Georg Galster has been working on a Danish translation of the Gor series. You may remember Georg from a TGV interview with OldViking in 2000 (http://pantheus.com/TGV/archive122000/TGV/interview.shtml). Georg happens to live less than a mile from the open air restaurant where Brenda took her coffee while visiting Copenhagen in Time Slave.

I was extremely fortunate when I asked Georg if he would consent to a TGV interview regarding his work and he answered with “Why not?”

Interview with Georg Galster

TGV: What first gave you the idea for taking on a translation project?

Georg: The translation project originally started in either 1997 or 1998. I had been invited to a conference at the university in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo, Malaysia. My purpose was to present how my institute at the Technical University of Denmark understood sustainable energy technologies. We thought mainly in terms of “Energy Services,” for example, that what you basically need is not light on your table but a way to read your book. We thought that these technologies and principles might prove useful in a country like Malaysia in rapid growth. I had to stay for a week or so in the hotel, which gave me lots of time for leisure reading.

At that time I was trying to read all Norman’s books of Gor, and I had brought #10, Tribesmen of Gor, with me as kind of leisure reading. I found it interesting, especially the description of how the former Miss Priscilla Blake-Allen during the book slowly developed into the fine slave girl Alyena. However, I also found it extremely difficult to read, even with my English-Danish dictionary, mainly due to the rather complicated sentence structure that John Norman frequently uses, especially when he leaves the main story line and becomes more theoretical and philosophical. Perhaps all the time I had in the hotel room made it tempting to try to understand all the details in the text rather than just skimming through the linguistically more complicated parts in order to follow the story line. I thought it might be easier to understand if I tried to translate such statements segment by segment into my native language in writing (using paper and pencil since I had no access to a computer in my hotel room). I then became obsessed with the idea of understanding the whole Gor books series better in that way.

Anyway, I found it to be a great help to translate the more complicated parts, word by word, often using the English-Danish dictionary I had brought with me, writing them down on a sheet of paper, and then rearranging the words into proper Danish statements. Soon I realized that if I did this with the whole book, and then with the rest of the books, I would (a) understand Norman’s work much better, and (b) learn some more of the English language. So I started off from the first page in Tribesmen, and before I had to catch the plane back to Copenhagen, I had a first version of a translation of the first maybe 100 pages, handwritten on paper.

Since then, and especially now during my retirement, it has become almost an obsession with me to try to put the books into proper Danish. Quite a time-consuming job, but also a rather rewarding one in itself. Of course it’s done now on my computer rather that with a pencil on sheets of paper.

TGV: What is your goal?

Georg: It’s my intention to make versions in proper Danish language of all the 26 books of Gor, and probably of Ghost Dance, too. Right now, I am working with chapter 2 of book #20, Players of Gor, after having been through the first 19 books plus Time Slave. This doesn’t mean that these 20 books are ready for others to read. I still need to do some proofreading on most of them, and it’s been my experience that proofreading is almost impossible to do too soon after a first translation is done, at least if both are done by the same person.

This all means, of course, that this project still has some more years to run before it is completed, even though I have more time for it now during my retirement, and even though I have become more experienced in the job than I was in the early stage in Kota Kinabalu.

TGV: How do you hope to use the translation?

Georg: It’s, of course, a hope of mine that it’ll be useful for other people with Danish as their first language. I was not at all illiterate in English when I started. I had no problems in making speeches at scientific conferences at that time, nor in writing or readingscientific papers, but still, Norman’s writing caused me problems. I would suppose most Danes are similar in that they are perfectly able to express themselves in some basic (or broken?) English, and to understand English at the same level, but still would have problems with the more theoretical or philosophical parts of Norman’s novels. Part of the fun doing it is to try not only to use it to understand what Norman wrote, but also to put it into correct, fluent Danish. I think I have learned a lot of both English and Danish in that process.

It is a totally unofficial translation, but I have an ambition that the translations might be of use and entertainment to other people. I would say that it’s impossible to find the Gor series, or any part of it, in any shop in Denmark, but it is, of course, possible to buy it over the net, like through Pantheus’ net shop, for instance. As there are only around 5 million people on this globe who have Danish as their first language, I don’t find it realistic to publish them as paper-books. I’m afraid the market would simply be too small, even if a minor fraction of the 4 million Norwegians might show some interest in the translations. However, I still think it might be possible to make them available as downloadable e-books.

I initiated negotiations with World of Gor. I showed them my Danish version of #11, Slave Girl of Gor, and proposed to them that the Danish translations might be published as e-books, downloadable for a nominal price to be readable on the purchaser’s computer only. I was hoping that they would take care of Norman’s copyright to his novels, but we didn’t reach an understanding on how to do it before World of Gor went out of business. I might add that I have no intentions of making any money myself out of the project, but would deliver the material free of any charge to Norman’s agent, provided they would make it available as e-books.

