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 feel very strongly about this, because I have huge amounts of experience reading bad translations of Sci-Fi authors to French, to the point that at an early age I taught myself English out of the originals just so I could enjoy non-sabotaged versions of these works I loved so much.

So in other words... those translators made your life much better?

ADBOC. The point, when you are a translator, is to translate. The criterion for "best" includes how close the translation is to the original. And cleverness is something that you brought up out of the blue, a non sequitur in the context - I reject (and resent) the implication that I approve of showing off.

Someone whose book I translated once told me: "It's my name that will be on the cover, so your job is to write what I would have written if I'd been French." Another way to say this is: if all you care about is how funny the jokes are, write your own damn jokes (pardon my French).

That doesn't mean that a translation of "PICKLED STEWBERRIES" must necessarily refer to pickling, strawberries, stew, and so on. But it should be funny (or unfunny) for the "same" reasons as the original was, for some value of "same". In particular it seems essential that the "House X" dual meaning should be preserved.

Which means it's not this one joke that should be considered when translating, but also the other jokes that rely on the dual meaning: "pancakes", "atreid", "representatives" and "elf". (Ideally the translation should also render the "clack" that arises from the "KHAAANNNN" joke which breaks the pattern.) Whatever the two German equivalents of "House X" are, they should be used uniformly over these jokes.

Refusing to go to these lengths may not necessarily result in an incomprehensible translation, or one that fans would reject. But it would result in a poor quality translation, and I think that's somewhat insulting to the author. (It's both a tragedy and a mercy that most authors probably never realize how much their work is sabotaged in translation, because they don't know the target language well enough.)

And its also insulting to "the people who need the translation" for symmetrical reasons. If their grasp of the source language was good enough they wouldn't need one, but because it isn't they are often unable to assess the quality of the translation. All they can tell is that something is off, that a string of jokes for instance reads as inconsistent and nonsensical. Sometimes (especially when the work is greatly renowned) this is eventually discovered and to the great embarrassment of the original publisher, a new and better translation is undertaken. For instance the French are to this day saddled with Frenchified versions of some proper names in Tolkien's work, that many of us find jarring.