The vanity search this morning turned up something I hadn’t seen before:
That’s the Japanese edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I knew one was in the works, but hadn’t heard when it would be out.
Of course, I can’t read any of it other than my own name (rightmost column of the cover text, from top to bottom). So I turn to Google Translate, which does wonders with the product description:
Dogs have been collected by Professor Chad Emmy physics, quantum physics interested in all of the owner. Amazing ideas of quantum physics, every day, “honoring” significant useless wanted to apply. In quantum tunneling through a fence that can be? Quantum teleportation, but I want to use to catch squirrels? The steak is down to go into space!
So Chad, what is quantum physics, Emmy or how they work (and human readers) would be to explain. Particles behave like waves, Heisenberg uncertainty, and spooky action at a distance of quantum entanglement, quantum physics is very strange, but very useful to humans and dogs. Popular Science phenomenally fun and unique.
I can sort of puzzle out what this is intended to be, because it resembles some of the publicity copy we wrote (or something that started its life as some of the publicity copy we wrote). But this is a terrific reminder that we’re a long, long way from Star Trek style universal translation.
Anyway, if you’re in Japan, or read Japanese, you can now pick up your very own copy of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I have no idea who did the translation– hopefully not Google’s automatic service– or if it’s any good. I’d love to know how they rendered “Bunnies made of cheese,” though, so if you see a copy, drop me a line and let me know.
The steak is down to go into space!
(Japanese Amazon link via this blog post, which appears to start off with some Tour de France commentary, and had me saying “What the hell?” before I got to the link at the bottom of the post.)
“The steak is down to go into space!”
At the very least, that deserves to be your Facebook status for awhile.
There’s no mention of cheese bunnies in the Japanese summary.
ã¹ãã¼ããè½ã¡ã¦ããå®å®ã«è¡ããã
would be better translated as “I want to go to the universe where the steak dropped!” You can probably figure out the auto translators confusion: dropped/down, universe/space, etc. “I” is missing because it is common for Japanese to omit the subject when it can be inferred.
wow is this for real
Well, ç©ç is physics. I know that much.
ç¬ã§ããããç©ç means, roughly, “Physics that even dogs understand”. This kind of construction is really common for stuff like this (along with “why is it that …?”) so I certainly understand them using it. I suspect it’s hard to translate the original title directly without making it look like a straight how-to manual for shoppers glancing at the title.
Agh, “Modern physics that even dogs understand” of course.
It’s amazing how these publishers all insist redoing the covers — even the brits. They could save a bit of coin by taking the original and just changing the language of the text. Why are they’re not interested?
“It’s amazing how these publishers all insist redoing the covers — even the brits. They could save a bit of coin by taking the original and just changing the language of the text. Why are they’re not interested?”
Well, you can’t just reuse the exact same cover. Book sizes and proportions differ by country, and different editions may well use different printing methods that dictate what you can do; a full-color cover may not be feasible for a print run of a translation for instance. And the text will differ, both in length and (as in Japanese) placement and visual typography. You couldn’t really cram the Japanese text into the original cover and retain a good visual balance.
Which is to say, you need to redo the cover for different language editions, to account for all these things. And if you’re going to hire a professional to redo the cover anyway, you might as well make a cover that will appeal most to your local target audience, and fits the market. The plain white design will make it easy to adapt to the immensely popular back-catalog pocket series here, for instance, when the book shows up there.