Nogon wrote:Having finished Pratchett's "Monstrous Regiment", I replaced it with Deon Meyer's "Kobra" as my main book. I have read 2 or 3 of Meyer's crime novels in Swedish or English translations, but this is my first one in Afrikaans. While I didn't like the other books much, I quite enjoy this one. Not for the story or the characters (which aren't better than in the other books), but for the language, or better, languages. The Afrikaans is quite easy to read, not many unguessable words, which of course is nice. However it's the frequent code switching between Afrikaans and English, which I find truely fascinating. While the plot is narrated in Afrikaans, some of the interrogations are entirely in English, or in Afrikaans, and some conversations are in a wild mixture of both.
For example (page 133):Nee, Benna. Here's an academic wat skielik 'n false passport het. How? I don't buy it. Here's dié innocent professor wat 'n hele ander Morris identity het, en hy maak sy Gmail skoner as 'n virgin se gewete? I mean, come on. Hier's en ou wat maande lank kwaai protest oor terrorists and organised crime, and than he goes suspiciously quiet? Hier's 'n middle-aged bok met 'n mooi jong blaartjie, but what can he offer her?
Fascinating, isn't it? This language switching is unfortunately lost in translations. I have read several books in Afrikaans, but not encountered such an amount of English in any of them. There there were some English phrases, exclamations or swearing, but no whole sentences and definitely not entire conversations.
That is really cool. I once wrote a sort of short story kind of like that, but I have never seen such code switching in a real published work. Very interesting.
As for Polish, you may be pleased to discover that LibriVox has a decent number of public domain audiobooks in Polish, along with other languages. All of the works recorded are old enough to be in the public domain. This might, I suppose, make them a bit more difficult, but it has the advantage that the books should not be very hard to find online in text form as well.