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Re: new relay

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 30, 2001, 17:18
On Wed, 30 May 2001, Padraic Brown wrote:

> On Wed, 30 May 2001, Aidan Grey wrote: > > >--- bjm10@CORNELL.EDU wrote: > >> The thing about poetry is that it is much more > >> likely to be deeply > >> entrenched in a set of assumptions than might a > >> prose selection. Part of > >> the problem is that poetry is an extreme in > >> metaphor, which would > >> probably get lost on the first translation. > > > > That's part of the point, isn't it? Each translation > >would have to modify the metaphors into a new > >mind-set, as represented by a language. > > Right. And there's no reason why a 100% correspondance > has to be made. The job of translator isn't to plug > words from Language A into words of Language B. It's > to take the ideas that are expressed in the words of > Langauge A and render them comprehensibly into ideas > expressed by words of Language B.
Agreed--I think this will be one of the funnest parts: seeing how metaphors get mangled and mutated across conlangs.
> Sometimes this is easy. The job of every translator on > Earth is made easy by the simple fact that we're all > human and have certain things in common. Take a world > with more than one race; or, in this game, translating > from species to species and you get interesting problems.
<happy sigh> (Sorry, science fiction instinct taking over.)
> >Even prose > >will do this. Unless it's very boring prose. > > A technical treatise on the energy levels of electrons in > hydrogen should be approximately the same in any human or > alien language. A treatise on how to capture a mate can > get tricky.
Er--and maybe not even then. Chevraqis in its not-yet-developed future is spoken by people who *do* develop "modern" technology, but on a world that also has magic; and I'm not sure every language would depict electrons as being voluntary actors or actees. =^) (OTOH it wouldn't make a *huge* difference to the translator, just maybe sound weird.) YHL

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Padraic Brown <pbrown@...>