tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jun 02 05:03:27 2014

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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Art of War

De'vID ([email protected])



On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 1:31 PM, Felix Malmenbeck <[email protected]> wrote:
> For those curious about the tlhIngan Hol content:
>
> I've peered through this book at a local bookstore.
> I was one of several klingonists who helped provide translations for this book (I think it was about nine different phrases), and I'm glad to see that many of our suggestions were implemented.

Do you remember which phrases these were? I honestly don't remember
seeing that many fully-translated and grammatical Klingon phrases in
the book.

> Sadly, there are also a *lot* of obvious Bing Translations, such as translating the "destroy the castle form" as {pa' Qaw' chenmoH} or something like that.

I'm actually kind of mad about this. I've read the book now, except
the two appendices. He mostly uses the style used in other Star Trek
works unrelated to Okrandian tlhIngan Hol, such as "trigak" or "bekk".
But he does occasionally make a point of using the transcription
system devised, as the in-universe explanation goes, by Federation
linguists to write tlhIngan Hol, and almost always he gets it wrong.
He uses {chenmoH} throughout to mean "form" as in "martial arts form",
when we have a perfectly good word {lol} for this. And he's clearly
just plugged English words and phrases into Bing without any regard
for correctness. He even claimed explicitly that {Daq} means
"against". If this is some fan fic on a web site, that's forgiveable,
but in a published book under Star Trek license?

ghe''orDaq luSpet 'oH bIng Daq'e'. mughHa'wI'vetlh vIQaw' vIneH jay'.

> So, this book is probably great if you're interested in Klingon culture and mythology, but those who are only interested in the language will probably not enjoy it.

The content of the book is quite enjoyable. As an imitation (or a
send-up) of self-help books allegedly translated from an ancient text,
with added modern commentary, it's perfect. (Anyone who's read an
English translation of Sun Tzu's Art of War aimed at a business
audience will understand what I mean.)

It's just too bad that the language part of it was so awful.

-- 
De'vID

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