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NLP VS German Publisher 2/15/2005 3:42:51 PM
Well, well, well.
Here it is.
I didn't think the time would come, but come it has - I can no longer communicate, it seems.
There is this nice and conservative German publishing company which is doing the translations (!) of Adventures In EFT and Oceans of Energy. They're selling a lot of these books and managed to "defuse" my languaging through the translation.
So I thought, I'll write a book in German next time around - Enchanted World, or Zauberwelt, as it's called in German.
That way, I thought, at least the spirit of how I approach things will be retained a little bit better.
I sent them the manuscript last April and they never got back to me about it, so I put it up as it was as a free download ebook, like its English language translation counterpart (yes, I translated Zauberwelt into English while I was there, it seemed like fun).
It's been downloaded by about five thousand German speakers so far and they just LOVE it. Rave reviews and lots of delighted feedback of the "I feel someone is finally speaking to me!" kind, even though it's full of spelling mistakes because I don't have a German spellchecker module on my laptop. In fact, not a single person has complained to us about the spelling mistakes in that ebook - that's rare, and for Germans, I would guess it's unheard of.
I'm guessing that some of these good folk must have bugged the German publishing company for hardcopy, so they got on to me and said they wanted to publish it after all.
Then they set to the grim and arduous task of seriously "editing" it, because of course, it was as it stood, "completely unpublisheable".
Hmmm ....
Last week, they send me the first few "corrected chapters".
It came in Microsoft Word with the corrections delightfully marked out in red, and there wasn't a single sentence or sentence fragment that had been left untouched, not a single statement that had not been entirely re-written with half the words replaced.
Not even "and", "the", "here" and "because" were left untouched ...
I am amazed that all these other Germans ever managed to read the original manuscript at all.
I thought about this thing for a while, and then decided to withdraw my offer of publishing this manuscript as of tonight.
Seems to me that there is such a divergence in what you might call "advanced languaging for internal representations and experiences" or perhaps you might call it "hypnotic installation teaching" or perhaps just something related to Ericksonian metaphor usages that it is no longer compatible at all with the classic publishing trade.
Two different languages.
One consisting of words, and nothing but words, lined up one behind the other according to grammatical rules and regulations, because if you didn't have them, you wouldn't even know where to put which word in a single sentence.
The other a living, changing, evolving form of communicative language which is not about the words, but instead about TRANSMISSION OF INFORMATION at the multi-level.
This has been going on for a while now, I know, but I wasn't really aware of just HOW MUCH the kind of language us aging NLPers are using as a matter of fact had diverged from the mainstream.
I'm sort of shocked by that, a bit sad, really, but also glad that I found out before it was too late for Zauberwelt.
It's probably particularly bad for the Germans because they never did have Bandler and Co with their writings in print to loosen up their entrenched ideas of grammar and language, and I'm guessing that's why the culture shock is so great when they come across someone like me who has been thinking like this and publicly writing like it as well, for all these years.
On the bright side, Zauberwelt remains available as a free download so that those who WISH TO HEAR MY VOICE as I intended it to be heard, inaccuracies and emotional outbursts and all, can do so.
And perhaps the "editor" at the German publishing company might try to write their own book and tell us their thoughts on energy, immortality and destiny in a "decent, publisheable fashion"?
That way, we're all satisfied and the German conservative school grammar teachers can remain sound in their beds at night and need not fear a revolution on their bookshelves.
Shame really that Bandler never had his own publishing company. I wonder what we missed because of it.
Happy Sunday all,
Silvia
Silvia Hartmann
DragonRising Publishing UK
Energy Magic & Hypnotic Literature
http://DragonRising.com
