tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Aug 24 19:34:28 1999
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Re: Have a nice day!
>Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 17:33:31 -0500
>From: Alan Anderson <[email protected]>
SuStel said pretty much what I was going to, but I'm going to say it anyway.
>ja' Voragh:
>>An order is, in theory, something that can be accomplished by or that the
>>listener can choose to carry out or not. E.g. "Come here!" "Kill the
>>prisoner!" "Fire the weapon!"
>
>Maybe we're talking past each other here. I'm considering the grammatical
>structure here, not the idea behind it. "Have a nice day" is certainly a
>statement intended as a wish, but it's undeniably an imperative phrasing.
And that's exactly it. Since when do we translate phrasing and not the
meaning?
>>: > Or do you think "Have a nice day" is also an order?
>>:
>>: Of course it's an order. That's what an imperative statement *is*,
>>: grammatically speaking.
>>
>>Rubbish. This too is a wish, not an imperative. "May you..." is usually
>>clipped off of such common and banal wishes in greeting/leave taking
>>formulae.
>
>Rubbish?! I'm curious -- how do *you* define the term "imperative" so
>that it excludes the things you're calling "mere wishes"? I've *never*
>heard anyone tell me "may you have a nice day." I don't see any reason
>to assume that a "may you" has been clipped off. The sentence is quite
>complete as it is, without needing any supposedly elided prologue.
Nobody's arguing the grammatical form, but come now. In English "I see you
go" is one sentence. Does that mean it has to be in Klingon? In Klingon,
it's two sentences: {bIjaH 'e' vIlegh}. In English, "which ship did you
destroy?" is a question. In Klingon, it's an order: {Duj DaQaw'ta'bogh
yIngu'}. In English, "Surrender or die" is a pair of imperatives,
conjoined with a logical operator. In Klingon, it's a pair of statements:
{bIjeghbe'chugh vaj bIHegh}. Are you trying to tell me that we mustn't
translate "Surrender or die" as above because the grammar doesn't happen to
match up? Don't we recast everything? What makes you think other
translators from other languages don't do the same? We tend to prefer
imperative forms of wishes in English, I think, because they're shorter
than "May/I hope you have a nice day." We also drop off "if" a lot ("My
attorney says we sign, we sign." Maybe I should write that as a rhetorical
question and answer). But the intent is, to me at least, very clearly a
*wish* that something happen. And I suppose as translator, that's my call
to make. All translation is interpretation. I and others here apparently
see "Live long and prosper" as mainly a wish for your well-being and not a
direct command ("what if I don't WANT to live long and prosper?"), and that
interpretation comes through in our translations.
>Since Vulcans are presumed to have translated their customary greeting
>from their language into English, I'm going to continue to assume that
>the imperative phrasing -- which is mirrored in the Klingon rendition we
>have -- is the appropriate one to use.
But the Klingon "surrender or die" didn't seem to have survived so
verbatim. Why should Vulcan have?
~mark