To be fair, Mondadori is in the middle of effing nowhere on the outskirts of Milan. The normal way of getting there is to catch a shuttle bus near the city center.
But the rest of it sounds a) more than a little overdone, and therefore b) perhaps publicist-made to sound Dan-Brown conspiracy-like?
Somehow I'm thinking of the satisfaction Winston Smith derived from his work in the Ministry of Truth. A bit hyperbolic, I confess, but you know there were moments when these translators, doing their dull frantic business, took a moment to appreciate their own cleverness at capturing a turn of phrase, idiom, or verbal tic.
Twice I tried to read "The DaVinci Code" and could NOT get even to page five, the writing was SO terrible. And speaking of Winston (Groom), "1942" was also really, really bad. Neither writer, their (inexplicable--to me, at least) "success" notwithstanding, has interested me in the slightest since.
Hmmm, 6 languages, 11 translators. Wonder how they divvied them up?
Here's my guess:
French: 3, because French.
German: 2, one to reduce the overall document size caused by huge compound nouns.
Spanish: 1
Catalan: 2, because isn't it trickier than Spanish?
Italian: 1
Portuguese: 2 (see Catalan, or maybe they loaned him to the Frenchies for clerical tasks)
@4: As a former interpreter and occasional translator, I can assure you that you're absolutely correct. Monolinguists don't often realize that there's a good deal of art that goes into the science of translation. It's not like a translator's brain is a giant dictionary with one-to-one correlations for everything; neither language nor the human brain work like that.
But the rest of it sounds a) more than a little overdone, and therefore b) perhaps publicist-made to sound Dan-Brown conspiracy-like?
Here's my guess:
French: 3, because French.
German: 2, one to reduce the overall document size caused by huge compound nouns.
Spanish: 1
Catalan: 2, because isn't it trickier than Spanish?
Italian: 1
Portuguese: 2 (see Catalan, or maybe they loaned him to the Frenchies for clerical tasks)
Total: 11