By the way, should Norman or his current agents happen to see this interview, they are most welcome to contact me in a personal message to Georg on Pantheus’ Public Gorean Board, http://www.pantheus.com/yabbse/index.php.

TGV: Which editions are you using for the basis of the translations - original or revised?

Georg: I use the original ones. I have seen some of the revised ones, as published by World of Gor, but at least in the first books the revisions seem to be very small. My impression was that they were rather at the level of proofreading.

TGV: Are you editing for content (censorship, like the German editions did)?

Georg: Certainly not. I hope it should be obvious by now that it’s rather my intention to make the Danish versions a true reflection of Norman’s texts. Whether I happen to agree with him or not in any specific statement of his should not be part of the translations. The discussion of the truth-value of Norman’s ideas should, of course, rather be made somewhere else.

Nevertheless, I have, of course, to make a lot of decisions on how certain expressions should be translated. The scope of a word in one language is often not equivalent to the scope of the word that is most often used in similar contexts in another language. One example is startled that, as I understand it, has a spectrum of meanings reaching from amazed through surprised to frightened. In Danish, we don’t have such a broad word, so it’s up to the translator, me, to decide which of these three meanings might be the correct one in the given context. Such tends, of course, to leave less to the imagination of the reader.

There are other examples where Norman uses an English word with a narrow meaning, but where I’m forced to use a word in Danish with a broader scope. In most cases I feel, for instance, that I’m forced to translate the nouns man and male into the same word mand, and similarly both woman and female into just kvinde. Although male might be translated by han and female by hun, the main meaning of these two Danish words seem to be much more animalistic than the meaning of the English words.

You constitutes a special problem. In modern Danish we have two forms, du and De, roughly corresponding to the German du and Sie or the French tu and vous. It might seem obvious that a person of high status should use the first form (du) when talking a person of low status, while a person of low status should use the second form (De) when taking to a the high status person. I suppose that would work perfectly well in French and probably also in German, but using De just doesn’t sound correct in Danish in this context. Therefore, I have decided to use an older Danish form I rather than De. A slave will therefore always address a free person as I while a free person always addresses a slave as du. And similarly, between Ubars or Tatrixes and peasants or simple soldiers, for instance. This tends to add to the atmosphere of a rather ancient society. Some might call that an advantage, but it’s definitely something added to the texts during the process of translation. On the other hand, it would be almost unbearable to let a slave use du in addressing a free person.

Please as an adverb, as an expression of politeness, is another problem. Danes seem to be rather impolite persons. The Germans have their bitte, the French their s’il vous plait, the Italians their per favóre, and I’m sure the Spaniards have something similar, too. However, we Danes don’t have such an expression. It’s often recommended not to translate please at all, but just leave it out. That would, however, mean that quite a large percentage of what slaves say to free persons should be omitted in the translation, which I feel wouldn’t be fair to Norman’s texts. I have resolved to translate please by Jeg beder Jer or Jeg beder dig, depending on the relative stations of the involved persons, meaning literally I beg you. It’s not a perfect translation, but at least it is, in my opinion, better than omissions. (Jer and dig are the accusative inflections of I and du).

TGV: What resources are you using, and how do they affect the final form of the translation?

Georg: The basic material is of course the original books. In addition to that come electronic versions of English Danish and Danish English dictionaries (Gyldendals Røde Ordbøger, to the few of you that might have a grasp of Danish), an electronic version of The Oxford Concise Dictionary and of the Merriam Webster dictionary. I have also found use of larger paper versions of Gyldendal’s English Danish and Danish English dictionaries (B. Kjærulff Nielsen and Vinterberg & Bodelsen) and of Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. Even Turia’s Desktop Gor Dictionary, v. 2 has proved to be rather useful in cases. When it comes to references to, for instance, ancient Greece or Rome, or to technical terms of shipbuilding techniques or chess (kaissa) and such, I often resort to my library of older and newer Danish encyclopedias. Sometimes even Google searches have proven useful, but often they point to quotations from the Gor books rather than to some independent material!

It’s my hope that using such resources will result in a translation that is a fairly true reflection of the original material. When Norman uses a word that I need to spend some or a lot of time interpreting using resources like the ones I mentioned above, I take that as an indication that that word is seldom used in English, and I then try to find a similar word in Danish that is also seldom used. In this way, the Danish reader should ideally not find the Danish texts much easier to read than the English reader would find the English ones. That is at least my goal, but I must admit that this sometimes comes into conflict with my other intention of writing the texts in proper Danish.

Of course, I use the Danish spelling and grammar checker in Word, which means that I by now have an additional dictionary of 6 or 7000 words, mainly names of Gorean persons, geographical names, names of animals and plants, of foods and drinks, etc. When I happen in this way to discover that some expression is spelled differently at different places in the books, I tend to use only one spelling, usually the first one.

