tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Nov 16 05:54:51 2007

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RE: translation

Agnieszka Solska ([email protected]) [KLI Member] [Hol po'wI']

ja' Jon:

>I've combined what I think you saying are the best suggestions, whilst 
>trying to keep to the original English as far as possible ? I have another 
>email from Ronnie in which he seems to want a word by word translation. For 
>this reason I have stuck with {nagh} instead of {Hew} and not moved 
>{yuQvam} to the line above.

Does he want a word by word translation from English to Klingon or
a word by word back-translation of a stylistically well-expressed
Klingon version of the English text? If the latter, an English
gloss for each Klingon sentence could easily be provided.
If the former then, frankly, he is not going to get it whatever
you send him. Let's face it, none of the suggestions that have
been proposed contains Klingon equivalents of such English words
as "management," "official," "binding," "future" or "assured."
A word of word translation is simply impossible. Obviously, since we
do have a word for "rock," there is no reason why we shouldn't
use it but I'm not sure what exactly is achieved by placing or not
placing the object of {luvu'mo'} and {DoQ}, i.e. the noun {yuQvam},
in front of the first verb.

And what exactly do you mean by "keeping to the original English"?
A text closer to the original in terms of structure (placement of
pronouns, number of clauses, etc.) is not necessarily better
and may be deemed weird by the users of the target language.
BTW, The inscription to be written on the sculpture suggests that
it was made by members of a race whose mother tongue is NOT English.
The race is fictitious, the language is not.


ja' Voragh:

>>      luvu'Ha'mo' nganpu' SaH,
>>      [...]
>
>Actually, I think that's about as close as we're going to get.

I have a problem with this line. To me {nganpu' SaH} doesn't mean
"current inhabitants." It means "the inhabitants present,"
i.e. "those inhabitants who are not absent, who are not away,
missing or gone." I see the qualities of being current and being
present as closely related but not exactly the same.
The fact that someone happens to be present at a location at
a given moment doesn't make this person one of the location's
current inhabitants. He or she could be present at the location
as a guest. Conversely, you do not stop being a "current inhabitant"
of, say, an apartment each time you are not present there.
I may be wrong about it but I don't think the Klingon "authors"
of the inscription want to voice the opinion that Earth has been
mismanaged only the inhabitants who are present on its surface
at the time when that opinion gets inscribed into a statue. Surely,
they'd think that the responsibility for mismanaging the planet
falls on the entire human race including those members of it who
are no longer alive, hence who are not longer present. I believe
my version, repeated below, gets the intended meaning across more
precisely despite being longer and more complex:

   (yuQvam) luvu'Ha'mo' DaH luDabbogh nganpu'...
   [literally, "Because the inhabitants who now inhabit it mismanage (this 
planet)...]

Still, not being a native speaker of English I admit I could be wrong in my 
judgments of what English words actually mean.

>>      per mub 'oS naghvam'e'.

Phrased in this way the sentence reads "It is this rock which...". I don't 
think we need the suffix {-'e'}. No emphasis is placed on "this rock" in 
English.

'ISqu'

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