1 Unfortunate Blunder Is Why The Witcher Books Arent As Popular As They Should Be

Summary The Witcher franchise, based on Andrzej Sapkowski's books, has thrived but English translations have underwhelmed fans.

Readers find the English translations mediocre, lacking wordplay and richness present in the original Polish passages, along with having grammatical errors.

The first book, "The Last Wish," seems to have suffered the most from poor translations, potentially hindering its popularity in English-speaking markets.

While The Witcher series has been a popular one for Netflix, the books on which it's based haven't been nearly as popular across the globe as they might have been thanks to one aspect being badly handled by publishers. The Witcher books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski have grown into a sprawling multimedia franchise comprised of 15 short stories, six books, a video game series, comic books, tabletop RPGs, and more. Suffice it to say, it's a wildly successful franchise, thanks largely to fans falling in love with The Witcher's characters.

Despite that success, however, there's one area in which the books have really struggled until recently. The release of the Netflix The Witcher series, now heading to season 4, has somewhat rectified this issue, but the books still haven't taken off with American audiences like they have in other countries. This sluggish adoption by English-speaking readers is all down to language.

The Witcher English Translations Are Generally Regarded As Mediocre To Pretty Bad

Translations Across Language Families Can Be Tricky

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While Reddit and other parts of the internet don't speak for the whole, the consensus among Witcher readers on forums and in the wilds of social media is that the English translations of The Witcher books are, to say the least, not great. There's always a tricky challenge in translating a book into another language, especially if the original language is quite different than the language into which it's being translated. With The Witcher's original language being Slavic-based Polish, there are bound to be some flaws in the translation to Germanic-based English.

Related The Witcher's Jaskier Name Change From The English Books Explained Although many The Witcher fans dislike how the Netflix series changed Jaskier’s name from the books, the choice actually makes plenty of sense.

That said, the English translations of The Witcher are particularly bad, suffering from notable grammar mistakes and incorrect word choices. Beyond that, readers seem to be in agreement that the English translation of The Witcher is quite wooden and robotic, stripping out much of the wordplay and richness of Sapkowski's original Polish passages. Sapkowski himself has strongly disavowed having any involvement in the English language translations, saying that the English translator "[was] polite enough, sometimes he asks me questions, sometimes he presents me with a fragment of the first page, but it is his own will – I have nothing to do with it." (via Eurogamer) In other words, don't blame him for the poor quality of the translation.

Beyond that, readers seem to be in agreement that the English translation of The Witcher is quite wooden and robotic, stripping out much of the wordplay and richness of Sapkowski's original Polish passages.

The First Witcher Book, The Last Wish, Seems To Have Suffered The Most

There Could Be A Few Reasons For This

Similar to the overall consensus about the books' English translations, most readers, particularly multilingual readers, agree that the first book in The Witcher series, The Last Wish, suffers the most from the poor Polish-to-English translation. There are likely a few reasons for this. When a book is translated, it's generally the foreign publishing company that picks up a book to sell in its own territory that does the translating into its own language. Currently, Orbit is the United States publisher of the Witcher series, having announced it had acquired the rights in 2017 the same month that Netflix announced it was making a series based on the Witcher books.

Witcher Book Release Year The Last Wish 2007 Blood of Elves 2008 Time of Contempt 2013 Baptism of Fire 2014 Sword of Destiny 2015 The Tower of the Swallow 2016 The Lady of the Lake 2017 Season of Storms 2019

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While there was some increase in demand for the books upon the announcement of the show, real demand didn't increase until the first season of the Netflix series. It could be that Orbit didn't want to commit too much to a huge initial print run, and that it wasn't as invested in the quality of its translation until it saw just how successful the show would be. Once issues with the first translation were discovered, it could be that adjustments were made for the translation of the next books in the series; of course, this is all an educated guess.

The Bad Translation May Have Held The Witcher Back From Being More Popular

It Has A Cult Following In Countries With Languages The Most Similar To Polish

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Netflix's The Witcher has undoubtedly helped with English language sales for Sapkowski's series. Still, the books have been around for years, long before the series, the first story having been published in Poland in 1986 and the first full book in 1994. The Witcher games have also been around for quite some time, with the first game in CD Projekt Red's series being released in 2007, which is, not coincidentally, when the very first English translations of The Witcher started to arrive.

Even though the English translations of The Witcher have been available for 17 years at this point, they just didn't take off as hoped, initially. It's odd considering how huge The Witcher games are and were. While there's no guarantee that video game or TV/movie adaptations will correlate to a big rise in book sales, that's usually the case. That didn't really happen with The Witcher, however, until the Netflix series, despite the books having a huge cult following in countries like their native Poland and other Eastern and Central European countries – all Slavic-speaking countries. It's hard not to think that the shoddy English translation has unfortunately held The Witcher books back from being as huge as they might have been much earlier.