When John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath' appeared in Japanese in 1948, it generated some amusement despite the grim nature of the subject because a literal translation appears, to the Japanese reader, as 'The Angry Raisins'.
Apocryphal or not, the tale neatly sums up the perils of translation, and that's why we're doing a wee competition.
OTS has already completed Scots translations of Aesop's Fables and Plato's The Republic.
Both are available to purchase as e-books:
Aesop's Fables buy.stripe.com/cN2aGJdQEgNE40w6op
Plato's Republic buy.stripe.com/fZe6qt9AoapgfJe8wy
Our next Scots translation project will be Robert Tressell's classic 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists'.
It's a pretty major undertaking and we want to do it properly, but the first hurdle is finding a good Scots version of that title.
A straight word-for-word rendition doesn't seem possible because we cannot find a Scots equivalent of 'philanthropist'.
So, that's the 'competition' - whoever comes up with a title which expresses the spirit of the original in modern Scots will win free copies of Fables and Republic, and, of course, be the first to receive a copy of 'The Raggle-taggle-Breeked Whatevers' whenever it's completed.
Was 'The Grapes of Wrath' Mistranslated as 'The Angry Raisins'? | Snopes.com
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