I see your point, agree in principle and definitely feel the same way about the main work. In this special case, though, I'd like to point out that this does not concern the main work, that it is a minimal alteration, and that it would actually be a tiny improvement from the point of view of most readers (who would otherwise be confused by a joke which they can't understand due to cultural reasons.) Note that I agree that it would objectively be a deterioration of the whole work – our disagreement simply concerns the question, how (or whether) one should weigh up objective quality vs. subjective impression of readers.
That being said, I just thought of a way to explain the joke without being too “in-your-face” about it: Just leave “PANCAKES!” in the text, the way it is, and add something like “So … that were references to politics, American restaurant chains, Dune and Star Trek.” after the end of the chapter. (Each including the appropriate Wikipedia link.) How do you feel about this option?
I think I would much prefer a translation which found some equivalent of the "House X" construction, and used that consistently to translate the "pancake", "pickled" etc. jokes - even if it ended up using something other than literally pancakes and fruit preserves.
So for instance "Haus der Wirtschaft" and "Haus des Lehrers" would yield non-slavish equivalents but a German reader might recognize both of them as being names of well-known (?) landmarks in German towns. It is this sense of familiarity that cons...
We're currently translating chapter 11 into German. It's going along fine, but
is still puzzling us. No dictionary entries, no HPMoR-unrelated search hits, nothing…
Is this some kind of dadaist joke by Eliezer? Or are we missing something?