[Tlhingan-hol] Bad Klingon in Trek novels (and the like)

[Rohan Fenwick - QeS 'utlh]

ghItlhpu' De'vID, jatlh:
> But OTOH actually publishing a Kindle version of the Psalms in
> pseudo-Klingon has done a lot of harm to the Klingonist community by
> perpetuating the idea that a word-by-word substitution counts as a
> "translation".

jang SuStel, jatlh:
> Those who know better won't be fooled; those who don't know better won't
 care. I don't see any point
> to it, but neither do I see any particular 
harm.

ghItlhpu' Qov, jatlh:
> At 20,000', trusting the autopilot, I'll tell you the harm. 
> Imagine I've bought a TKD and it captures my imagination. I wonder if people could really learn this.
> I've -heard- of people speaking Klingon. So I check out the bible thing. It's gibberish. Oh well, I guess
> no one really does this, and a potential Klingonist is lost.

wa' DoS wIqIpchu'. I have two more reasons for considering it harmful. Firstly, it thumbs its nose at the immense labours behind the handful of true gems of Klingon literature. For instance, Nick Nicholas's titanic efforts in bringing us not one but two Shakespearean plays truly beggar belief. Klingon literature is sparse enough as it is that I think we have a responsibility, as a community, to make our published works in Klingon be worth their while.

Secondly, the UTA purports to show what a "Klingon Bible" would look like. But anyone who's familiar with Klingon grammar can see that the pidgin that the UTA spits out doesn't look at all like a grammatical Klingon text. In some ways it's like saying that an English text gives you an idea of how Inuktitut looks. Yes, Inuktitut uses only roman letters, but they're put together in totally different ways and an Inuktitut text looks nothing like English in any way except the alphabet. So the UTA fails even in the premise it aims to fulfill.

QeS
 		 	   		  
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