Discussion Main / Uberwald

No, German aristocrats were pretty non-existent in most parts of the Eastern Europe. The association of the German with Uberwald comes from the fact, that Transilvania, popularized by the seminal Bram Stoker's novel was a part of Austro-Hungarian Empire, where a large part of nobility (and virtually all _ruling_ nobility) was of Germanic origin. And that's dead center of Europe. Anything East was Russian Empire, where German-speaking people were pretty scarce.

"Überwald" as translation for Transsylvania... I'm from Austria. I'd much rather translate it as "Hinterwald", which MIGHT actually be where the term derived (pure speculation on my part). "Überwald" is more like Overwood, not Transwood.

There was a lot of arguing under the entry for Girl Genius. None of it really looked relevant to the page, but I figured I'd post it here in case somebody felt like re-adding it in a non-Nattery fashion:

• The castle and town Sturmhalten is presumably a mis-translation by the authors of the English Stormhold. Unfortunately the authors did not look in a dictionary, or looked up the wrong entry, because they confused the noun "(strong)hold", meaning a keep, fortress or castle, with the verb "to hold". So they arrived at "storm = sturm" and "to hold = halten", when the correct translation into German would have yielded Sturmfestung or, for a more archaic feeling, Sturmfeste. * sigh*
  • It could be a mistranslation... or perhaps they could actually mean "to hold the storm", as in to hold the power of lightning in your Sparky hand. Wouldn't surprise me either way.
    • Considering that the distinguishing feature of the town's keep is a lightning moat...
  • It could also mean "we hold the storm" or "we keep the storm" since halten is used as the conjugation for the plural first person. This makes sense given Tarvek's revelation that he is the lineal descendant of the Storm King and the current Storm King. The family's name, "Sturmvoraus", likewise means "ahead of the storm".
  • And, to take a third alternate, it could mean "to/we hold the storm" in the sense that it holds the Sturmvoraus family and their "stormy" relations-they're noted to be a particularly virulent and venomous family, and giving them a little power struggle to nurse keeps them out of everyone else's hair. Regardless of how you interpret the name, Sturmhalten certainly captures the spirit of the trope, which in Discworld is acknowledged as being, politically speaking, "not so much a country as an argument."