nth ZBB Translation Relay (results out)

[Glass Half Baked]

I spent so long trying to figure out where I had gone wrong with Man In Space's text. It turns out, I had understood it perfectly, it was just gibberish. And my efforts to twist it into a sensible narrative only made the translation worse.

[foxcatdog]

See my original text was generally much more similar to the one before It's just i put in intentional homophony which caused bradrn to translate it differently, favouring more nonsensical translations. Note the original text is quite nonsensical itself and doesn't make much sense so forgive me for my alternate interpretation.

“When the queen was born, a small knight of the capital gave her the gift of the feeling of wind”
“This gift is rare and valuable now”
“She was born to leave, he touched her heart within, the colour of the wind, which goes across the hill”
“Within her mothers sacred womb she was sacred earth, a little spark, a primal substance”
“She stood within six paces”
“And again her pure soul stood as her mother dressed her in tiny flowers”

[Darren]

See my original text was generally much more similar to the one before It's just i put in intentional homophony which caused bradrn to translate it differently, favouring more nonsensical translations. Note the original text is quite nonsensical itself and doesn't make much sense so forgive me for my alternate interpretation.

“When the queen was born, a small knight of the capital gave her the gift of the feeling of wind”
“This gift is rare and valuable now”
“She was born to leave, he touched her heart within, the colour of the wind, which goes across the hill”
“Within her mothers sacred womb she was sacred earth, a little spark, a primal substance”
“She stood within six paces”
“And again her pure soul stood as her mother dressed her in tiny flowers”

Why did you add three names into it then

[bradrn]

Yes, I think foxcatdog has serious questions to answer about what happened here. I am willing to post my gloss of his text if anyone is skeptical. Homophony was certainly part of it, and misinterpreting that is on me, but the deviations from the original text go well beyond simply mistranslating a few words.

[Darren]

Hey let's have some perspective here. This is just a game and it doesn't really matter. Foxcatdog went overboard with changing the text and yeah that was annoying, but we could still run the relay and have fun. We'll take this as a lesson for next time and be clear about the rules.

[bradrn]

Hey let's have some perspective here. This is just a game and it doesn't really matter. Foxcatdog went overboard with changing the text and yeah that was annoying, but we could still run the relay and have fun. We'll take this as a lesson for next time and be clear about the rules.

Sure. I suspect my post came out a bit harsher than I meant; sorry about that.

[Glass Half Baked]

Why did you add three names into it then

Darren.
You're the one who let foxcatdog participate.
It's all on you.

But actually I don't think the text was unsalvageable at that point. It truly did get more nonsensical every step of the way. I can only apologize to Travis, because Gullahonka has some very underspecified syntax in those longer sentences. It's a miracle he did as well as he did. And it's true that the original text was whimsical enough that there was no way to "sniff test" your translation to see if it made sense.

[bradrn]

Flan O’Brien ‘whimsical’? That doesn’t strike me as quite the right description…

[Glass Half Baked]

So it seems that policeman > queen was deliberate, but where did the rabbit come from?

Also, very fun that Bradrn's heroic attempt to parse "enimatee" became "Mary" as it got squeezed into various phonologies.

Another fun observation. I had no idea what "passing the rabbit" meant, so I assumed it was a colloquial way of saying "faster than a rabbit." But the comparative construction in Gullahonka is rather obtuse, and it was mistranslated as... "passing the rabbit."

[Travis B.]

Another fun observation. I had no idea what "passing the rabbit" meant, so I assumed it was a colloquial way of saying "faster than a rabbit." But the comparative construction in Gullahonka is rather obtuse, and it was mistranslated as... "passing the rabbit."

I did a lot of guessing when translating the Gullahonka, and I seriously thought that the second part of the text was some weird story about a rabbit and its young courtesy of foxcatdog.

[foxcatdog]

*łemanchi “rabbit/hill” N Stem: *-łamanchi-

[Ketsuban]

Confusion caused by the language happening to have homophony is one thing, but the fact Foxcatdog said they "put in intentional homophony" suggests they made substantive alterations to either their language or the story for the sole purpose of creating bear traps for people further down the chain, which doesn't really seem like it's in the spirit of the exercise.

Note the original text is quite nonsensical itself and doesn't make much sense so forgive me for my alternate interpretation.

This, on the other hand, is just false. It's got dream-like qualities and seems to be doing some scene-setting for a narrative the translators in this exercise are unaware of so they have to make some leaps in interpreting concepts like wind-watching, but it's not nonsensical. If this is intended as an implicit defence of "it was already nonsense so it didn't matter if I deliberately changed it" then that's intellectual vandalism. What's to stop everyone in the relay simply writing their own narrative instead of making a best-effort translation of the torch by the same reasoning?

[bradrn]

Confusion caused by the language happening to have homophony is one thing, but the fact Foxcatdog said they "put in intentional homophony" suggests they made substantive alterations to either their language or the story for the sole purpose of creating bear traps for people further down the chain, which doesn't really seem like it's in the spirit of the exercise.

