tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Feb 24 08:41:07 1995
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Re: Strange New World Book
- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Strange New World Book
- Date: Fri, 24 Feb 1995 11:41:04 -0500
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> (message from Andrew Marquardt on Thu, 23 Feb 1995 20:32:34 -0500)
>Date: Thu, 23 Feb 1995 20:32:34 -0500
>Originator: [email protected]
>From: Andrew Marquardt <[email protected]>
>I am really baffled by the idea of translating the human bible into Klingon...
>I mean to say what relavance does the bible of humans have to do w/ klingons,
>shouldn't a klingon bible speak of klingon rites, and ceromonies ? The idea of
>translating the human bible into klingon is good in so far as how our words
>can translate into a language that only some are familiar with.
I, too, am sometimes baffled by the idea of translating the Bible into
Klingon... amd I'm involved in it! People often get the wrong idea about
the project. We're not trying to generate something to "convert" the
unwashed heathen Klingons (yeah, right, like there are people who would
really find religious meaning in the fact that now the Bible can be read in
Klingon. Besides, we who work on it aren't even of the same religion; I
certainly wouldn't try to convert anyone: Jews don't proselytize). The
tack the KBTP is taking is that we're trying to translate the Bible into
Klingon such that a putative Klingon scholar studying Terran culture would
read it. I think this is necessary since the Bible is pretty obviously not
a very Klingon book in sentiment and tone. The Shakespeare project has a
different approach... but Shakespeare is a different corpus.
I suspect the main reason why we want to translate the Bible is historical:
it's just traditionally the book you translate into new languages. Also,
it is pretty inarguably the most famous text in Western culture (like it or
not, but you've undoubtedly heard of it), and arguably the most famous text
on earth period, and is just a big honking chunk of text, so translating it
would if nothing else demonstrate that the Klingon language *can* handle
things of fairly large size.
~mark