Everyone Is Difficult
Alle sind schwierig. Auch du.
This is one of our own titles, not a client project, and the German edition has not been on sale long enough to prove anything about sales. What it can show is the work, which is the part you would be buying.
The title was the first decision, and it is not a translation
Everyone Is Difficult makes the reader work out that they are included. German has a shorter way to say it, so the German edition says it outright and the title became Alle sind schwierig. Auch du. Everyone is difficult. You too.
The obvious word for difficult is nervig, which carries the bluntness exactly. We rejected it. Nervig belongs to a flatmate who leaves the dishes out. Schwierig is the word German uses in human resources, in therapy, and in the phrase schwierige Gespräche, and it is the word a reader would type into a search box. Bluntness survives a border. Register does not, and it has to be decided again.
One consequence turned up later, in the conclusion. The English spends a paragraph arguing that the title invites a misreading. In German that misreading is not available, because the cover has already corrected it. That paragraph was rewritten rather than translated. A translator working chapter by chapter would have carried it across intact and nobody would have noticed.
The cover is a new piece of artwork, not a retype
The English title is fused into the English artwork, so it cannot be lifted out and reset. Every localised cover is generated again from scratch, briefed to the target title's own shape.
Here that turned out to be a gift. Alle, sind, schwierig maps onto the three-beat stack of Everyone, is, difficult, which left Auch du. as a fourth beat with nowhere obvious to go. That is exactly what the sentence is, so it sits apart, smaller, below the block and closer to the knot than to the title.
The help page was replaced, not translated
The English edition ends with a page of crisis resources. 999. Refuge. Acas. NHS 111. The Samaritans.
None of it applies in German. Translated faithfully, it would have handed a reader in Berlin a British emergency number.
So the page was rebuilt for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, because a German-language edition sells into all three and a free number reaches only the country that issued it. Every number was checked against the body that issues it, on the day it was written.
One of them could not have come from memory. Switzerland introduced a national victim helpline, 142, on 1 May 2026, three months before the edition was made. It is also explicitly not an emergency number, so the page says 117 or 144 for immediate danger, which is the distinction the Swiss authorities themselves put first.
Where no equivalent exists, the page says so instead of inventing one. Germany has no Acas, so it names the Antidiskriminierungsstelle for discrimination and the works council and union inside the company.
What the checks found
Every chapter was run against the source before anyone read it, on fifteen separate mechanical checks. All seventeen chapters passed all fifteen.
Then the proofreading pass, by a reader who never saw the English. It returned 284 corrections.
Nearly half of them, 117, were the same fault. An English idiom rendered literally into German words. The kind of thing that is invisible to anyone holding the original, because the source tells them what it was supposed to mean. That is the entire reason the proofreader does not get to see it.
The remaining 167 fell into four further groups. We keep the ranking because it decides what the brief for the next book forbids by name.
The numbers
| English | German | |
|---|---|---|
| Words | 65,164 | ~51,000 |
| Paragraphs | 522 | 522 |
| Printed pages | 184 | 202 |
| Formats produced | 5 |
Fewer words, more pages. German compounds, so the word count falls while the page count rises. That difference decides the spine width, which decides the cover.
Two mistakes, since the checks are only worth what they catch
The page count was wrong twice. One rendering engine reported 251 pages and a projection from the English suggested 214. The printer said 202. Both covers had already been built against the wrong number and both had to be made again.
The contents page listed eighteen entries twice. It survived every automated check and was obvious on page three of the printed proof, which is the whole argument for reading a printed proof.
Both are now written into the process document, with their causes. That document is the reason the second edition took less time than the first.
What the author would have approved
On a client project there are six approvals, and this book passed the same gates internally. Briefing and direction. Title and subtitle from three options. A three-chapter calibration sample. The cover. The back cover copy. The final proof.
Where an author does not read the target language, each of those arrives with a back-translation, because approving text you cannot read is worse than not approving it at all. The seventeen middle chapters are not sent for approval. They are checked against the source by script and read by a native reader.
That is one book. If you have one that already sells, the same process is on the Localisation page, with what it costs and when we would tell you not to bother.