Mein Kampf. I recommend the Ford translation. Whether you want to take a stand for or against fascism you should really read that book first. It could change your mind.
I'm seeing bad things when i look it up, only thing on wikipedia is in a talk page saying it's not a valid source. And this amazon review:
TL;DR Ford translation is a fraud grift inaccurate translation made to part neo-nazis from their money.
I am a historian. I came upon some controversies surrounding Michael Ford's translation lately. In particular, the following dismissive evaluation by Thomas Dalton:
"Ford has no discernible credentials, no publishing record, nor any documented history with such academic works. His ‘in text’ notes are awkward and distracting. The book includes many amateurish and cartoonish ‘photos.’ There is no index. And his so-called publishing house, Elite Minds, appears to be some kind of environmental group that focuses on the ecology of sharks, of all things."
After looking through the first 3 pages of the online "A Translation Controversy" document, I became intrigued; "Dalton" is a well known Nazi revisionist who had questioned the veracity of the Holocaust in various publications, but evidently, Ford himself is highly sympathetic to Hitler. Nazi sympathizers rarely disparage other Nazi sympathizers.
Reading through the text, I was quickly able to arrive at one conclusion at the minimum: Ford's grasp of standard English is poor, as is evident by the frequent (and often shocking) mistakes on subject-verb agreement throughout the text. However, these mistakes do not resemble the quirks of a native German speaker who learned English as a second language. Instead, Mr. "Ford" appears to be an American who had not received enough education to write with proper English grammar. At this point, I became very much intrigued.
After going through nearly all of the 200-page "Mein Kampf, a Translation Controversy" pdf, it became evident to me that this "translation" was not merely a poor amateur effort, but is an outright ruse, and an attempt at defrauding casual non-German readers of their money.
(1) From the outset, Ford was by his own admission attempting to rewrite some of the earlier English translations to make them "accessible". This effort itself might be commendable, were it not for the fact that his grammatical errors, confused typesetting, and arbitrary modifications and additions of juvenile "explanations" to basic terms render his translation as essentially illegible.
In many cases, Ford outright copies half of one English translation, half of another English translation, then pieces them together (usually in an incoherent way - he often fails to understand the English translations themselves) - and the only notable change Ford made was to remove or modify one or two words that he found "difficult" to understand. This effort becomes absurd and comical in the following instance:
- Murphy translation: For the authority of the State cannot be based on the babbling that goes on in Parliament or in the provincial diets and not upon laws made to protect the State
- Ford "translation": Strength depends on the universal confidence that can be placed in the administration of a commonwealth and not on the babbling in Parliaments or legislative assemblies(Landtags in some German states), or on laws to protect the State
Ford justifies the alteration of "diet" to "legislative assemblies" with this note: "the meaning is not used in common English in this way which makes his translation confusing." Obviously, most English speakers know the alternative meaning of the word "Diet", but Ford apparently was confused.
There were some parts where Ford's awful grasp of the English language was so jarring that I had to momentarily pause to take a sip of alcohol before continuing on, but in the spirit of being as objective as possible, and in light of evidence that there's more concerning bullshit going on here, I'll refrain from further comments on the awful prose.
The more crucial problem is that, eventually, it becomes clear that Ford does not have the ability to translate, or even read, the original German. While occasional inaccuracies in translation could be overlooked as mistakes, there are several damning examples which show that Ford was not actually referring to the German text at all, but was *solely* relying on other English translations to make a guess as to the original meaning. In one revealing instance, two of the existing English translations differed in that one contained an extra second sentence in a specific paragraph ("who among our bourgeoisie..."). This was, as I found out, due to a revision in the German texts; this sentence existed in the 1926 edition, but was omitted in the 1930 edition. Ford does not realize this; he goes on to quote the 1930 German text as the "original text"; but nonetheless includes an awkward and incorrect translation of the removed sentence. He proceeds to compare the 2nd sentence in RH, an earlier English translation (which would be the 2nd sentence of the 1926 German text) with the 2nd sentence in Manheim, a later English translation (which would be the 3rd sentence of the 1926 German text). He mistakenly interprets the phrase "hypocritical rabble" of the latter English translation as being the equivalent translation for "bourgeois" in the earlier translation, and argues that this would be a poor translation. Of course it is - because it wasn't the sentence he was thinking of. "hypocritical rabble" actually corresponded to "allerverlogensten Pack" in German, which was translated as "mendacious pack" in the RH translation. It's apparent that Ford did not make this mental connection because he did not know the meaning of "mendacious".
