"When the PR guy and his silly girlfriend went off to dance around the Midsummer pole in front of the general store on the other side of the island, he stayed behind with his herring and his aquavit in the cockpit of the M-30, shooting the breeze with his old school pal."
I know it's nitpicky (yes, like the "criteria" thing...you may be noticing a pattern by now), but while reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo I'm hearing in my head the voice of the Swedish Chef. Somehow the translation manages to be loopy and dorky all at once, like my onetime German Lit professor who regaled us with a Book of Boners (apparently in, like, 1928, "boner" was slang for a joke or pun).
The silver lining is that, if I am complaining about a book, it means I am reading a book. This was my end-of-robotics-season gift to myself. And a book goofily translated into Euro-English is still better than just about anything I can think of.
By the second book in the trilogy, Reg Keeland the Goofy Translator is forgiven. He can say things like, "Salander felt like a bag of bananas that had been left too long in the sun" and I don't even flinch.
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