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One year ago a dear friend gave my mum the movie "Hogfather" based on the same titled book written by Terry Pratchett. I love the movie version (although, the book is, of course, better), they made it quite well. And so "Hogfather" has made a place for himself in my Favorite Movies Collection.

The movie has English subtitles, but that isn't presenting any problems to me. It's even better watching movies with English subtitles instead of Croatian because if you realize that something was not nicely translated you get annoyed (well, I do, at least).

Now, to go back to the story. In my house my sister and mum both read Terry; we talk and laugh about the characters and books; I remind them how they spoiled "Feet of Clay" for me (they just had to mention the bloody ... no, not going to spoil it for anyone else). I still get angry on that subject...

Anyway, the only person who isn't joining in on our "Terry talks" is dad, who isn't reading Terry's books for a couple of reasons. One is because only a few books were translated to Croatian, two is that those books that were translated were badly translated (Death in "Mort" is, for instance, made into a woman, since in Croatian the noun "death" is of female genre. His daughter calls him "mother" through the entire book. In "Wyrd Sisters, though, Death is a guy. But, the names of Granny, Nanny and Magrat are translated.) There is a special place in Hell for that Translator. The third reason is my mum's belif that dad won't understand that kind of humor.

I wanted to see if she was right, so I started translating subtitles from "Hogfather". I have spent two whole weeks translating them, thinking of good replacements for words that they have and we don't have, going throw the dictionary, and so on. When I was done I had a feeling that I never had before. I felt as if all the blood from my body was sucked out with a hollow, tiny stick. After that feeling went away, I felt happy and proud. I did it. And, more importantly I did it GOOD. The only thing that spoiled this feeling was my mum's words: "Your dad won't get the movie".

Well, I watched it with him yesterday, and ... he didn't get it. Oh, he tried understanding it because he and mum had one of those "talks" the day before, but, all in all, he didn't get it.

Strangely, I'm not sad. I had seen how hard it is to translate (and I must point out that I was just translating; the person who wrote the English subs had written down the time and everything), and I will never ever ever again say anything bad for the loyal fans who are hard at work writing the subtitles, even if they don't do a good translation. They, at least tried. And now we have one "Hogfather" in English and one in Croatian.