Dave Dröge

The Game Changer takes place in the Netherlands and I expect was originally written in Dutch. I have to say I would bet a lot of money that the manuscript I received for review was just run through a translation program and then sent to me. There was no obvious intent to actually edit it into English. While this can work for small documents and emails etc. it definitely does not work for novels. I agree it was a pretty impressive translation job and better than google translate, but it still left a huge amount to be desired.

The first obvious problem are idioms. All languages have them, and many have things that mean the same thing. ‘Du hast einen vogel auf dem Kopf’ is roughly equivalent to ‘you are nuts!’. But a direct translation is ‘you have a bird in your head’. Another problem is that German, Dutch, French, Spanish etc. put verbs often at the end of a sentence. While this can work in intended situations, such as when Yoda speaks, it can be very disorienting for it to be constant. Especially when used in a ‘joke’ or being sarcastic. It completely changes the whole tone of the previous sentence(s) and you have to read it again.

There are added words, missing words, and plenty of just plain wrong words scattered throughout this manuscript. Certain words are very consistently misused ‘live’ instead of ‘life’ is very common. Several other words use a ‘v’ instead of an ‘f’ and have an even stranger effect on the story because they are not as closely related.

Here is the story as I understand it. The main character, Henk, is having some issues, his wife has fairly recently left him for another woman, and is living in a warmer country with her. His daughter got him to concede to let her take a year off before going to University (to become a medical Dr.) and the use of his art gallery for that time to do exhibitions. He seems to be obsessed with her art and how she is living her life and the people she hangs around, especially the men.

I thought he was dealing with some legal issues with his businesses and then someone robbed him and the police seem to think he had something to do with it. He hired a private investigator who seems to have some magic software that can do anything to spy and track people. And Henk seems to spend a LOT of time wandering around Rotterdam incognito for no real reason I can understand (and gets mugged frequently). He also has an employee/business partner? Cor, who seems to always be thinking about ‘doing the right thing’ and working hard to earn his paycheck. Honestly, he makes less sense than anyone else in the book to me.

This book (according to the jacket and other reviews) is supposed to be a humorous book, but it didn’t translate at all to English, for me at least. Most of the time I spend trying to understand what the hell is going on. Even cutting scenes from one person to another, or just to a new location are often not well delineated and leave me confused. Often I feel like I did way back in middle school when I tried reading a Robert Ludlum book, lots of work to get just a little understanding. With the language that comes through the translation, I do suspect this would be a pretty good and interesting book in it’s native language (if you read it) and might be worth it if it had a real translator/editor work it over for an English reading audience.… (más)