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Buying translated Novels? Abridged? and "The Vulcan Academy Murders" Questions

Dr Helen Noel

Dr Helen Noel

Lieutenant Commander
Red Shirt
My French copy of "The Vulcan Academy Murders" just arrived and is noticeably shorter than my English copy. The English copy has 280 pages and 35 chapters while the French copy has 221 pages and 15 chapters, but also a prologue an epilogue that appear to be the first and last English chapters.

However, my Spanish copy "The Covenant of the Crown" has 223 pages and 15 chapters and Goodreads tells me the English has 191 pages which sounds about right.

Is it common for translated Trek novels to be abridged? Someone mentioned in an old thread that this can happen because of plot lines not working in different cultures. Is there something particular about "The Vulcan Academy Murders"? Or do the French ones tend to be abridged?

Does anyone have any recommendations for where to buy old translated Trek novels in Europe? I assumed there would have been stacks on ebay but there's not many once you sift through the listings. Maybe not much of a market for them?

Lastly, off topic but does the cover of "The Vulcan Academy Murders" show a Vulcan moon that shouldn't exist? I haven't read either version yet.
 
Translating a work into a different language could make it longer or shorter due to linguistic differences even if the entire unabridged story is included. Although I tried using DeepL to translate your 53-word first paragraph into French, and it came out at 57 words, so losing 60 pages seems unlikely.


Dr Helen Noel said:
Lastly, off topic but does the cover of "The Vulcan Academy Murders" show a Vulcan moon that shouldn't exist? I haven't read either version yet.
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Both TAS: "Yesteryear" and the theatrical edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture show what appears to be an enormous moon in Vulcan's sky. To reconcile this with Spock's statement from "The Man Trap," The Vulcan Academy Murders established the "moon" as a companion planet named T'Kuht that came close once every seven years, which Diane Duane's Spock's World later respelled as T'Khut and put it in permanent close orbit (while A.C. Crispin's Sarek called it T'Rukh and said it had multiple names depending on the season). It was finally canonized as T'Khut in a screen graphic in Strange New Worlds: "Charades."
 
Christopher said:
Translating a work into a different language could make it longer or shorter due to linguistic differences even if the entire unabridged story is included. Although I tried using DeepL to translate your 53-word first paragraph into French, and it came out at 57 words, so losing 60 pages seems unlikely.
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The number of pages doesn't bother me that much and I do expect them to vary, not just because of language but also formatting, but surely the number of chapters should remain the same? I wonder if the French translator was told to cut the book down to 15 chapters and added the prologue and epilogue to try and squeeze a couple more in.

Interestingly, to make up for the missing pages, the cover of the French copy also seems to show more of the artwork that was cropped out of the English version: LINK
I'm not sure if "Boris" (his name is hidden in the work) meant so much white space to the shown though.
 
The chapters in the original novel are quite short -- 35 chapters in 278 pages (not counting the "About the Author") comes out to an average of 8 pages per chapter. On the other hand, 17 chapters in 221 pages (counting the prologue and epilogue) comes out to 13 pages per chapter on average. It stands to reason that the translator simply combined the original short chapters into longer chapters. That in itself would reduce the page count a bit, since there'd be less white space at the starts and ends of chapters. Differences in font size and format may account for the rest. As your link shows, the pages are slightly taller, so there would be more lines on each page and therefore fewer pages.
 
Christopher said:
The chapters in the original novel are quite short -- 35 chapters in 278 pages (not counting the "About the Author") comes out to an average of 8 pages per chapter. On the other hand, 17 chapters in 221 pages (counting the prologue and epilogue) comes out to 13 pages per chapter on average. It stands to reason that the translator simply combined the original short chapters into longer chapters. That in itself would reduce the page count a bit, since there'd be less white space at the starts and ends of chapters. Differences in font size and format may account for the rest. As your link shows, the pages are slightly taller, so there would be more lines on each page and therefore fewer pages.
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That makes sense!
 
I can't comment on The Vulcan Academy Murders, but it's not uncommon in literary translation to change things like the structure of chapters - often this is done to accommodate what the audience in a country is 'used to' when reading.

I've been reading the Jo Nesbø Harry Hole series in Norwegian, with the English copy alongside for reference when I don't know a word or phrase. The English versions have significantly more chapters - where the Norwegian goes into a new section within the same chapter, the English version will often just start a new chapter. It also sometimes has chapters that start and end at different points.

