tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Nov 18 14:16:20 1993

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

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

Comments on translations

Hey all.

I ran into a lot of puzzles in the Jonah translation, and thought perhaps I
should write about some of them separate from the translation, so people
don't have to wade through all of it to get there.  Not all of these are
new things.

First off, there's the problem of nouns in apposition.  I don't think we
have any examples in the canon of these, but they're useful and make some
amount of sense.  These are nouns/noun phrases that refer to the same
thing.  There's an example in Krankor's Klingon anthem, in the line "Dun
wo'maj, juHmaj; not Dej".  Here, "wo'maj" and "juHmaj" are synonyms,
referring to the same thing, it's not the usual noun-noun construction (and
don't tell me the punctuation makes a difference; we have no evidence of
punctuation).  There is the danger of ambiguity with the genitive noun-noun
construction, but there are languages (like Hebrew) which also have
noun-noun genitives (with the nouns not always in a special form) and which
also use them in apposition.  So I support them in Klingon.  I used them a
few times in the Jonah, including right at the beginning: "nInveyDaq veng
tInDaq yIghoS"--"Go to Nineveh, the great city."  Works for me.

I used "-vaD" a great deal, in various meanings.  "Cry out to it [the
city]": "'oHvaD yIjach".  Work for you?  Probably not much of a stretch.
How about "to lighten [the ship] for/from off them": "chaHvaD tISmoHmeH"?
Maybe a little less good.  I generally use it a lot for the recipient of an
activity, not the object.  So "This bad <event> happens to us" becomes
"maHvaD qaS wanI'vam qab."  This seems to be consistent with Sect. 6.8, as
"we" is in some sense (a negative one) the "beneficiary" of the action.
Similarly, "What should we do to you" --> "SoHvaD nuq wIta'nIS?"

There was a big chunk of discussion that had in the original "He said to
them" and "they said to him" (with both speaker and audience explicit each
time).  I did these as "chaHvaD ja'" and "luja'" respectively, since
"luja'" has to be "they said to him", while "ja'" might lose the "to them"
aspect.

I ran into the "ship in which I fled" problem several times.  For those
just tuning in, this is Yet Another relative clause problem.  Quick
summary: the relative clause, as we all know, is made by tacking "-bogh"
onto the verb.  Okrand talks about "yaS vIleghbogh" being "the officer whom
I see" and "muleghbogh yaS" being "the officer who sees me."  This led us
early on to wonder about how to say "the officer whom the child hit" as
opposed to "the officer who hit the child."  The method we use, which I
believe is one of the only extensions we know to be sanctioned by Okrand
himself, is to flag the "head" noun with "-'e'", yielding "yaS'e'
qIppu'bogh puq" and "yaS qIppu'bogh puq'e'."  Late development: in _Power
Klingon_, we have a proverb "Hov ghajbe'bogh ram rur pegh ghajbe'bogh jaj"
(A day without secrets is like a night without stars), indicating that this
flagging is at least optional.

Anyway, this makes for trouble when we have phrases with nouns that already
have type 5 suffixes.  And it also makes for trouble when the noun is being
used differently in the relative clause and the main clause (e.g. "Because
of the ship in which I fled").  You can cook up your own hairy examples.
[Hmm, while typing this I came up with a possibly good proposed solution;
I'll post it later.  It'd need Okrandian sanction pretty badly, though.]  I
ran into this problem a few times, like "Let us cast lots [I put 'gamble']
to find out because of whom this bad event happens to us."  This gives us
another problem of what to do about the relative pronoun; I'm not sure
"'Iv" is right for it; it's a question word.  I used, tentatively, "nuvmo'
maHvaD qaSbogh wanI'vam qab maSovmeH maSuDjaj".  Any better plans?
Similarly later, when they address him as "you, because of whom this bad
event happens to us" (the Hebrew is really obscure, this is one reading), I
translate "SoHmo' maHvaD qaSbogh wanI'vam qab".  Same deal.  At the end I
construct a huge set of relative clauses which even I can't fully decompose
now, owing to the fact that it's nested so many times which suffers from a
similar problem.  Any ideas?

There was a problem at one point with distribution (every vs. all).  The
verse says "[each] man called to his god", meaning his own.  If I said
"joHDajvaD jach Hoch", might that more likely mean "they all called to his
[maybe Jonah's] god" (assuming "joH" is okay for "god").  The trouble is
that "Hoch" is both "all" and "each".  I used "joHchajvaD", since for some
reason the other meaning just seemed too likely.

I "coined" a word for "whence" or "from where", which feels like the Right
Thing: "nuqvo'".  The word for "where" is "nuqDaq", plainly a locative of
"nuq", and I want the ablative, so "nuqvo'" it is.  Any better
suggestions/objections/death threats?

Used some words "imaginatively" elsewhere.  There was no word for "storm"
except for "jev", which is a verb and probably means the military term.  I
ignored that and used it anyway, as a verb, implying that the wind,
perhaps, was storming.  Any better ideas?  I use "qorDu''a'" for "people"
in the singular sense (like tribe, nation), as I did in my Tower of Babel
translation.  "Holy" got translated to "quv"; seems close, and I used the
"vomit" translation I mentioned before: "SopHa'."  For "fast" (an occasion
of non-eating), I use "SopQo'ghach", since a fast is a voluntary refusal to
eat, not just a failure to do so.

I also made use of the object place in other ways.  For example, Nineveh is
described as being "three days' journey [across, presumably]".  So I said
"wej jaj nI' lengDaj": its voyage is long three days.  You have to stretch
your mind for this one.  And similarly, "vengDaq wa' jaj leng ghoS" is "He
went into the city one day's journey."

We don't really have a word for "to feel an emotion" (lol'aad, in L'aadan),
or anything like that, which is a bummer, since we have a word "pung" for
"mercy", but no good way to use it!  So I had to call on poor overworked
"ghaj" again for "having mercy", both in the sense of feeling it and in the
sense of being charactarized by it.  There's some support at least for the
second use in the word "HoSghaj", plainly a compound of "HoS"+"ghaj", thus
implying that it can make sense to "have" power and have it charactarize
you.  I didn't go so far as to coin "*pungghaj"; that would not have been
right.

I mentioned already that I used "'et" for east, based on the Biblical usage
(I am, after all, translating the Bible); we really have nothing much to go
on there.

Any ideas (aside from law'/puS, which is probably too hairy to put into an
already hairy sentence) on how to say "more than 120000 people" (in "that
has more than 120000 people... in it")?  Last sentence.  There may be no
way other than law'/puS, in which case I'm probably better off leaving it
out, but I wish I could find one.

Argh, I've rambled *way* more than enough.  Write back...

~mark

Back to archive top level