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In my quest to widen the vocabulary of my artificial language, I've been translating pieces of various books. Lately it's been a thorough job of Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone (the version which I own). Right now I'm working on the part when Harry visits Hagrid's hut for the first time. Outside it sits a crossbow, and deciding how to translate crossbow is one of the interesting problems of linguistics. Not so long ago I would have just skipped it. It's not that important of a word for everyday conversation after all. There are quite a few words like names of plants and herbs which I just explain in footnotes and don't translate even now. But with the vocabulary getting fairly substantial, a crossbow seems like something that would have easily developed in an alien civilization as my language was supposed to. I could just pick some arbitrary sounds, after all that's what most of it has been till now. But more and more I've been trying to relate new words to old ones, making use of word-roots and crossbow seemed like a good candidate.
It would be easy enough to translate the pieces 'cross' and 'bow' and stick them together, but I have the feeling my civilization wouldn't see the thing in that way. I looked up the word in Russian for comparison. Instead of focusing on the shape of the object the Russians named it for the 'mysterious' way they saw it operating. They call it a self-shooter. Curious I looked it up in German and found they named it neither for its shape nor its function, but how it's held. It's an arm-breast. So having assured myself that there is neither a Europe-wide cultural view of the object nor any universal view of seeing it, I've chosen to translate the way it's operated, so in my language it will now be the equivalent of a crank-bow (which, by the way, gave me an excuse to make up a word for crank).
Translating has become very interesting because it forces me to look extremely carefully at what I'm reading. It's interesting how many things we would normally see as flaws are easily overlooked in a good story. In the beginning of Pride and Prejudice in translating you feel like if they all get together one more time to discuss how everyone feels about each and every other person you're going to run screaming into the night. Jane Austin as many of you know, has some bad grammar, and frankly doesn't completely understand all of the words she is using. In translating that, you just put in the right word and the right grammar and get on with it. Yet in reading it for pleasure you pass over all the repetitions and bumps, without caring much that they are there. Ecco's The Name of the Rose is quite bogged down with high-falutin' religious and Biblical turns of phrase run on top of each other in many sentences. It's so much so that my free-flowing alien language starts stumbling all over itself with all the subordinate clauses. The only rescue is to chop it up into shorter, less convoluted sentences. Translating Harry Potter has been fun and comparatively easy. Rowling consciously or unconsciously uses quite a bit of alliteration. Which means that when I have to look up a word in my growing dictionary, likely the next word I'll need to look up will be nearby, which is a nice time saver! One of Rowling's quirks is that she frequently uses what is a stylistic mistake, at least in American circles. She frequently joins semi-related sentences together within the same sentence with commas. This is know as comma splicing. It's easy enough to fix. You just replace the commas with periods and capitalize the appropriate words. This makes it sound better in my language, so it stands out when I'm translating. Rowling also uses a lot of idioms. You don't notice them when your are reading, because every native English speaker uses them. But when I am trying to translate into a language which supposedly would not be at all familiar with those turns of phrase, I have to sit there and think, 'Now, exactly what-the-heck does that mean?' I can feel what it means with the greatest of ease, but being able to express what it means in words isn't always so easy.
It would be easy enough to translate the pieces 'cross' and 'bow' and stick them together, but I have the feeling my civilization wouldn't see the thing in that way. I looked up the word in Russian for comparison. Instead of focusing on the shape of the object the Russians named it for the 'mysterious' way they saw it operating. They call it a self-shooter. Curious I looked it up in German and found they named it neither for its shape nor its function, but how it's held. It's an arm-breast. So having assured myself that there is neither a Europe-wide cultural view of the object nor any universal view of seeing it, I've chosen to translate the way it's operated, so in my language it will now be the equivalent of a crank-bow (which, by the way, gave me an excuse to make up a word for crank).
Translating has become very interesting because it forces me to look extremely carefully at what I'm reading. It's interesting how many things we would normally see as flaws are easily overlooked in a good story. In the beginning of Pride and Prejudice in translating you feel like if they all get together one more time to discuss how everyone feels about each and every other person you're going to run screaming into the night. Jane Austin as many of you know, has some bad grammar, and frankly doesn't completely understand all of the words she is using. In translating that, you just put in the right word and the right grammar and get on with it. Yet in reading it for pleasure you pass over all the repetitions and bumps, without caring much that they are there. Ecco's The Name of the Rose is quite bogged down with high-falutin' religious and Biblical turns of phrase run on top of each other in many sentences. It's so much so that my free-flowing alien language starts stumbling all over itself with all the subordinate clauses. The only rescue is to chop it up into shorter, less convoluted sentences. Translating Harry Potter has been fun and comparatively easy. Rowling consciously or unconsciously uses quite a bit of alliteration. Which means that when I have to look up a word in my growing dictionary, likely the next word I'll need to look up will be nearby, which is a nice time saver! One of Rowling's quirks is that she frequently uses what is a stylistic mistake, at least in American circles. She frequently joins semi-related sentences together within the same sentence with commas. This is know as comma splicing. It's easy enough to fix. You just replace the commas with periods and capitalize the appropriate words. This makes it sound better in my language, so it stands out when I'm translating. Rowling also uses a lot of idioms. You don't notice them when your are reading, because every native English speaker uses them. But when I am trying to translate into a language which supposedly would not be at all familiar with those turns of phrase, I have to sit there and think, 'Now, exactly what-the-heck does that mean?' I can feel what it means with the greatest of ease, but being able to express what it means in words isn't always so easy.