My short story, “Snares of Satan,” is now on this site in German.
“Reconstructing the original German” of the story was an interesting exercise, since my German is far from fluent. It’s a manual translation, but I made heavy use of these online tools:
- LEO German-English dictionary
- Google Translate — but only to get suggestions for translating phrases!
- LanguageTool grammar checker; free registration required
The story includes a couple of historical quotations, and for those I really used the original German, though with modern spelling.
The process went something like this:
- Do the translation with the help of LEO and Google.
- Review it with LanguageTool and make corrections.
- Read it aloud and make more corrections.
- Read it to my German conversational group at the Portsmouth library and notice a few more issues.
- Go home and fix those issues.
- Paste it to WordPress, noticing and fixing some more things.
- Nervously click “Publish.”
It’s not as if anyone would pay me money to do German translations, though I recently got an email asking if I was interested in such a gig. I declined, pleading insufficient skills.