This happens again and again in the rest of Ford's "translation"; in trying to pretend he had created an original translation, he attempted to piece together entire lines from the 3-4 existing English translations, but then due to his obviously limited vocabulary, he would in fact repeat several words that had corresponded to the same word in the original German text, or make other absurd and nonsensical errors.
Let me give several other examples just to illustrate how truly awful this attempt is. In page 77 of the "A Translation Controversy" pamphlet; in explaining his translation of "einer Elster redliche Eigentumsbegriffe" ("a magpie's heartfelt conception of property"), Ford directly copies several definitions for the word "Elster" from an online site on German idioms (I discovered this by Googling his awkward quotes - note that he did this without attribution) -- and ended up copying the definition for a different phrase, "geschwätzig wie eine Elster sein" (to chatter like a magpie). In the online site, this phrase was used as an example of a *different* idiom in which the word "Elster" could be used; in this instance, it was obviously irrelevant, but Ford was apparently limited enough in his comprehension of both German and English that he ended up including this definition.
(2) It's not clear if Ford even has the correct original text at all. Ford presented multiple blockquotes of the original text with hyphenation in incorrect places - suggesting that he merely scanned or copied the paragraphs from a pdf file. Evidently, he was able to remove most of the spurious hyphens on his own, but lacked the comprehension of German to remove a number of those, e.g.
(i) "allerver-logensten", where aller- and -sten are respectively the superlative prefix and suffix for "verlogen";
(ii) "erkann- ten", in which "erkannten" would be the third-person plural past tense of "erkennen", where er- is the prefix (roughly meaning "to" or "for"), and "-kennen" is cognate with the English "know";
(iii) "die-ser", which should clearly be one word "dieser", cognate to English "these".
Indeed, one particular paragraph of "original German" even contained numerous words that are clearly non-existent:
- "nichtntioneion", which should be "nicht";
- "Raubben", which should be "haben";
Apart from the above error-filled paragraph, there were innumerable cases of minor typesetting errors where an "n" was mysteriously transformed into an "r" or "s". These errors suggest, again, that Ford had used some type of page scanning tool to obtain excerpts of German texts, and that he lacked the basic grasp of German to notice these obvious errors.
(3) Last, but not least, it becomes evident that Ford lacks a basic knowledge of the historical context when he makes his amateur attempts at "explaining" the text. In one glaring example, Ford refers to "Fourteen Points" as "a plan for the division of European territories". While it is defensible in some situations to mention the context of some historical reference in a footnote, Ford's grasp of modern European history seems barely on par with a U.S. high-school student, and many of the definitions or statements he inserts are, as I found out, lifted from Wikipedia and other sites with no attribution; a large proportion of them are flat out incorrect when applied to the text. Indeed, in one awkwardly inserted explanation, he refers to a town of "Frankfurter", a mistake that can be avoided by a rudimentary knowledge of either German geography or the German language.
To give him the very little credit that he deserves, his skill at prowling the Internet for obscure references seems to have allowed him to make a couple of correct translations where other texts have failed; but this is dwarfed by the sheer number of mistakes that are made whenever a slight bit of academic vocabulary appears; he translates "Ought Germany be a federalist or unitary state?" into "Should Germany be a confederation of states or one national central government?". He justifies the latter (nonsensical) statement as the superior translation because he apparently did not find the phrases "federalist state" or "unitary state" to be comprehensible, even though both are well-defined concepts that are taught in introductory social science around the world. Ford then describes the political ideal for "one national central government" as "nationalism", at which point I stopped reading.
-- final words: --
This publication, for the most part, does not seem to have gained much attention beyond small American communities of Nazi sympathizers. As such, I am not particularly motivated in putting in more work to explain why the "translation" is fraudulent. The fringe parts of the Internet can read whatever translation they deem appropriate, for all I care.
However, I have noticed a few instances in recent years whereupon actual academics in history or in Communication departments had cited this "translation", likely without reading it. Hopefully, this review will help prevent similar blunders by future scholars.
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How do you respond to these allegations? It'd be cool if you could link me to something more substantive than
>believing wikipedia
>""historian""
>IM DEBOOOONKING
>trust the science!!
>lol lmao
