tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jul 27 20:02:19 1997
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RE: KLBC:Book 1
Kenneth Traft writes:
>The exercise was to translate the sentence into Klingon (The bus is coming.)
With that as the goal, {ghoS lupwI'} succeeds. However, if the goal is
to produce a Klingon sentence that can express the idea well to someone
who doesn't already know the English sentence, {ghoS lupwI'} fails badly.
I recognize that starting simple is important, both with grammar and
with vocabulary. But starting so simple as to be *wrong* is never a
good way to do things. The idea that there is a "correct" translation
that doesn't mean what is being translated bothers me a lot.
I've never met Glen Proechel, and we've never corresponded. But every
time I encounter his work, I am stunned at how "one-way" his translations
are. The man always seems to have, at the center of his motivation, the
production of Klingon translations of English phrases. But what I have
read of his efforts is almost never easy to read in Klingon, and makes
"real sense" only after I translate it into English, using knowledge of
how English grammar and idiom express certain concepts, and guessing at
how those idioms have been warped to fit Klingon grammar and vocabulary.
-- ghunchu'wI'