herbjørnsrud's playful mixing of dialects poses great challenges to translators; his most prolific story, "kai sandemo" (1997), has long been considered untranslatable to any other language. it tells the story of a murderer who flees his home in telemark and settles in denmark where he starts writing letters to people he grew up with - first in danish, then, as he remembers more and more dark secrets of his past, gradually switching to nynorsk, bokmål and the dialect of telemark until at the end, virtually every sentence becomes a complex mixture of various languages and dialects. an ambitious project undertaken by the universities of zurich and munich worked on a german translation of the story for several years and released a finished version in 2005. the team moved the story to switzerland and substituted standard german, swiss german, romansh and various swiss dialects for the original's languages and dialects.