tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Mar 31 09:02:29 1996
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Re: toughie
- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: toughie
- Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 12:02:27 -0500 (EST)
Color me impressed. :) Yes, that was indeed the line. I thought it would
be too obscure and too hard to translate well due to its poetic nature to
come across. But you got it.
I had always heard it as "Indians scattered..." so my first sentence was
also a sentence fragment. There was no way I could do "fragile, eggshell
mind" so I did what i could. Oh for a word for "fragile." {lomqa'} is
used in Hamlet for "ghost"; I can't take credit for it. I decided it was
marginally better than "qa'". Indeed, it's He'a' with only one stop in the
middle (and one at the end), since it's "He" (no stop: one of the
occasional open-syllable words in Klingon) plus "-'a'".
I simply wasn't going to get "Indians" across, because it's a cultural
reference. Any explanation would really destroy the meaning. If I were
translating this "for real" I'd either use a group for which we have a name
(as I did) or leave the name of the ethnicity untranslated, and either way
I'd have to explain in a footnote. But this wasn't for real, so I took
liberties. Be thankful: I changed it to tera'nganmey at the last second
from verenganmey, for no apparent reason.
I'll have to do this more often; at least remember the many snippets I come
up with between posts...
~mark