My Dog Is the Best… in Japanese!

A few months ago I announced that My Dog Is the Best would be trans­lat­ed and sold in Japan­ese. A few days ago, there was a pack­age on my doorstep. I opened it to find these:

S U R P R I S E !  =D
This is the first for­eign edi­tion I’ve seen of any of my books, so it’s super excit­ing. And it was even bet­ter than expect­ed, since we cur­rent­ly have a Japan­ese stu­dent liv­ing with us! She had already read the book in Eng­lish, so it was fun to see her enjoy it in her native language.
She also rather sheep­ish­ly informed me that my bio, which I thought was rather clever in Eng­lish, did­n’t trans­late quite so well into Japan­ese. It orig­i­nal­ly said, “…many of her best friends have had four legs and fur,” but the Japan­ese ver­sion appar­ent­ly says some­thing along the lines of “many of her best friends have had four legs and were hairy.” She found it rather humor­ous that the Japan­ese ver­sion was­n’t clear­ly refer­ring to ani­mals, as the Eng­lish ver­sion was. Ah, the sub­tleties of lan­guage, and the impor­tance of word choice! 🙂