35 Comments on “Das Syndrom”

1. So . . . what you going to do with it?

2. it’s also really fun to yell in a bad WWII-movie German accent. “DAS SYNDROME! SCHNELL!”

3. German translations of my favorite authors were the primary motivation to improve my English ;-).

4. I see they also changed the name of Old Man’s War to War of the Clones in Germany. Much less imaginative sounding, in my opinion.

5. Would “Roman” be the translator’s name?

6. “Roman” means “novel” in German. And “Heyne” is my German publisher.

7. That silhouette looks masculine to me. It saddens me to think the German publisher removed that lovely protagonist ambiguity.

8. Do you have a list somewhere of all the translated titles of your novels? That would be pretty cool.

9. And apparently you’re responsible for The Clone War too.

10. Gender ambiguity is a tough thing to manage in German; virtually all nouns referring to people have distinct masculine and feminine forms, so you can’t even say “the agent” without specifying the gender of the agent. Worse, the tendency in recent years in Germany is to add more such distinctions, rather than remove them. This is being done in the name of inclusivity, but to Anglophone sensibilities it feels backward.
    Anyway, a question for our host: does this publisher have the German-language rights or just the Germany rights? That is, will that same edition be hitting the shelves in Austria?

11. “Der Autor … Krieg Der Klone!” Would that mean that you were, in fact, the author of “The Clone War”? I can’t help but feel that if a certain famous sci-fi franchise, similarly named film had reached out to you the script would show vast improvement!

    Apologies if you’ve heard that joke before.

12. As German native speaker, I wouldn’t know how to translate “Lock-In” literally in any way that sounds good as a book title. “Das Syndrom” (short for Haden Sydrome) is probably the closest they could get.

    I’m half tempted to buy the German version in order to see if they managed to preserve the gender ambiguity; unfortunately the cover art and the synopsis on Amazon (which identifies Chris as male) don’t leave much room for hope…

13. Future cross-over sequel: Das Syndrom auf Das Boot…

14. I dunno, “The Syndrome” could arguably be considered a superior alternate title to “Lock In”. Kinda makes me wish you’d tag these foreign edition posts, in order to go back and look at the alternate titles easily. But, suggesting you do so makes me a total hypocrite, since I never tag anything.

15. But where is the last shooting space craft?

16. Markjreed:

    The license covers the German language in general if I recall correctly.

17. @Joseph Finn

    Chris Shane: “Mein fuhrer…I can walk!”

18. Mark J Reed -> are you asking for a specific reason, ie you know someone in Austria who’s looking for a good read? ;)

19. I just thought of the person on the cover as being a generic Hayden, not specifically Chris, but I I hadn’t even thought about the gender specific nouns and articles in German and other languages. That would make ambiguity virtually impossible, wouldn’t it? I guess they just need two editions like the English language audiobooks.

    I studied German in school, but I’ve never really used it, thus the one German sentence that comes to mind is, “Vorsicht, Carl, stoßen Sie nicht Ihr Kapf an die Lampe!”

20. My experience is that about half the time, I like the different foreign title, translated back into English, much better than mine or my English-language publisher’s. However, I have notoriously terrible taste in titles, so this may not indicate what I think it does. So I chalk it up to “They know their market.”

21. I like the title… it would be a movie I watched. However, I’m not sure how well it fits your book John. You’re the only one who can say for sure. Still.. Das Syndrom might be an excellent take on something like The Andromeda Strain ;-)

22. I still hope this book will be translated to Italian one day, so I can finally nag all of my non English speaking friends until they read it.

    On the other hand, however, and just like in German, it would be pretty much impossible to translate the gender ambiguity, since per our grammar rules, every noun is gendered, and all articles and adjectives must be gendered according to the noun they refer to.

23. “Krieg Der Klone” sounds like a good book.

24. I like the minimalist cover art.

25. So, your other book is “The Clone War” in Germany? Hope they don’t get a C&D from Disney :)

26. There was a time they were going to rename one of my books “Between Planets,” and I was all, “Uh, that’s the name of a Robert Heinlein book. Please don’t.”

27. Obviously “Das Syndrom” means “that thing where foreign language publishers change the title of your book to work better in their language”.

28. Nice cover, but I realllly miss the Laser Gun … :-D

    @ markjreed: You’ll find Heyne’s (= Random House) books in Austria and Switzerland.

29. There was a French novel by René Barjavel Le grand secret where the English translation title was The Immortals which rather gave away the secret up front.

30. I’ve been making a database of all the short stories in my apartment (because it often happens that I go “Hm, I wonder if I have any short stories by X?” and this way I don’t have to spend half an hour looking at the table of contents of every anthology and magazine here) and came across a story called “The Einstein Gun” by Pierre Gévart. The blurb noted that it was a translation, and was originally published in French as “Comment les choses se sont vraiment passés” which means approximately “How Things Actually Happened”. I think the translator improved that one.

31. My oldest is starting to learn German this year. Maybe if he studies hard I’ll buy him Krieg der Klone for his summer read (and, you know, if I have to grab Der Syndrom for myself, well, sometimes you have to sacrifice as a parent).

32. Dear folks,

    A couple of things you might not know about titles:

    1) It’s not the author’s job to come up with the final, published title for book. That’s actually Marketing’s job. Generally they will consult with the author about the title (if for no other reason than the one that came up in John’s commentary case–– often the author knows something about the field but they don’t). They’re not out to make an author unhappy; they are out to sell as many books for them as they can. Sometimes they go with the author’s title, sometimes they tweak it a little bit, sometimes they come up with an entirely different one. And, the more major and important the book/author, the more likely they are to intervene, because economic stakes are higher.

    Now, a lot of artists are dismissive, if not downright derisive, of those marketing types. When it comes to aesthetics, there is sometimes some justification for that. But, if your publisher has been making good money for you, it’s possible, just possible, that those people know what they’re doing when it comes to selling books.

    2) Titles can’t be copyrighted (at least in the US). John’s objection to having a book of his retitled Between Planets was because there was already a well-known book by that name. It wasn’t a legal objection.

    pax \ Ctein
    [ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
    ======================================
    — Ctein’s Online Gallery http://ctein.com
    — Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com
    ======================================

33. As a German I can not tell you how much it pisses me of that they do this.
    They do this with books and movies.
    Really bad is when they substitude one perfectly fine English with another totally nonsesical English title. Because WTF.

34. I like the name “DAS SYNDROM”!

35. What! They didn’t put a spaceship blasting lasers on the cover.