRM actively tried to be evocative of medieval England when he created Westeros. Translating his names takes all of that away. Plus, he even went the additional mile of using slightly altered English names everywhere, to create that brilliant "familiar but also alien" feeling. Does that need to be emulated in the new language as well? The translator would have to be extremely skilled to pull that off, and most aren't. And I don't want to read about a Westeros populated by Friedrychs and Ottos.
End of rant, that just needed to be said. It's not directed at you, the quote was just the trigger
By the way, the only good translation of proper names I've read (and now we're going full circle here) is the German LotR. For example, the German name of Rivendell doesn't sound like a babelfish translation, is just as evocative and still keeps the basic meaning. That Tolkien was involved with the translation process (speaking most of the languages it was translated to at least rudimentarily) probably helped a lot.
I am talking about the Czech version and the Czech translation of it, which is just awful. And there are much worse abominations which sound like a parody of the Czech language.
