You may recall I posted about my desire to make at least some of my scribbles available in other languages, firstly in German.

Rather than go pell mell into it I started with a sample chapter and sent it to someone with a good understanding of English as well as being a native German speaker. Now I know it's not perfect, I expected it to need a bit of tweaking on spellings/tenses but with my limited German skills I could follow the general gist of things. but apparently it made little sense to a German.

To be honest i was somewhat disappointed and disheartened by the feedback - it's a bit of a labour of love and to be told this has me on the verge of saying 'sod it', why bother? But I want to bother, there are plenty of German speakers who struggle with written English and I'd like them to be able to read and get the proper meanings. So to that end what I propose doing is posting that chapter on here so anyone who reads German can give it a go and give me feedback, this will happen tomorrow (Wednesday).

Given a typical Gaby book runs to @ 80,000 words the project was never going to be quick and I'm not aiming for perfection! Even this single story chapter took an hour for me.

Of course if anyone wants to volunteer their energies of translating from scratch.......- but i've tried that before and those involved couldn't agree on anything!

In the meantime i'll get back to writing Gaby book 18!

Mads