On 8/17/2021 10:55 AM, Will Martin wrote:
I’ve long argued that the Klingon is not encoded English, pushing people to avoid the common beginner-translation errors that people do in most languages, believing that translation is a process with specific rules, and if you follow those rules and do the process you’ve translated text from one language to the other, right?
I think calling this idea encoded English does a disservice to the student. They're not trying to create a cipher for English; they genuinely aren't familiar with idea that translation is not an exact science. They tend to think that there is a "right way" to translate something. Even the idea that the glosses in /The Klingon Dictionary/ are translations is a bit of an eye-opener when it comes. When you berate a student that Klingon is not a code for English, you're imputing intentions and thoughts to them that they're probably not having. The understanding they lack is that translation is subjective, not that it's not a cipher.
That said, I’ve come to realize recently that most formal language learning goes through an academic filter that fails to teach anyone how to reliably translate any language to any other language. The best translators always have years of “native language” experience in both languages.
Er... how did you determine this? I mean, I imagine that most formal language learning these days is aimed at producing conversational speakers, not translators. My guess is that translation has its own formal educational departments, and the "best translators" you mention above have an education that includes these things. The difference in Klingon is that the /only/ learning materials we have are explicitly geared toward producing conversational speakers, and those only have "brutish" ability. Why would we expect to see expert translators of Klingon appear out of the blue?
Most American Sign Language interpreters, for instance, are CODAs (Children of Deaf Adults) or otherwise have been raised in a family that included a Deaf person with whom the interpreter actively communicated with from childhood.
Why?
My first guess would be that the best way to learn American Sign Language fluently is to practice it with people who use it.
Consider that if a native Basque speaker with no experience with English outside of their education had spent years in both early and higher education learning English took a vacation to Georgia and heard somebody say, “[It] don’t make me no nevah mind.” I bracket the “It” because it is optional in this common dialectic sentence. They also might have difficulty figuring out the verbal tone and facial expression that goes with it. They’d get the sense that it was a negative response, perhaps, but the rest might be mysterious.
Native speakers of English from places outside Georgia can go to Georgia and be just as confused as your native Basque speaker. Your Basque speaker simply hasn't learned the local dialect.
Meanwhile, unless it becomes one of the random idioms that Maltz shares with us, we’ll never have that native experience of encountering “Don’t make me no nevah mind.” Lacking a deeper cultural experience with the race, we’ll never speak like natives.
Nope.
So, given that I live in a household that can’t completely agree on the “proper” way to say things in English, it’s interesting how vehemently this list argues about The Right Way to say things in Klingon, myself, in the past, among the most extreme in this opinion, though I’ve softened over the years.
The list doesn't argue about The Right Way to say things in Klingon; it argues about what Klingons would find acceptable. If I say point to a muffin and say /I eated that car,/ what I said is just flat wrong. One might say that /eated/ is an overapplication of the rules that typically shows up in children, so that if you hear a child say it you might accept it, but it clearly isn't a car and I clearly haven't eaten it yet. The sentence is The Wrong Way to say what I want to say. But I have a native understanding of English /and/ a studied one, and I can explain exactly what rules I'm breaking. I can tell exactly where the line between acceptable and unacceptable is, or, if the line is fuzzy, how acceptable it might be. Klingon has no native speakers. No one has that sense of right and wrong. We can't ask a native speaker to give us the answer. Klingon, as presented to us by Okrand, is a dead language. You've got to accept this or go home. Some people want to make Klingon into a living language, and this is kind of like rehabilitating ancient Hebrew into modern Hebrew: you can't ask any native speakers of ancient Hebrew to explain their native sense of the language. If Klingon goes down this road, then there is absolutely no reason to care about what is "canonical": Klingon becomes divorced from its Star Trek context and becomes something else. Personally, I would lose interest at that point. Not because I'm role-playing being in the Star Trek universe, but because Klingon itself is an act of Subcreation (to use a term from Tolkien), and my ability to sustain Secondary Belief in it depends on the author's skill at his Subcreation. If Klingon were to pass out of its Star Trek context and become a "real" language, the Subcreation would fail and I would be left with trying to suspend my disbelief in it, making it completely unsatisfactory. And that, to me, has always been the only real point to this ridiculous language. It's like a story or song, well told, that you feel perfectly comfortable believing in, even when you know it's fiction. It's like the Muppets: we all know they're just puppets, but we also believe that Kermit is a real "person" (frog). It's why when people visit the set of Sesame Street and one off the puppeteers meets them with Cookie Monster or Oscar and they're standing right there with a Muppet on their hand, these people start crying: they're meeting /people/ they've loved all their lives, never mind the puppeteer standing right there. That's what Klingon is. It's a Subcreation that you can believe in /because/ of its Star Trek backstory. Abandon that, and it's like meeting Kermit the Frog, only they've decided to "improve" him by making him blue and having him talk with a Brooklyn accent. You don't do that, because you destroy the Subcreation. So no, the arguments aren't about The Right Way to speak Klingon. They're about How Klingons Speak Klingon. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name