eBook translator garbles War and Peace after supplanting the word ‘Kindle’ for ‘Nook’
An eBook translator who thought they’d hit upon a sly shortcut for converting a Kindle edition of War & Peace to the Nook platform has been left with egg on their face – after they employed find and replace to supplant all mention of the word ‘kindle’ with ‘nook’.
Sadly for the Nook employee this failed to take account of the verb to ‘kindle’, used extensively in the novel – resulting in Leo Tolstoy’s work being peppered with random ‘Nook’s’ and even ‘Nookd’.
Philip Howard, from Ocracoke island, North Carolina, uncovered the faux pas after picking up the eBook title for convenience after receiving a copy of the tome, he recalled: “As I was reading, I came across this sentence: ‘It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern....’ Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading.
“Some pages later I encountered the rogue word again. With my third encounter I decided to retrieve my hard cover book and find the original (well, the translated) text.
“For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: ‘It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern....’”