In the case of Millenium, we can tell it's in large part the writer, because what you mentionned happens to be a point many reviews worldwide have raised. Here they spoke of some flaws common to first novels, e.g. that the pacing was a bit uneven and the beginning and end were too slow. They spoke of Millenium as a page-turner that occasionally got off track for a while.


Scandinavian thrillers have long been extremely popular on the French markets, and reputedly the French translators of Norwegian and Swedish are quite good. The most common complaint we get locally about the French translations from Norwegian or Swedish is that many French are really not that good with everything related to winter. It may not be so bad for the other French, but their winter vocabulary is far more limited (and different) than the French Canadians', and they have little understanding of harsher winters, details like the many states and feels of snow and the specialized equipment and clothing we use (this must vary a great deal depending on where they live in France, though). That's true with Millenium - so Swedes living here and invited to comment the novels on radio shows were saying. They said the way Swedes experience and talk of winter is much closer to the way Canadians (French or Anglo) speak of winter, and pretty much everything about it in Millenium got translated a bit off, as if the French translator had no experience of a real winter. Which is odd, because the book was translated by a Swedish woman and a French guy... There was that they spoke of, and the social stuff.

By and large, that's far more likely the sort of problem you might encounter in the American translation as well, if the translator is not someone who has lived in Sweden who has a vast enough experience of the country. It's far more rarely problems with the language itself, or at least you won't be able to tell anyway. Translation won't make the beginning of a book feel slow if it's fast paced or anything like that, though!

What's particularly different for an American is the social and political systems. The programs, the services and the whole culture behind them, like the way people feel about it. They're terribly different from everything in the US (in comparison, Canadians and I'm sure Scandinavians too must read quite a bit to begin to understand the various POVs in the health care debate in the US, it's all most odd to us), and Larsson was writing for Swedes and made no particular effort to explain much of anything. Not sure how it comes off in the American translation. We're somewhat familiar with the great lines here, our systems are far more comparable. I found the way the French translator chose to describe it in Millenium (not translating some acronyms instead of expanding them literally in French in a footnote, or putting footnotes giving French equivalents to this or that unit of police, agency or social program that helped a Canadian not one bit) was somewhat more confusing than usual in Swedish novels. I often had to rely on knowledge of stuff I had from reading the like of Menkell to puzzle it out.

My experience of translations is limited. I used to read a lot of translations as a kid, before my English got good enough for me to read almost exclusively the originals. I've spent a lot of time as a young adult re reading in English novels I had read in French translation. Let's say I grew to dislike and distrust translations, for the most part, especially American novels as I'm a North American, extremely familiar with American culture, especially the east coast, and by and large I find that European translators suck massively at understanding the cultural elements properly and their translations are full of very annoying cultural mistakes. New England isn't supposed to feel massively different from Québec where I live - I've went there, I know people from there and I know this - and yet daily life in New England (or NYC, or Boston) often feel very off in translations of even high profile writers like John Irving or Stephen King. They don't get details like our roads, our shopping habits (some translators fairly obviously have never set foot in a Wal-Mart!), TV, the fast food and most of all the sports. I remember in particular small league baseball scenes in a John Irving book that got so butchered I failed to recognize the game until it got named! They called bases goals and the names they gave to positions I had never heard in my life, and so on. It came off as a kind of hybrid of European foot and hockey....

Quality of translation is extremely uneven and there doesn't seem to be any "rule" to tell you what to expect. Big novels you expect the publisher to have a lot of money to translate will have an horrible translation, while a low-key novel will have a very good one, and the next time it's the opposite...

JK Rowling's translations in French are at best average, and the little I've read myself I'd describe as horrible, her whole typical britishness got washed away.

Over the years I've look at a few translations of French writers for Anglo friends. On the whole, I was rather unimpressed. Some were so poor (eg: Quenault, Vian) I didn't really see why people bothered to read them at all. I certainly understood why writers like this were little known by anglophones.

I don't read a lot of American translations, not in languages I know enough about to compare with the original anyway, but according to our bilingual reviewers quality of translation is highly uneven in the USA as well. I don't know how much of this is true, but we often hear that it's difficult and expensive to find excellent translators for some languages in the US, and that publishers tend to cut corners short and usually don't have on staff the skilled editorial personel who can control the quality of the translations they get (they just edit the English), as publishers in Europe, where the markets for foreign works is larger, have (in France in particular, publishers tend to specialize in works from specific countries or regions. In the US I notice it's often the usual big general publishers that release translated works).


Occasionally, our reviewers will recommend that we read the American translation of a novel over the French one (of something written in a third language) but as often they warn us no to, because the English translation is not very good (why read in English a German or Spanish novel instead of reading it in our native French? Because the French books can often be 30-40% more expensive...). I don't have enough Spanish to tell, but for having read some of his books in both English and French and the rest in either, I can tell that the books of someone like Arturo Pérez Reverte feel very differently in English and French. He reads much better in French, but I don't know if it's the better translation or not. I also usually prefer French translations of Japanese novels over the American ones too. Again, I have no idea if the French or English translation is the better one, I just know the book feels smoother in French (French translators of Japanese also tend to translate more the casual words that English translators will leave untranslated. E.g: in English they'll speak of mochi when in French they'll say rice cake, or they'll use geta instead of sandals. Using the Japanese words when it's not necessary adds a whole artificial layer of exotism to daily life stuff you shouldn't feel while reading a Japanese novelist. It's not a travel guide).

Anyway, translations are always at best a mixed bag, and occasionally pure horror stories. Reading the original translations of Milan Kundera versus his own translations years later was deeply shocking. These were not at all the same novels. Not at all. Same for Dostoyevsky. His original translator found his style raw, harsh and poor and he made a proper Zola or Stendhal out of him. A few jaws dropped when a scholar finally translated the novels in a far more faithful way. It's decades and decades of French scholarship on this writer that went down the drain. And I have the very bad feeling this happens far more often than we believe, in all language. Many, many works have been translated only once, and very long ago, and the accuracy of the translations have never been reassessed.