[tlhIngan Hol] Is Star Trek: Discovery a new canon category?

[De'vID]

On 11 August 2017 at 02:46, Alan Anderson <qunchuy at alcaco.net> wrote:

> How would you answer if YOU were the one providing Klingon translations
> for the lines in Discovery scripts?
>

Well, now that it's been made public that you're Qov's backup translator
and you provided some of the lines, that puts your question in a different
context. :-)

On 11 August 2017 at 15:22, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Of people who have opted in to provide app usage statistics, there are
> currently over 5000 30-day-active users (meaning people who have
> actually used the app within the last 30 days), and over 64000 total
> installs. Probably most of these people are casual fans, but at least
> some are beginner or intermediate Klingon learners. But in any case,
> there are three orders of magnitude more users of {boQwI'} than there
> are Klingonists who use it.
>

Just to give an update on this. There was a 94% increase in downloads of
{boQwI'} in the past 7-day period compared to the week before, and a 41%
increase for the 30-day period compared to the previous one.

Something which I didn't expect was that the episodes have Klingon
subtitles, thanks to Lieven. (Only on Netflix, though, so they're not
available in the US or Canada, unfortunately). So instead of searching for
things in English, users have actually been typing the subtitles *in
Klingon* into {boQwI'} to break down their constituent parts.

There was another use case which I hadn't anticipated: people are using
{boQwI'} to *listen to* the text-to-speech engine repeat the lines spoken
on the show. Many people apparently can't understand the spoken Klingon in
the show even with Klingon subtitles, so they're listening to the
TTS-generated version for comparison. (The stats for the TTS downloads are
107% over the last 7-day period, and 74% over the last 30-day.) In other
words, the TTS engine is being used as a tool for people to learn to
understand spoken Klingon.

On 12 August 2017 at 00:58, ghunchu'wI' 'utlh <qunchuy at alcaco.net> wrote:

> I guess I don't get the point of putting it in boQwI'. If it is proper
> Okrandian Klingon, it will be things that are already in the app. If it is
> not, then it shouldn't be included as an example.


If a sentence is included in {boQwI'}, the entry can be annotated to
provide a breakdown of its components and grammar. If a sentence isn't
included, {boQwI'} will try to analyse it, but it doesn't understand things
like homophones (e.g., it will provide both "be quiet" and "exchange,
substitute" in its analysis for {yItamchoH!}). Another wrinkle is that the
TTS will only speak sentences which are included in the database. It can
still speak the individual parts of any sentence which isn't included, but
it just means the user has to listen to each part separately, so it won't
flow smoothly.

I completely understand and agree with the need to keep Okrandian canon
separate from stuff produced by other people. When I originally started
{boQwI'}, it was a canon database. But the user base has other ideas. If
you joined the Klingon language community early on, and you were lucky
enough to be able to attend the qep'a' and converse with other speakers,
subscribe to HolQeD, and so on, you may not appreciate how difficult it is
for a beginner now to pick up all of the vocabulary or develop an ear for
spoken Klingon. There are thousands of people out there who are interested
enough in the spoken Klingon on Discovery to the degree that they're trying
to convert what they hear into written Klingon so they can break down the
parts and understand them, and I want to make their entry into fully
learning Klingon as easy as possible. (I don't want to annoy beginners with
notes about canon they won't understand, but I also don't want to annoy
experts by mixing canon and non-canon material, so the DSC stuff will be
marked, but not in a very obtrusive way.)

I think there's a huge opportunity for the KLI here, to produce with CBS
(after the season, or the series, is over) a book of annotated transcripts
for all the Klingon language dialogue in the show, with commentary by Qov
and yourself on word choice, grammar, etc., some comments from Marc Okrand,
interviews with the Klingon actors and voice coach, a glossary/dictionary
in the back collecting the vocabulary used on the show, with lots of glossy
pictures of the cast and language experts. It can accompany the "making of"
video segment for the Klingon language parts of the show. (I was going to
suggest that this could be included in the book as a DVD, but nowadays I
guess it should just be streamed online.) There's clearly a market for
something like this.

-- 
De'vID
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol-kli.org/attachments/20171002/2eedcdf0/attachment-0001.htm>