#translatorposting

It's 2026. You're a nerd with an internet connection. Your girlfriend (yes, nerds have girlfriends now, if they too are girls) is resarching Drow Lore to write some fanfiction about Minthara Baenre, star of the 2023 Game of the Year Baldur's Gate 3. This leads you to do some idle reading of Drow Lore, which brings you to a wiki page about R. A. Salvatore, author of the Drizzt novels and Drow Lore Guy Extraordinaire. You skim his page, wondering what kind of sick life he must lead to have come up with stuff like the infamous violent pregancy orgasms. He seems like a pretty normal guy actually. And due to your day job, this is what catches your eye:

The books have been translated into Yiddish? No disrespect to the מאַמע־לשון‎, but... why? Yiddish has a tenth of the speakers of the next smallest language (Finnish) and would not provide a very large market for the books. D&D itself only received a Yiddish translation - done by a fan and free to download - in 2023, and it would be really bizarre to translate the books before translating the game. Some brief google searches involving "forgotten realms yiddish translation" and similar terms in both English and my poor attempt at Yiddish yielded no results except the impressive fanlation project linked here.

My first impulse was that someone had vandalized the article and added a language to the list that would be, I don't know, funny to have translated it into?

After creating a forgottenrealms.fandom.com account so I could view the page history, I determined that Yiddish was not a vandalization of the original article, but rather part of the original full article dating back to 2005 (its second edit, the first having been the creation of that intial stub for R. A. Salvatore):

Eagle-eyed viewers might notice one language is missing: Hebrew, which quite famously provides the alphabet for Yiddish. And some of the drow books HAVE been translated into Hebrew. At some point, someone edited the article to include this fact - but didn't stop to question a Yiddish translation. My new theory is that someone in the information chain, whether that be the original editor or one of their sources, saw one of the Hebrew covers and mis-identified it as Yiddish. Then, when someone who knew what language it actually was went to rectify the mistake, they only added Hebrew and did not delete Yiddish.

Will I edit the R. A. Salvatore article with my freshly-baked account to correct this misinformation? Maybe. Could I bring it up on the talk page or add some citations for the translations that actually exist? I could. Will I do that? Probably not as I am likely to forget this post the instant I post it.

If you have any leads on or have written a Yiddish translation of The Crystal Shard, The Dark Elf Trilogy, or any other of Salvatore's works, please feel free to contact me here or on Forgotten Realms Wiki @DrowInvestigativeJournalist.