tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jun 23 07:54:18 1995
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Re: "It was raining hard"
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: "It was raining hard"
- Date: Fri, 23 Jun 95 10:54:15 EDT
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>; from "Alan Anderson" at Jun 22, 95 9:13 am
According to Alan Anderson:
>
> ~mark wrote:
> > Always dangerous to translate songs/poetry...
>
> jIQochbe'qu'. I agree emphatically.
>
I also agree emphatically. While it may seem like a good idea
because you are translating text that you like working with,
realize that for a beginner, translating a song is similar to
someone who has never sculpted anything deciding to carve a bar
of soap into Rodin's "The Kiss" or deciding that for your first
pencil sketch of your life, you'd like to render the Mona Lisa.
You don't have the tools yet to handle poetry. It is not just
because poetry is somehow difficult in Klingon. It is because
in order to translate anything at all, you need to completely
understand what the original speech meant. Poetry and songs are
full of symbolism, figures of speech and often intentionally
ambiguous, vague, mystical text.
Two langauges will not necessarily share the same areas of
ambiguity, so if the language you are translating FROM has an
ambiguous phrase, you'll have to decide how to interpret it
before translating it, and THEN you quite likely will have
destroyed the entire point of the original work.
This is why it is better to start out writing original stuff in
Klingon. It allows you to tell a story with the tools you have
on hand. The story and the language interact. You will want to
say something you don't know how to say, so you'll back up and
change the story a little so you'll have something to tell
which you CAN say.
Still, the pressure to have said what you couldn't say will
have pushed a button in your head and you'll start working at
figuring out how to say that thing you wanted to say but
couldn't. Eventually, you'll succeed and you will increase the
tools you possess for use with the langauge.
Meanwhile, beginners commonly are attracted to epic works or
highly symbolic poetry. We translate Hamlet before we write a
short story of our own. We translate the Bible before we begin
a Klingon diary. And how many Klingon pen pals are there in
this group? Anybody use snail mail to send a normal letter to
each other? The MUSH is a great idea, but most folks there seem
to prefer English, and they meet when I'm rarely free to
converse.
jIbep DaH 'e' jImevchoH! Just write. Don't try to translate
ANYTHING you didn't write yourself until you find writing
original, simple stuff is easy. AFTER you have done that,
consider what you would like to translate, with preference to
works that you think you understand so intimately that you
could have written yourself, since they speak with your words.
If the words are not yours, you will probably end with a poor
translation. The world doesn't need more poor translation into
Klingon than it will naturally tend to get. Paramount alone is
an endless source...
...
> Seriously, Jim, fall back on simple sentences. VERY simple ones. Tell us
> about things that are happening in your life. Don't try to translate songs
> until you find that you're nearly thinking in Klingon. Even then, I'd be
> happier if you created a NEW song instead of "copying" an existing one.
>
> -- ghunchu'wI'
Excellent advice.
charghwI'
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