TGV: Are you cross-checking your work?

Georg: Well, yes. A Danish girl with some journalistic education (some of you may remember her as Soleil from IRC or GPB) proofread some chapters of Tarnsman of Gor (or rather on Tarnrytter på Gor) when she had the timeto help with the project. Her work gave me many good ideas on how things might be done and written. That was a very rewarding experience.

I have discovered that, especially in dialogs in the books, I sometimes skip a few paragraphs. This happens, for instance, when a paragraph like {“‘Yes, Master,’ she said.”} is repeated several times on the same page. In order to try to rectify this, I put the English book through my scanner and then convert the scanned images into a Word file using an OCR program. (This is legal, at least in this country, as long as you only make personal use of the scanned texts.) I then develop a Word macro in Visual Basic that compares the English and the Danish texts, paragraph by paragraph. On the screen it points out paragraphs that should be reflecting each other but are of different lengths; of course, with some tolerance for differences, a rather small relative tolerance for long paragraphs, a few percent, and a larger one for shorter paragraphs. It’s my experience that I normally find a dozen or two paragraphs that are missing in the initial Danish versions, or are too short because I, inadvertently, have skipped some part of them.

I use another rather useful macro to check that I have not added or missed some quotation marks, something rather similar to a small program checking that all parentheses are closed in a source text in a programming language like C or Pascal.

Of course, I also check the volume of the full Danish texts against the English ones. It most often turns out that there are fewer words in the Danish ones, due to the much more widespread use of compound words in Danish than in English. For instance the arrow point becomes pilespidsen in Danish and of the slave girl becomes slavepigens. On the other hand, there seems to be a tendency (that is not obvious from these two examples) for there to be slightly more letters or characters in the Danish texts than in the corresponding English ones.

TGV: Where do you find the greatest difficulties?

Georg: The very long statements, those with lots of words between full stops, with lots of words that are used rather seldomly in daily English, and with lots of adjectives and “-ing” forms. These are often rather difficult to pack into a single, proper Danish statement. I think, however, that over the years, I have gotten some experience in how to do this. I once worked with an Irishman in Egypt. He had tried to learn some Danish, as he worked with a Danish company. He told me that he found Danish to be a rather difficult language, mainly because Danish is rather sensitive to word order. According to him, that’s not true to the same degree in English, where you might put the words in almost any order you wish without risking your statement losing its meaning. I think the Gor books contain many good examples that he was right.

In this country we sometime use a calculated index, the ‘lix’-index, to measure how difficult a text might be to read. I think it’s a Swedish invention, and I don’t know if it’s in general use outside of Scandinavia. Anyway, it’s a simple function of the number of words between full stops and of the number of long words, words consisting of more than six letters. It’s normally thought that if the lix-index goes above 45, the text would be rather difficult to read for most people. When it goes above 85, the text is thought to be almost unreadable. In the Gor books, it’s not unusual for the lix-index of individual statements to go well above 100. It’s exactly these kind of statements that I struggled with long ago in Kota Kinabalu. It’s my firm intention not to divide such statements into more readable ones by rewriting them into shorter statements, by adding more full stops. This would ruin Norman’s style, and it’s my intention to keep as close to this style as possible, even if it’s sometimes rather awkward. The intention is not to make an “easy-reader” version of his books, but a Danish version.

I have decided not to translate the words that Tarl, the supposed writer of the English manuscripts, does not translate from “Gorean,” while I of course translate names like Pumpkin or Turnip into the relevant Danish words (Græskar and Majroe, in these cases). But some of the “Gorean” words do have a well understood, but quite different, meaning in Danish. Examples are tal, urt, and ost, meaning speak, herb, and cheese in Danish. Such would be rather confusing in a Danish text, so I have decided spell them another way, adding silent or mute h’s so they become tahl, urth, and osth in “Danish Gorean.”

TGV: How are you storing your translated passages?

Georg: I’m primarily storing them in Word format on my hard disk, with backup copies on a secondary hard disk and burned on CDs, too.

As the layout is dependent on the reading version of Word to have the same Danish hyphenation program as the one I use, I don’t see this as the final storage format. I rather intend to use the PDF format, although that seems to result in larger files. It’s my belief that the PDF format is rather similar to some e-book formats, so the conversion should be rather easy to make without loosing the layout format in the process.

TGV: So, what are your word and character stats so far?

Georg: So far, I have translated around 2,452,200 English words, consisting of around 13,277,900 characters, into around 2,359,500 Danish words, consisting of around 13,345,600 characters (not including Time Slave).

We wish Georg the very best in his continued effort to extend the fandom readership of the books, and our hope is that one day the translations will become legally available as e-books. He deserves a hearty round of applause!