(The one I just read, originally written in 1998, also has a whole chunk cut out in the English translation done 15 years later, when sensibilities about how we talk about the appearance of people from South East Asia had changed somewhat.)
 
I have compared a few pages of the French translation to the English original. Chapitre X in French appears to contain chapters 20, 21 and 22 from the English original (or, as the copyright page has it, “l’americain” original.)

As far as I can tell, nothing significant from the original Chapter 20 was removed, but it was translated with great economy. Lorrah has a tendency to repeat herself a bit, and the translator (Bruno Billion) has minimized the repetition.

But there almost have to be cuts somewhere. The French text I read covered about 5 1/2 pages, and the English original covered about the same number of pages. So, there almost have to be something like 60 pages of cuts elsewhere in the book.
 
I didn't know there were any Spanish translations of Star Trek novels. There are none listed on Memory Beta or Wikipedia or the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
 
Extrocomp said:
I didn't know there were any Spanish translations of Star Trek novels. There are none listed on Memory Beta or Wikipedia or the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
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They don’t appear to be common. A Spanish translation of First Contact was listed on ebay today for about £100!

If you go on Goodreads you can see all the different translations. Very handy for tracking down specific book/language pairings: LINK
 
Dr Helen Noel said:
They don’t appear to be common. A Spanish translation of First Contact was listed on ebay today for about £100!
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It claims to be a Spanish edition of First Contact, but the picture is clearly the English audiobook. I can't find any picture of a Spanish First Contact translation, so I doubt it actually exists.

I managed to find a list of Spanish TOS novels here.
 
Extrocomp said:
It claims to be a Spanish edition of First Contact, but the picture is clearly the English audiobook. I can't find any picture of a Spanish First Contact translation, so I doubt it actually exists.

I managed to find a list of Spanish TOS novels here.
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It’s common on ebay for large booksellers to use a similar photo instead of uploading their own to save time.

It’s also listed on Amazon: LINK

Here is the ebay listing for everyone else: LINK

Goodreads doesn’t list a Spanish version but does have French, German, Italian, and Japanese versions: LINK
 
Dr Helen Noel said:
My French copy of "The Vulcan Academy Murders" just arrived and is noticeably shorter than my English copy. The English copy has 280 pages and 35 chapters while the French copy has 221 pages and 15 chapters, but also a prologue an epilogue that appear to be the first and last English chapters.

However, my Spanish copy "The Covenant of the Crown" has 223 pages and 15 chapters and Goodreads tells me the English has 191 pages which sounds about right.

Is it common for translated Trek novels to be abridged? Someone mentioned in an old thread that this can happen because of plot lines not working in different cultures. Is there something particular about "The Vulcan Academy Murders"? Or do the French ones tend to be abridged?

Does anyone have any recommendations for where to buy old translated Trek novels in Europe? I assumed there would have been stacks on ebay but there's not many once you sift through the listings. Maybe not much of a market for them?

Lastly, off topic but does the cover of "The Vulcan Academy Murders" show a Vulcan moon that shouldn't exist? I haven't read either version yet.
Click to expand...
Some of the early novels used like an 8-point font in the early novels, whereas the later novels went to like 12 font. So with “Covenant of the Crown” the foreign editions probably used a larger font. Of course some later English Trek books like the first two DS9 “Mission Gamma” books (‘Twilight’ & ‘This Gray Spirit’) used like 8 point font again because, I remember Marco Palmieri saying once that both books had been advertised to book stores at a certain number of pages, and they couldn’t go over, so in prepping the page proofs he shrunk the font size from 12 or something to an smaller font, plus he pulled the chapter starts up to right after the previous chapter so there was no white section (the later omnibus “These Haunted Seas” he or whoever was in charge, was able to enlarge the font and make the chapters more normal). I think I have seen the German translations divide both books into 2 volumes so that they could publish them with a larger font, but the German translations appeared years later, so they knew what they were getting.
 
Dr Helen Noel said:
Interestingly, to make up for the missing pages, the cover of the French copy also seems to show more of the artwork that was cropped out of the English version: LINK
I'm not sure if "Boris" (his name is hidden in the work) meant so much white space to the shown though.
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"Boris" is Boris Vallejo, who did the covers for quite a few early Star Trek novels. Here's his website.

If by "white space" you mean the dead areas where Spock and the creature aren't visible, every cover artist builds those into their compositions, so that there's space for the titles, author credits & such. The final placement of those text elements is done by the publisher & can vary from country to country. I'd imagine it's just easiest to send the foreign publishers a copy of the cover art and let them apply the text themselves.
 
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