Book Translation Story

I recently read a book called Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. It’s a really interesting book about a philosophy going by the same name, and I personally can recommend everyone who is a social media addict to read it. After finishing this book in English (the original print) on my Kindle, I wanted to get a physical copy that I could show my friends or even lend it to them. So I went to one of my local bookshops and luckily they had a couple of units in stock.

Now what the real problem is, that I didn’t even think about before is that the book is translated from English into Czech, my native language. I only thought about this when I got it home, but let’s not skip ahead and continue with the story.

So I bought a paperback print of this book for around 13€ (303 CZK), went home and the curious side of me wanted to re-read some of the good parts in my native tongue. I think got through about 8 pages (keep in mind that this book is A5 sized) and I had enough.

The. translation. was. terrible. They used words that were nowhere even close to the original idea. Sentences that made sometimes absolutely no sense, that even re-reading it multiple times wasn’t enough to actually understand it and on top of that the formatting was really, but really bad (no line spacing & font). I had to focus very to not skip lines while reading.

I think this was the last¹ time I ever bought a printed copy of a English to Czech translated book. Have you ever had similar experience like this?