tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Dec 24 10:48:24 1997

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Re: KLBC: tera'Daq qoD leng

SuStel wrote:
: From: Steven Boozer <[email protected]>
: >|Eduardo Fonseca wrote:
: >|> tera'Daq qoD leng
: >|> Journey to the Centre of the Earth   (Julio Verne)
: >
: >There's a better word available: {botlh} "center, middle" (n). Don't forget
: >{-Daq} goes at the end of the Noun-Noun phrase:
: >   tera' botlhDaq leng     "journey to the-Earth's-center"
: 
: Here's another Krankor Trick, and I'd just assume zap it out of existence.
: Most evidence and my own gut feeling tell us that you cannot have a Type 5
: suffix on the first noun in a phrase like that.  Time to recast.

I agree, which is why I moved {-Daq} to the end of the N1-N2 phrase (i.e.
attached to N2): {tera' botlhDaq}. Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by
"first noun" here?

: tera' botlh leng
: Earth center journey
:
: tera' botlh He
: Earth center course

Even more confusing. This is the "Earth's center's journey" (i.e. the
journey made *by* the Earth's center) and the "Earth's center's course"
respectively. Planetary interiors do not themselves travel.
 
: If that's too vague for you, make it a sentence (what's the hang-up with
: translating noun phrase titles as noun phrases in Klingon?):

What's the hang-up with avoiding noun phrases (verbless sentence fragments)
as titles or labels in Klingon? Okrand uses them as titles for TKW and the
Skybox cards.
 
: tera' botlh ghoSlu'
: Someone unspecified heads for Earth's center.
: (More or less translates exactly as "Journey to the center of the Earth.")
: 
: Or you can elaborate on the subject, if you like.  Or add a bit of meaning
: not in the original:
: 
: tera' botlh ghoSlu'lI'
: Someone unspecified is heading for Earth's center.

Adding "meaning not in the original" is the sign of a poor translator. The
job of a translator is *not* to explain or improve a work (however tempting
that may be!), but merely to render it into another language - warts and
all. This is even more true when translating literature. The goal is to
produce what the author would have written, had he known the target language
as well as his own, keeping in mind that some writers are better at their
craft than others. This is where the difficult art of literary translating
comes. If the original is unclear or poorly written, so should the
translation be and in equal measure. For all you know, something you find
confusing may have been specifically intended for effect. A translator
certainly must understand what the author is trying to say, but he also
needs to understand why it was phrased in a particular manner. If you feel
compelled to clarify and expand upon the author's text, do so in a footnote
or a critical essay. Even better, write an *adaptation* of your own and
indulge your creative impulses. In this particular case, for example, your
"solution" is inappropriate since the characters are not unspecified in the
original but are eventually named. If you must, make it an active phrase
(particularly if the book was written in the first person) which still
avoids naming the protagonists:

  tera' botlhDaq maghoSlI'
  We head for Earth's center.

: We could probably come up with a few more, but the point is you *don't* need
: to resort to Type 5 suffixes on the first noun of a noun-noun construction.
: 
: SuStel

On the first noun, no; on the second, yes. Here are a couple of examples
which are nearly identical to the one under discussion:

  'Iw bIQtIqDaq jIjaH 
  I travel the River of Blood. TKW 

  'Iw bIQtIqDaq bIlengjaj 
  May you travel the river of blood! PK

  'ej yo' qIjDaq vavpu'ma' DImuv 
  we ... join our fathers in the Black Fleet (Anthem) 

Still more examples of Type 5 suffixes on the second noun of a N1-N2 phrase:

  jaghpu' yuQmeyDaq 
  at/to the enemies' planets  TKD

  loS... qIb HeHDaq, 'u' SepmeyDaq Sovbe'lu'bogh lenglu'meH He ghoSlu'bogh
retlhDaq 'oHtaH 
  It waits... on the edge of the galaxy, beside a passage to unknown regions
of the 
  universe.  DSN99

  wa' Dol nIvDaq matay'DI' maQap 
  We succeed together in a greater whole.  TKW 

  juHqo' Qo'noSvo' loghDaq lengtaHvIS tlhInganpu' 
  During the (aggresive) expansion of the Klingon people from their
homeworld of Kronos into      space...  SP1 

  Hoch tlhIngan DujDaq So'wI' jomlu' 
  All Klingon vessels are equipped with a cloaking device  S33 

I really don't see the problem here.


Voragh
(who has earned his living on many occasions by translating from Russian and
Hebrew and knows just how difficult translating can be)

 
_____________________________________________________________________________
 Steven Boozer   University of Chicago Library   [email protected]

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