Wednesday 29 July 2020

My story was translated and narrated by a German creepypasta Youtuber?!

Last December, I wrote a story called Moult and posted it on the Creepypasta Wiki. The next day, somebody commented on it. To this day, it's the only comment on the story, a clear indicator that very few people have even read it.

...but last night, I found out that some dude had translated it into German and narrated it on his Youtube channel called Hellscythe German Creepypasta!😳 The video has over 30,000 views and over a thousand likes, which is absolutely baffling to me since, you know, the original story itself has probably been read only a dozen or so times. So, one of those few people who read it then put in the effort to translate it, narrate it and upload it to Youtube. He even included a link to the story in the video description, which I've heard is something a lot of creepypasta narrators on Youtube don't do. You can't imagine how happy this makes me.😊

Contrary to popular belief what a handful of people have assumed, I don't speak German (I only know a couple of words and very basic grammar), so I can't tell whether the translation is faithful or if something was changed, but I'd at least like to assume that the only changes, if any, would be ones that make sense in the context of translation; I know translating stuff can be difficult and time-consuming, and I'm also aware my writing style is a bit wonky at times.

If one of the three(?) people reading this blog post happens to know German and has the patience to sit through the 23 minutes of German narration while simultaneously reading the original in English, I'd like to know if there are any obvious mistranslations or such. I'd be especially interested in how he handled file-virus, considering that was intended to be a mispronunciation of filovirus; I can hear the word virus in the narration, but... well, like I said, I don't understand German haha. It's about 17 minutes into the video.

Running all the comments through Google Translate, I found out that there are several people who'd like a sequel. It's something I've been considering ever since I finished the story, but now I finally got the motivation to actually start writing one. No idea when it'll be finished, but I'm off to a good start.