Feeling too lazy to swing a rough translation of a book I was cataloging, I looked the book up in amazon.fr and had Google translate the description. The results are below but what does it mean?
The left is capilotade and rebuilding is valid. Some want the press center, others on the left antilibérale. But it apparently does not wish to become adult as it refuses a real Thursday dialectic between his ethics conviction and his ethics of responsibility. It should therefore be left as a lover of freedom that the liberal left and as drastic as the far left. This is not a pipe dream, because she really existed: it is the libertarian left…
Huh. I think the publisher tried to get cute when writing the back cover blurb, using jargon and colloquial phrases, which resulted in this truly bizarre translation.
Dear Publishers,
In the future, please have the courtesy to include title descriptions that are clear, concise and written with unambiguous language. Oh, and for heaven’s sake, obtain a unique ISBN with each new edition of a work!
Love, hugs, etc.,
Jenny
Brownies to the first person who comes up with two suitable LC subject headings for the description above.
Playing in Puddles 
2 replies on “Book Descriptions”
I dunno… It’s possible that the incomprehensibility of the description is due to the translation rather than the writing. Web translators turn out pretty literal word-for-word translations, and that often doesn’t wind up making a whole lot of sense in English even if it makes perfect sense in the original language. (Consider, for example, the German sentence “Was gibt es zum Abendessen?” which a human being would translate as “What’s for dinner?” and which is perfectly correct and sensible in German, but which Babelfish translates as “What gives it with dinner?”)If the publisher had provided that blurb in English, exactly like that, that would have been a different story, of course. *grin*If I were more awake I’d take a stab at what it really means; I kind of get the sense of it, but being half-asleep still I find it difficult to put my own words together to get at it. The most I can say at the moment is that it appears to be a book about politics, specifically offering some complaints about left-wing politics and proposing a “libertarian left” position as the ideal left-wing position.
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This is why I shouldn’t post when irritated. I had just spent most of the morning doing titles in Catalan (argh!) leaving me in no mood to deal with this one relatively easy French title. Luckily, sleep was invented and now I feel refreshed and ready to tackle this one.
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