On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 11:35 AM, Lieven <levinius@gmx.de> wrote:
Am 09.12.2016 um 15:06 schrieb mayqel qunenoS:
I didn't mean to say "your mother cooked this damn good food"; I meant "your mother cooked this god damn food".
Well actually a) there's not much difference and b) you are trying to translate something Klingon has no concept for.
Any expression that Christians use with the word "god" is only to thank or to curse their God (the "Lord").
Most negative expressions using "God" involve God cursing someone or something, not the speaker cursing God. Using "god damn" as an adjective is just a shortening of "god-damned", i.e., damned by God. A literal translation of "god damn food" would probably be {Soj'e' qIchbogh joH'a'} "food that the Lord has condemned", although it lacks the bite of the original and, as Lieven said, curses involving religion are probably not a big thing in Klingon culture. {Sojvam vutta' SoSlI' jay'} should suffice to get most of the meaning across. I'm not sure that {'Igh} quite works here. The description in KGT suggests it means something like "doesn't work right, prone to failure, unlucky" and not simply just bad in general.