[tlhIngan Hol] dishonorable vs dishonored

Will Martin willmartin2 at mac.com
Thu Oct 31 06:19:50 PDT 2019


“Hypocrite” has a complex meaning that likely has no simple word-replacement translation into Klingon. A hypocrite’s specific behavior is to espouse and promote one behavior while violating his own advice to others. There’s a comedian who goes by the name “Brother Bob” who has expressed the hypocrite’s code of ethics:

“I don’t practice what I preach because I don’t preach to people like me.”

I think this is an instance where you have to decide what the original author intended the phrase “woe unto you scribes and phrases, hypocrites,” to mean at the most specific detail of meaning, including the context that your reader won’t have available to him, and then with that idea in mind, express it in Klingon, ignoring the original grammar or word choice. You translate the meaning, not the words. The word “hypocrite” may require an entire paragraph to convey.

It’s like saying, “Fred is just like Sam.” People who know both Fred and Sam and recognize the characteristics they have in common can understand that statement, but the rest of us are clueless, so if you want to express that to the rest of us, you have some explaining to do, and you won’t do it in one short sentence.

The person who originally wrote this knew what a scribe was in his time and culture, and the reference probably had little to do with making a living writing things down, which is all we really know from the word “scribe” in our modern context. The original context probably included a sense of corruption and abuse of power. You can translate the word “scribe” as a {ghItlhwI’}, but have you actually translated the meaning of the original statement?

And what about a “pharisee”? How is a Klingon to understand the original meaning.

And all of that doesn’t touch on “hypocrite”.

The original is a highly compressed statement based on a context that is unavailable to a Klingon you are translating this for.

Maybe it’s like translating a New York subway map for an indigenous village in a village in central Africa. Do you even want to do this?

Let the fireworks begin.

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.




> On Oct 30, 2019, at 2:38 PM, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I wonder, which of the two would be best to express "hypocrites", as in "woe unto you scribes and pharisees, hypocrites".
> 
> {HoQwI'pu'} or {QaqwI'pu'} ?
> 
> - bara'qa'
> 
> 
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