[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Bible nonsense

[lojmIt tI'wI' nuv]

I, for one, would always encourage people to write something original rather than translate. Translation is an educational exercise, but, the truth is that the process of going from an idea or story to expression through language is an interactive one between the story teller and the language. The memory of what you have already written will influence your choice as you sift through the decision points in the story, and what you've written is influenced by the language you wrote it in. This process of moving forward from where the story has brought you is both creative and influenced by language.

When you translate, you can't do that. You have to follow the story somebody else has already put forward. You have the additional problem of having to figure out exactly what the original author meant in the original language. Sometimes, a sentence is a minor patch connecting two more important moments in the original story, but it might have been done that way mostly because it was so easy to do in the original language, but in the translated language, you might have to work really hard to translate that insignificant line in the original. The translation process puts inappropriate emphasis on the minor point because you wrestled with the second language to express it, when if the original author had been writing in this second language, he might have omitted the line altogether.

The best translations are retellings of the story, rather than attempts to encode all the words of language A into language B. This ignores the simple truth that the original story was already an encoding from the original ideas, images, feelings and events into language A. Double-encoding merely dilutes the reader's connection to the original story.

The highest quality of translation is not that which represents all the words in the original. It's the one that best tells the story of the original. If the original was in English, and you translate into Klingon, then someone else who speaks Klingon, but not English, should be able to understand the translation and not feel like it was oddly twisted in a way that distracts from the story (because it maps too closely to the original English, especially if it includes English idioms).

This is also why I discourage anybody from translating poetry. The nature of poetry is to offer personal meaning to each reader, perhaps different from the understanding of the same text gleaned by a different reader, or to play with features of the language, like rhythm, rhyme, onomatopoeia, homonyms, synonyms and other features that simply don't translate to another language. I often find it frustrating that the least experienced Klingonists are so frequently drawn to begin by translating poetry.

They just don't get it.

A poem should mean more than that.

You should be able to write original short stories and even novels before considering yourself ready to translate even simple poems. Otherwise, you kill the poetry, reducing it to prose that wasn't worth being prose the first time, which is why it was poetry.

Take an English poem and "translate" it into English prose and see what happens to it. Translating it into Klingon is one step worse.

Though a gifted few can do it well... It's safest not to consider yourself among the gifted few.

lojmIt tI'wI' nuv
lojmIttI7wI7nuv at gmail.com



On Oct 23, 2011, at 7:36 PM, Qov wrote:

> Five notes on this discussion:
> 
> 1. One reason the KLI Bible translation project got bogged down is that the translators were not translating from English but from the original Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew. There weren't too many folks who could help.
> 
> 2. I can actually see that the word-for-word program could be marginally useful for someone who knew how Klingon worked, but did not have vocabulary memorized.
> 
> 3. How did sake get mapped to chIch. Can anyone see a route?
> 
> 4. Why would anyone object to anyone trying to translate anything?
> 
> 5. Is translation somehow considered a more noble, valid or deserving pursuit than original work? I understand that for publication the general marketability of the product is enhanced by tying it to something with an existing audience, but what about when it's just for fun or skills. I've done translation, nothing dirty about it. I've just discovered that an old one is on line, complete with the translator's notes I sent to the author. (http://books.google.ca/books?id=fikDiQRMxgkC&lpg=PA157&ots=NXFbfRGIix&dq=KLingon%20michael%20collings&pg=PA157#v=onepage&q=KLingon%20michael%20collings&f=false) But my fun is in original work.
> 
> 
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