<div dir="ltr">On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 3:02 PM, Robyn Stewart <<a href="mailto:robyn@flyingstart.ca">robyn@flyingstart.ca</a>> wrote:<br>><br>> At qep’a’, ghunchu’wi’ and I were reading aloud to each other from Green Eggs, just translating on the fly. When we got to the page with the goat, we just left it at “goatâ€. It’s an Earth creature. It has a shape, an odour, a set of behaviours, a history in literature and a whole raft of connotations. Why would you want to substitute another animal that can’t possibly be the same?<br>><br><div><br></div><div>I hear people do this all the time when speaking non-English around me.</div><div><br></div><div>When I worked at an auto shop, I had customers that would interject English auto part names into their non-English sentence.</div><div>Does their language have a term for that part of the car? Probably. But it's technical jargon for mechanics, so they don't know it.</div><div><br></div><div>When I worked for a credit card company, people would leave the more technical terms in English.</div><div><br></div><div>When I worked at Amazon, packages would be multi-lingual.<br>And unlike my other two examples, these translators had time to sit down and think about things,<br>and they left things in English as well. Often they were computer or phone terms.</div><div>USB was never translated, for example.<br><br><br>English also does this.<br>Qov's targh example, for example.<br>taco<br>déjà vu (personal hobby of mine is to ask people how to say this in their language; a lot of people don't seem to know)</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Since joining this list in 2002, I've noticed that a lot of Klingon speakers don't like doing this.</div><div>They like using Klingon words for things.</div><div>To the point that there's an rule on the list not to transliterate things, because we already know you're going to try.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Now, if I'm talking about an earth cat, I don't see a problem with calling it a {vIghro'}. The two are close enough IMO.</div><div>If someone calls their dog a {targh}, I roll my eyes, but know what they mean.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>I think the answer varies based on the project.</div><div>Reading a book aloud and translating on the fly for fun, I'd leave it as "goat".</div><div>Translating the book for publication, I'd substitute a known Klingon animal, and inform the illustrator of the substitution.</div><div>In that book, it's not important that we have a goat.</div><div><br></div><div>Even in The Three Billy Goats Gruff, I'm pretty sure we could change the animal and keep the story.</div><div><br></div><div>If, for some reason, keeping the goat as a goat is important, leave it as "goat".</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>That said, I am guilty of wanting Klingon names for Terran animals.</div><div>My 7yo son is obsessed with bunnies, and there was really no known Klingon animal to use instead.</div><div>And he's been asking what the Klingon word for "bunny" is for several years now.</div><div>So I did vote in the poll this Spring/Summer for the "animals" category.</div><div>Because, to my son, it is very important that we're talking about bunnies. We can't just substitute in another animal.</div><div>The same thing with my 9yo daughter and owls. But in her case, we had {lIr}.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>~naHQun</div></div>