Subject: Translations that have to alter details in a work
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Posted on: 2021-03-27 14:51:34 UTC

In the French translation of "Casey at the Bat", the score for each team is bumped up a run for the sake of the rhyme: «Ça n’aillait pas fort pour les joueurs de Mudville ce jour là/Juste une dernière manche à jouer, sur un compte de cinq à trois...» ("It was not going strongly for Mudville's players that day/Just one last inning to play, on a score of five to three..."). This is a change demanded by the poetry style.

Also, some translations of Aristophanes, Menander†, Plautus, and Terence alter jokes so that puns (sometimes including the double entendres) work in the local language and/or so that gags regarded in the local culture as dude-not-funny become less offensive; and the translators sometimes replace dated references with references (often anachronistic) that a contemporary audience could get. Here the changes are to ensure that the jokes still elicit laughter.

How does the PPC regard such alterations? Fan works to be judged on quality of adaptation?

† Over the last century, substantial finds of his work were discovered in Egypt, including his Δύσκολος ("Peevish Man" or "Grouch") virtually complete, a majority of his Σαμία ("Girl from Samos"), and substantial fragments of other plays.

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