tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Mar 31 09:02:29 1996

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Re: toughie



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


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