tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jun 15 09:13:49 1994
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: Why Make A Klingon Bible?
Hu'tegh! nuq ja' [email protected] jay'?
As Kevin Wilson is a theologian, and is running the project, he'll give you
the answer you probably should pass on. I'm an atheist, but I'll tell you
why I became involved.
=I'm on a Christian mailing list, and the people there are currently
=discussing the Klingon Bible Translation Project. Some take the view
=that, hey, everybody needs a hobby.
True, and translating things into Klingon is something I find extremely
stimulating intellectually. Translating _Mark_ exposed me to quite different
challenges to Shakespeare. It taught me a bit about Koine (mostly that
Mark's Koine is ridiculously easy for a modern Greek speaker, whereas Luke
is unfathomable), a fair bit about the origins of Christianity (since Mark
reflects the historical Jesus most accurately), and a lot about Klingon
style (Mark is conceptually much easier than Shakespeare, so I don't have
to subject the language to too many twists and turns).
It also taught me that Klingon Bible translation is a sensitive matter;
some Klingonists for whom I have a lot of respect had a really negative
reaction to the whole thing. More recently, of course, the crisis splashed
on the Wall Street Journal. And (I hope my Christian friends don't take this
the wrong way, but...)
=Others say that this is disrespectful
=and a waste of time: there are lots of REAL languages that don't have a
=Bible translation yet.
... as a linguistics student, having read a bit about regional linguistic
issues, I'm less than enthused about linguist missionaries. Several people
now believe the entire Pacific region, and particularly Papua New Guinea,
are a cultural wasteland because of the effect missionaries have had
on native cultures.
This is, after all, the mentality that says (so I've heard) that when the
"soul count", the population of the tribe you're working on as a missionary
linguist drops below 100, you move on.
On the plus side, missionary linguists, and particularly the SIL, have done
some great linguistics. We owe our knowledge of Hixkaryana, Klingon's sister
language on Earth, to them. Hell, we owe virtually all our linguistic
knowledge of Papua New Guinea, the most linguistically diverse place on
Earth, to them.
In any case, if you peruse the SIL's Ethnologue (Catalogue of the world's
languages), you'll find that most of the 60% of the world's languages not
to have any bible translation work done are spoken by less than 10000 people.
A fair few are spoken by less people than Klingon!
=Still more are saying that Klingon culture (as portrayed on Star Trek) is
=not very forgiving or loving, and that it's a mockery to translate the
=Bible into a language centered around war and killing and so on.
This was a problem I had to deal with. The Gospel has nothing to do with
Klingons culturally. Shakespeare can be reconciled much more readily, although
it is permeated with Christianity. People here should look at my translation
of Hamlet III.3, and how I handle Hamlet and Claudius' perceptions of life
after death: my Klingons do still pray, but their Paradise is more like
Valhalla, and the Satan equivalent is the one doing the judging of souls.
It would be insulting to take the same approach to the Bible, so I quite
simply didn't. Satan is called Fek'lhr in my text of _Mark_, but my apostles
bring grain-food and sea-animals as loaves and fishes, not blood-pies and
serpents (as in Glen's translation); Jesus speaks unabashedly for peace,
and so on. As Kevin has emphasised, this is a work of scholarship, and I've
tried to make sure I'm faithful to the original (for example, Jesus *lies
down* (kataklino:) to eat, as in the original; all English translations I've
seen have him sitting down.) Why don't you download the text from the ftp site,
and see for yourself?
I don't know about the translation task being any easier or harder; I do know
that I was more sensitive to the syntax of the original than English
translations tend to be, but of course that isn't necessarily an advantage.
=Others have said that some famous writings have been rendered in Klingon,
=noting the references to Shakespeare in STVI:TUC. The Bible is just a
=logical thing to translate.
This, indeed, is the official reason why we're translating it.
I'm sure Kevin has much more to say on the issue, and I'll let him do so.
If you think my comments aren't too provocative, you can forward them to
the mailing list.
Nick.