Read Babel by Louis Couperus in Dutch

Literal but understandable

Like all of our other Interlinear translations, we have translated words literally and individually as long as such translation is still comprehensible. See this example sentence if translated individually:

Most words are easy to understand and the sentence still makes sense. Well, except for "Hoe zij ook", which is an expression. In this case, we would translate "Hoe zij ook" together as a single unit and the rest of the sentence individually in order to make sure that we translate at the minimum unit of meaning that makes sense:

It is notable that Dutch and English are remarkably structurally close languages, and hence we have managed to stay very literal for most of the book.

Embracing cognates

Just like in our other Interlinear translations of closely related languages, we have tried to use cognate Dutch and English translations whenever possible.

For example, we translated bevrijder as freer (and not liberator), zwermden as swarmed (and not flocked), dik as thick (and not fat, corpulent or similar), grondvestte as grounded (and not basedfounded), etc.

We hope that this may help highlight the sound changes between English and Dutch and also help learners remember words.

However, we did such highlighting of cognates with the knowledge that there are also false cognates or simply situations where the meanings of words in Dutch and English have diverged too much to be useful. In those cases, we did not use cognates.

Accompanied by audio

This product is accompanied by a free Dutch audiobook. The audiobook comes as a collection of mp3 audio files, which can be downloaded and played on your computer, phone or other device.