Yesterday, I accidentally came across the translation into Dutch of Pinker’s The Sense of Style in a bookshop here in The Hague. Amazing, an English style-cum-usage guide translated into Dutch. A much earlier similar attempt, the translation of Lynne Truss’s Eats Shoots and Leaves into Dutch, under the title Eten, Vuren en Beuken, by Wim Daniëls, fell quite flat. It was a peculiar mix of English and Dutch, that to my mind didn’t quite seem to work. This same criticism is also levelled at the Pinker translation by a reviewer for the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, though, awarding the book three stars (out of five), the author is still fairly positive about the book’s general message. It’ll be interesting to see how well this translation is going to do.