User talk:GCU NervousEnergy

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Hello, GCU NervousEnergy, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} after the question on your talk page. Again, welcome! --Guinnog 20:16, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Iain Banks auf deutsch

Hi Michael. I was interested in the work you were doing on the Iain Banks novels on :de. In the Culture novels template, you have included "A Gift from the Culture" (although it is currently unwritten), but not the original Culture story "The State of the Art". Why is that? Do you plan to include it in the template?

I am delighted to see someone extending :de's coverage of Banks, and if there is any way I can help, please let me know. Is Banks much read in Germany? I envy you living in Berlin, one of my favourite cities in the world. Best wishes, --Guinnog 15:46, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Hi Guinnog. "A Gift from the Culture" is the German title of the collection "The State of the Art". The standalone novella was never published here and by the german wikipedia's rules, the article has to bear the name of the book, even though the novella is what makes it significant for The Culture. So de:Ein Geschenk der Kultur is going to be a translation of The State of the Art.
As far as I can see, Iain Banks is only slowly gaining popularity in Germany, which probably owes to the sometimes mediocre (or worse) quality of the translations that are sold here. To give you an example: I read the german translation of Consider Phlebas back in the early 90's. The ideas and detail of the Culture in the book were the only thing that kept me on reading, even though the style was horrible and the plot ranged from stumbling to incomprehensible... A few years later, I picked up The State of the Art in english, which was soon followed by Use of Weapons and Consider Phlebas, this time in english. I vividly remember that it took me until the scene on the Megaship to get a feeling of dèja vu ... and all the way to the escape of the Clear Air Turbulence from the GSV Ends of Invention to even realize that I had read this book before!
This is also the reason why I'll have to wait a while for someone to turn up in the german wikipedia who owns the german version of The State of the Art because I need the titles of the individual stories in the book (which is out of print here) to do a translation of the article. (Don't worry, in a few weeks I'm going to do it anyway and keep the english titles if need be, but with the deletion craze we have going on there... *sigh*) --xGCU NervousEnergy 20:51, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
http://schoener-denken.de/blog/?p=46 has the German titles. Good luck, and keep up the good work. --Guinnog 00:32, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the link. I just got the english article imported to my german User-page. --xGCU NervousEnergy 14:26, 29 April 2007 (UTC)