tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Sep 10 11:37:40 1997

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Re: qaStaHvIS poH jIQubtaH

According to Qov:
> 
> At 10:47 AM 9/9/97 -0700, you wrote:
> >In ST7 Soran says to Picard, "Time is the fire in which we all burn." Just
> >thinking about how this would be expressed in tlhIngan Hol. 

First of all, realize that this is poetry and you cannot expect
poetry to translate directly from one language to another. In
order to translate prose, you need to understand meaning in
both languages. In order to translate poetry, you need to
understand poetry in both languages.

My own limited skills at Klingon poetry would lead me to
translate this (using KGT examples as a guide) as:

nI'be' yInmajmey. qul lurur.

Note that this dodges the whole abstract concept English
applies to the word "time". Instead, we speak of durations,
which is the whole point here. But then the same original poetic
statement could be interpreted differently, requiring a
different translation:

raghlI' yInmajmey. qulDaq nIn lurur.

or simply:

meQlI' yInmaj.

or even:

yInmaj natlh Hoch poH. tugh maloj.

Each period of time consumes our life. Soon we are all gone.

Or:

nIn natlh qul. yIn natlh poHmey.

And I'm no poet. A poet could translate this in a way that
would cause you to stop and go back to read it a few times,
enjoying the poetic twist that makes the expression
interesting. If the expression is not interesting, then it is
not successfully poetic.

Poetry can be usually be interpreted different ways, and after
translation, the set of different ways a single poetic
utterance can be interpreted will differ from the original.

I always stress that you will never make translations worthy of
honor if you merely translate word by word, following the
rules. Instead, you have to take what you are translating from
and understand it; draw it back to its original meaning before
that meaning had words assigned to it by a mind, and then go
through the process of expressing that meaning in Klingon. This
is all the more important with poetry. That's why I very much
discourage beginners from working with poetry at all. Forget it.

Instead, follow this sequence:

First learn to translate simple sentences like a robot
following a program. Learn the rules of grammar and some
vocabulary.

Begin to play with some of the more complex grammatical
structures a little, but not a lot. It is more important to
speak simply well than to misspeak complex constructions. No
one will be impressed by the latter, except perhaps yourself.

Begin to go from simple thoughts to Klingon without starting
with an English sentence (or whatever other primary language
you use).

Begin to take relatively simple English (or other primary
language) sentences back to pre-verbal thought and then bring
them out in Klingon without reference to the original English
words.

Continue to work with more complex constructions as a robot
following the rules of grammar until you understand those
constructions well enough to add them to your process of going
from pre-verbal thought to Klingon sentences. Once you have
worked with the entire grammar, build your vocabulary.

Go to qep'a' every year and converse voraciously.

Do this for about, oh, five or ten years and then, if you
happen to be drawn toward poetry, consider writing a few
original poems. Note whether people like them or hate them.

If people love your poems consistently and you feel drawn
towards particular poems in other languages, then and only then
should you consider BEGINNING to translate poems. Otherwise,
you are probably creating noise and trash, annoying grammarians
and fellow list members alike.

But that's just one opinion.

Oh, and as far as we know, there IS not transitive sense of
{meQ}. All canon examples so far use it intransitively, so we
know you can use {meQmoH} to get your meaning.

charghwI'

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