Re: new relay

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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