For curiosity sake, anyone know or have any guesses what the longest (word count) trek novel is? I think Day of the Vipers is the longest one I own. The font seems on the smaller side.
Crucible: McCoy - Providence of Shadows is 640 pages long with very small font. My guess is that is the longest star trek novel?
^ As far as I know, that honor (or is it ignominy?) belongs to Provenance of Shadows, which clocked in at about 230,000 words. If I recall correctly, Twilight weighed in at a mere 200,000 words. I guess I had a lot to say....
I had a feeling Providence of Shadows was going to be hard to beat. Can't wait till May so I can finally get the omnibus and give it a go.
And how much longer will it be in the revised hardback edition? Or will we need excess baggage allowance if we take it on flights? Paul
Which of course raises the question of when we can expect another one of this size, just to counterbalance our bookshelfs, before they turn over on one side....
How does the translation work? Based on what you are saying they do not translate it word for word??? Who decides what gets deleted?
While I don't know much about Czech, I think the change in word length is a function of a language's grammatical requirements, not of editing. For instance, in the present tense, Russian does not use the verb "to be". I could correctly introduce myself on this board by saying "Ya Nerys Ghemor." It sounds wrong in English, but is perfectly correct Russian grammar. (Heck, the same thing occurs in my version of the Cardassian language: all I would need to say is "Nerys Ghemor edek," to say "I am Nerys Ghemor".) Right there you've got a four-word sentence going down to three in the translation. I believe Czech, like Russian, also has no words for "the" or "a." Between those two features, I suspect you can account for most of the drop in the word count. Other languages, like Spanish, require MORE words to express a concept than English does. For instance, there is no " 's ", requiring possession to be expressed differently. You could say "Nerys' cat" in English, but it would have to be "la gata de Nerys" in Spanish. (And Spanish also tends to include the article in more places than English would, further beefing up the word count.)
^^And there are other reasons besides that why a word-for-word translation would never work. Different languages use different structures and different idioms, and they don't always have words that mean exactly what a given word in another language means. A good translation captures the sense, rhythm, and flavor of a text rather than trying to render every word literally.
What have I started?? If this thread stays open long enougn, KRAD will be here with a list of the ten longest books, and probably the ten shortest just because. *starts stopwatch*
Weirdly I don't remember Twilight being that long when I read it... I wasn't really 'in' to Trek Lit back then - just New Frontier and the DS9 relaunch. I remember finishing off the the last two Mission Gamma books a lot quicker but was never really concious of the length. Now I notice these things. And am amused by stuff like The Good That Men Do having 100 more pages than Greater Than The Sum, but the latter being the thicker book....
I believe Nerys Ghemor and Christopher have already given you perfect answers. Nobody wants to "delete" anything, and nobody deletes anything (well, most of the time, anyway...). It's just that Czech generaly uses a little bit longer, but fewer words than English (again, most of the time, not always). Think about idioms, for example - do you think that a word-to-word translation of... "from frying pan to fire" would mean anything in Czech? Or "stygian darkness"... OK, that actually does, but I couldn't resist using it. And it's not only idioms, it's pretty much anything, aside from simple sentences like "I am your father!". But I guarantee you that, if the translation is done well - that is, not word-to-word - the readers love the book as much as you do.
Thanks everybody, I was not thinking properly when I asked. It makes sense now that you have explained it to me.