tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Mar 06 19:37:04 1995

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: Strange New World Book

>Date: Mon, 6 Mar 1995 04:49:53 -0500
>Originator: [email protected]
>From: Wouter Slegers <[email protected]>

>Please don't see my remarks as critisism! I thought you meant that you
>were translating the bible from a translation of the bible. I did not
>know that the 'originals' were part Hebrew, part Greek, I thought they
>were Greek only...

Ah, I see.  Well, what is called the Bible came down in different pieces.
The Hebrew Bible, called in Christian culture the Old Testament (which
sometimes sounds funny to me, since for me it's the *whole* Bible) is
written in Hebrew, with a few chapters in Daniel and the odd word here and
there in Aramaic.  The New Testament is written in Greek (is there any
evidence that it was translated into Greek from something else?  I wouldn't
know).

>< I don't know that I could really expect someone to *learn* Klingon from a
>< Bible translation.  Certainly not as your first primer.  But An
>< intermediate/advanced student could use it as Roger suggested; as a book he
>< could look at in Klingon and also have a text in his native language not
>< too hard to find, for comparison.  Not an interlinear translation, mind
>< you, but *something* to compare.
>< 
>Yes, I understand why you would want as much Klingon texts to translate
>and compare so you can get a feel of the language. However it is my
>experience that it are exactly the small grammatical details between
>the source and the target language that bring the insight in the
>language. And those details will certainly be lost if you compare your
>Klingon text to your Finnish or even English bible. 

I don't know, really.  I often find that a loose translation, where the
source and target languages express things in vastly different ways and
constructions and total rephrasings, can be very helpful in studying
translation.  I certainly enjoy seeing some of the creative recastings in
Hamlet to make the text flow more smoothly in Klingon.  You look at the
English, say (or Finnish) and think "Now how is this working in Klingon...?
Hmm, it's not "He travelled down to the store in the car, there's some kind
of purpose-clause happening; I see a -meH.  Hmm...  Wait, it's "In order to
travel to the store, something something..."  Ah!  "In order to travel to
the store, he activated the car!"  Oh, I see."  Or some such weird example.
And so you see a new and interesting way to cast the concept... which is
the most interesting part of translation anyway: getting the concept in a
new and insightful form, perhaps one that fits it in some sense "better"
than the source language had.

For an example of this, one that I found in the Bible between Hebrew and
English.  The Hebrew of the Ten Commandments says stuff like "You won't
steal."  It's expressed in first-person singular (so it's thou, I suppose),
but not in imperative.  Rather, it's in simple future (or imperfect) tense.
The Bible very often uses simple future in place of commands, especially in
the negative (also avoiding the negative-imperative word, using instead the
normal negative).  The standard English translation brings out the command
aspect in some sense more clearly than the Hebrew.  It does not go so far
as to make it imperative, that might have been too far.  But it says
"Thou shalt not steal."  It's a subtle point of English grammar that's not
often recognized today, but in second and third person, the use of "shall"
(rather than "will") indicates command or determination, rather than simple
future (in first person, the meanings are reversed).  I don't know, maybe
it's nothing, and maybe someone else might disagree with me, but I thought
it was a very nice touch on the part of the English translators.

~mark

Back to archive top level