tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Dec 25 08:36:41 1997
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: KLBC: tera'Daq qoD leng
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: KLBC: tera'Daq qoD leng
- Date: Thu, 25 Dec 1997 11:36:06 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
- Priority: NORMAL
On Wed, 24 Dec 1997 10:59:34 -0800 (PST) Steven Boozer
<[email protected]> wrote:
> 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?
There are three nouns here in this noun phrase, unless you are
using {leng} as a verb: "He roams the center of the Earth". What
you have written looks like a locative and a direct object for
some unstated verb. That is what is probably bothering SuStel.
The verb would be the glue to hold these together, but you leave
it out.
...
> : 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.
I very much disagree here. Such a goal is, in the first place,
impossible. A wart in one language will likely fail to have an
exact translation into another language. I once heard a man say,
"Woman, you ain't got no good English!" So, how would you
translate that, warts and all, into Klingon?
I've been told that many Germans prefer to read Kant in English
because it is easier to understand in a good English translation
than in the original German, even to a native German speaker.
The ambiguous use of pronouns is eliminated in most good English
translations.
A translator's job is to convey the ideas and images of the
original writing. It is not simply encoding words into another
language. It involves understanding the original meaning and
intent. If in doing this, a translator can clarify things, this
is even better.
> 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.
jIQochchu' jay'!
> 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.
Fine. Meanwhile, I don't see how this is more pure than that
which you attacked.
> 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)
Good. Then you should realize that the problem with warts is not
how to translate them, but how to read through them to
understand the concepts the writer was attempting to convey.
> _____________________________________________________________________________
> Steven Boozer University of Chicago Library [email protected]
>
charghwI', taghwI' pabpo' ru'
Temporary Beginner's Grammarian, December 20-30