tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jun 29 09:12:49 2011
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Some things are best left untranslated.
- From: "lojmIt tI'wI' nuv" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Some things are best left untranslated.
- Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2011 12:06:38 -0400
- Dkim-signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=from:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:subject:date:message-id :to:mime-version:x-mailer; bh=poHBMea6CfHU4O0SHomJlEAixlgIDmGor72yB4BlE9U=; b=FP2wYl6ayC/30mBYM11W0D1MHqkpeIf8mpqhPHt18Uy2fozTXwLbLDh1q1zYIwwPDk y3dlJk+zhX0+NbxdOr4EfKjHjs8i/yGCfg9G8aOAraKz+FZJdSAaRolDIi/s+5pu2b7J PEw/jkTYUFHzscfz+/ei52lVvsoSJMT4+b134=
During my pedestrian commute, I pass a boxcar that someone has spray painted, "Tonight, the streets are ours!" It's got deixis written all over it.
While I enjoy a translation challenge, this one quickly got too ugly.
We have no standard replacement word or phrase for "Tonight". As individuals, we might come up with {DaH ram} or {DaHjaj ram} or {ramvam}, but the fact remains, Maltz has never addressed the issue, to my imperfect memory. And when I think about it, I'm not sure what it really means in English. It depends on when it was written.
If it was written during the daytime, then it means "the dark period of time that follows the current sunlit period of time". If it was written at the moment of sunset or later, it means, "From now until dawn".
And, of course, there's the deictic problem that the boxcar has been there for months. Was this a one-time event, or is the declaration that during all nights, the streets are ours?
And who are "we", anyway? Is this an inclusive "we"; a righteous statement that both the reader and the writer own the streets at nighttime, or is this an exclusive "we"; a warning to those who are not "we" that they better stay off the streets tonight?
And what streets are we talking about, anyway? The definite article suggests specific streets without specifying which ones. They didn't say, "Some streets are ours" or "All streets are ours". It just says "THE streets are ours".
And then there's the problem of expressing possession. What exactly do we mean here? What does it mean for a street to be "ours"? I know that MY street is the one that goes in front of my house. Actually, I live on a corner, so two streets are "my" street, though the one that goes by my front door is the one I'd usually think of as "my" street.
So, does that imply that "we" are neighbors? If we own the same streets and that's the same thing as the same streets being "ours" in the same sense that MY street is MINE, then we'd have to be neighbors, unless, of course, our street is very, very long.
So, in this case, as it turns out, the problem is not that I can't say this in Klingon because of inherent limits of the language so much as that I can't translate the sentence because I don't really understand what it means. I couldn't translate it into ANY other language, except perhaps Pig Latin, and only then because I can "translate" each word without having to know what the actual sentence means, since Pig Latin is not a language -- it's a code. If Klingon were coded English, I COULD translate it, just by coming up with word equivalents and grammar equivalents, but in order to translate this into Klingon, I need to know what it means.
And I don't.
pItlh.
lojmIt tI'wI' nuv