Having worked through foxcatdog’s dictionary, I came to the conclusion that it was done deliberately, though of course I can’t know.

[Darren]

I'll compare foxcatdog's translation (in a loose sense) with the original text, since I also have the Pičíyyeihčipmatlapn text glossed and the lexicon handy. I didn't include any homonyms and kept definitions quite specific. In terms of straight grammar, fcd missed a lot of the argument indexing (although this was described in the grammar section) which led to a confusion of person and gender roles, but also most of the nouns have been changed to something much more fanciful.


When I was born there was a certain policeman present who had the gift of wind-watching.
→ “When the queen was born, a small knight of the capital gave her the gift of the feeling of wind”
Generally acceptable although fcd seemed to of missed my discussion of pronouns so he introduced a queen as the agent instead. Also the gender-indexing markers were thoroughly ignored, switching the speaker from male to female.

The gift is getting very rare these days.
→ “This gift is rare and valuable now”

Just after I was born he went outside and examined the colour of the wind that was blowing across the hill.
→ “She was born to leave, he touched her heart within, the colour of the wind, which goes across the hill”
Again understandable mis-steps although "heart" is introduced

He had a secret bag with him full of certain materials and bottles and he had tailor's instruments also.
→ “Within her mothers sacred womb she was sacred earth, a little spark, a primal substance”
Nothing in the lexicon was glossed as "sacred", "womb", "earth", "spark" or "primal"; there were free nouns which were unambiguously glossed as "material" and "bottle" and a NP of "instrument of cloth-work-NOM" (simplified slightly). "womb" seems to be a fanciful interpretation of "bag" due to the gender misunderstanding; the rest is independently created nonsense.

He was outside for about ten minutes.
→ “She stood within six paces”
Not sure what was going on here; the line in Pičíyyeihčipmatlapn read "outside-stand-indic-past for f-ten.minutes". But in his other translation fcd gets it correct.

When he came in again he had a little gown in his hand and he made my mother put it on me.
→ “And again her pure soul stood as her mother dressed her in tiny flowers”
The "pure soul" is more fantasy, and the word for "gown", ihppat^a, was glossed as "gown". I will however take the blame for "tiny" in place of "little"; I seem to of made a typo by writing *tu tu instead of tu u for "little and".

[bradrn]

He was outside for about ten minutes.
→ “She stood within six paces”
Not sure what was going on here; the line in Pičíyyeihčipmatlapn read "outside-stand-indic-past for f-ten.minutes". But in his other translation fcd gets it correct.

This one actually makes sense. As I recall, in the dictionary a pasi was defined as a unit of time such that 6 pasi = 10 minutes; ‘pace’ is an Anglicisation (albeit a confusing one).

But then, also, that English translation does not actually correspond to the Manchakaa text I received — he added some further extra stuff into that one.

[foxcatdog]

Confusion caused by the language happening to have homophony is one thing, but the fact Foxcatdog said they "put in intentional homophony" suggests they made substantive alterations to either their language or the story for the sole purpose of creating bear traps for people further down the chain, which doesn't really seem like it's in the spirit of the exercise.

On the contrary i think that's part of the fun.

[Darren]

This one actually makes sense. As I recall, in the dictionary a pasi was defined as a unit of time such that 6 pasi = 10 minutes; ‘pace’ is an Anglicisation (albeit a confusing one).

I see.

But then, also, that English translation does not actually correspond to the Manchakaa text I received — he added some further extra stuff into that one.

Yeah. Whether or not your translation is accurate, he's obviously added a lot of irrelevant extra things. He seems to have translated my text, then changed some details to fit in with his style of conworld (the text he described as "[his] original text"), then he's fixed on these new details and made them the subject of the story. Queens, the Earth, axes, nests, wombs, sparks, hearts, souls and flowers did not feature in the original text, nor even in any of the glosses of my translation, so he's actively added all of those, then made the queen (his own character) the protagonist, made it a creation text (again the earth was not mentioned) and added a few cities and characters for good measure.


If you want to rebut this, foxcatdog, please provide a full gloss of your Manchakaa text.

[Ketsuban]

Might the confusion be that what Foxcatdog wants is not a translation relay but a localisation relay, passing a text through a series of con-cultural rather than con-linguistic lenses?

[Zju]

Might the confusion be that what Foxcatdog wants is not a translation relay but a localisation relay, passing a text through a series of con-cultural rather than con-linguistic lenses?

...and stuff like implicit localisation is largely why I don't feel like taking part in these anymore.

Let's stick to linguistics, please - it's in the title.

[Travis B.]

Might the confusion be that what Foxcatdog wants is not a translation relay but a localisation relay, passing a text through a series of con-cultural rather than con-linguistic lenses?

...and stuff like implicit localisation is largely why I don't feel like taking part in these anymore.

Let's stick to linguistics, please - it's in the title.

This is foxcatdog we're talking about. Next time he should be kept out of these things, as we know what he'll do if he isn't.