Zompist Bboard Again

Yeah, I vaguely remember Yiuel doing Japanese in the last telephone game as well. If you all don't want to get typecast in the next game, start learning Piraha now!

Based on vijay's comment, I'm wondering if a two week deadline is too long. The passage isn't very long, but I assumed people would struggle with it. If more people finish early, are we willing to shorten the deadline to, say, 10 days? I suspect what's happened is that the passage vijay got is deceptively "easy," but full of things that will trap the unwary (unless vijay's translation has leveled all that out ).

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sun Sep 15, 2019 12:58 amYeah, I vaguely remember Yiuel doing Japanese in the last telephone game as well.

*finlay. Yiuel wasn't in the last one.

Based on vijay's comment, I'm wondering if a two week deadline is too long.

Eh, even with a two-week deadline, we can still send it in earlier anyway! But yeah, last time, we had only three days each, and even then, we did it in a week with (one team of) ten people.

I suspect what's happened is that the passage vijay got is deceptively "easy," but full of things that will trap the unwary (unless vijay's translation has leveled all that out ).

Lol, that may be part of the stuff that just doesn't translate well into Turkish.

You know, I didn't realize until just this moment that the very first link in Team 2 is a language with gender-neutral pronouns. This is going to be interesting.

Also, just so I don't have to say it every time: when you get a message from me, please give me a response so I know that you received it and plan to get it done within the deadline.

I don't even remember when the last one WAS let alone what I translated. I've done something into Latin a handful of times though.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sun Sep 15, 2019 5:20 amYou know, I didn't realize until just this moment that the very first link in Team 2 is a language with gender-neutral pronouns. This is going to be interesting.

So is every variety of Chinese I can think of (despite the invention in the previous century of gender-specific characters that are still pronounced identically), whereas the other languages all have gender-specific pronouns. I think it's possible to guess which pronoun refers to which character, though.

Also, just so I don't have to say it every time: when you get a message from me, please give me a response so I know that you received it and plan to get it done within the deadline.

If it helps at all, you can see whether we got your message by seeing whether the message you sent is still in your outbox or moved to "Sent Messages." If we haven't read it, it'll be in your outbox; if we have, then it'll be in "Sent Messages."

finlay wrote: ↑Sun Sep 15, 2019 6:39 amI don't even remember when the last one WAS

Almost four years ago, shortly after I joined (the old forum, of course)

let alone what I translated.

A passage from Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, first translated by the host into French and then translated from French to Latin before you translated it to Japanese

Ok it's ringing bells now. Funny thing is i actually finally read that book recently so i know what context that stuff is being said now...

If push comes to shove, I'll try Hebrew. It is my native language but I'm for most intents and purposes illiterate and not very good with the grammar.

Maybe Alon might be interested, his Hebrew is much better than mine and he knows French and German as well and perhaps other languages.

Sorry for the delay, I had a few days when I wasn't really up to it. Will get straight to it.

Since people are plowing/ploughing through the text, I propose that we change the deadline to ten days after receipt of the text. If anyone objects to this plan, please say so here.

In the past, I've always done a very literal translation (errors and all) of the text I've gotten. This time around I'm doing a freer translation, because, frankly, that's more fun for me.

I'm not used to also supplying an English translation. (Part of the fun, IMHO, is challenging yourself to translate directly from one L2 to another without falling back on your native language.) Should it be a free translation, a literal translation of the source translation, a literal translation of my translation, or what?

Honestly it's up to you - it's just to help everyone else follow it. Looking back on the archives, a lot of ppl's towards the end are full of "(??)". And there's at least one where I provided two English translations to show before and after (I think in this case it was to highlight how nonsensical the text I received was, but also to show how I'd interpreted it into something more coherent - and interpreted "se coucher" as "fucked").

In general I'd err towards freer translation. Ultimately we could get into the nitty gritty of translation theory, but it's a game innit.

How do you manage to see the intermediate translations? Do you need a KneeQuickie account? Because I can't see any of them, but I don't have one...

I tried to make my translation into English a literal but idiomatic translation of my translation into Turkish. I believe I did the same thing last time (except from Croatian to English instead of from Turkish to English).

EDIT: Also:

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Sep 18, 2019 12:48 pmSince people are plowing/ploughing through the text

Where are we in terms of the chain? Who currently has the text in each team?

Vijay wrote: ↑Wed Sep 18, 2019 2:38 pmWhere are we in terms of the chain? Who currently has the text in each team?

I'm working on DE>ES as I type this.

I will start updating the first post to reflect where we are in the process tomorrow. Both teams are currently on their second link.

Currently working on Turkish → Classical Chinese. Er, my Turkish has seen better days. (That's supposed to be part of the fun, right?)

I actually have a rules question. While part of me likes the idea of following Warring States punctuation and whitespace conventions (that is, a single big block of text with maybe an occasional mark to distinguish sentence-like or paragraph-like chunks), I think it might drive zompist mad. Maybe some anachronism would be okay?

I think some anachronism is pretty much necessary. It's not like we're doing this game on oracle bones or even paper!

My official stance is that you should do everything in your power to make a clear and coherent product. That means no deliberately translating idioms literally unless you think the result still makes sense, no using ancient punctuation if it will make the result nearly untranslatable, and no copying over typos or formatting mistakes. Pretend you're a translator who's actually trying to do a good job.

That said, I can't tell you what to do, and everyone is free to use their own judgment.

Vijay wrote: ↑Wed Sep 18, 2019 2:38 pm How do you manage to see the intermediate translations? Do you need a KneeQuickie account? Because I can't see any of them, but I don't have one...

I tried to make my translation into English a literal but idiomatic translation of my translation into Turkish. I believe I did the same thing last time (except from Croatian to English instead of from Turkish to English).

EDIT: Also:

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Sep 18, 2019 12:48 pmSince people are plowing/ploughing through the text

Where are we in terms of the chain? Who currently has the text in each team?

If you access KQ it gives you a choice between the new one and the archived one that was overrun by spam - click the archived one

Hmm, if I click on this, for example (from PGT XVII), I get: "There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, or search the related logs, but you do not have permission to create this page."

Also, Moose-tache, thanks for hosting the game!

If we're allowed to recommend dictionaries to each other: akam chinjir, you might find tureng.com useful if it isn't too late and you didn't already know about it. I use it a lot for Turkish.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Thu Sep 19, 2019 12:40 am My official stance is that you should do everything in your power to make a clear and coherent product. That means no deliberately translating idioms literally unless you think the result still makes sense, no using ancient punctuation if it will make the result nearly untranslatable, and no copying over typos or formatting mistakes. Pretend you're a translator who's actually trying to do a good job.

That said, I can't tell you what to do, and everyone is free to use their own judgment.

On the one hand, I think this could potentially make the game less fun; on the other hand, I also think trying to come up with the best translation possible could actually make the final product even more messed up! For example, if I had to translate the sentence "I know a song that gets on everybody's nerves" into Malayalam, and I knew that someone else had to translate my Malayalam into Mandarin Chinese, my Malayalam translation might be more literally translated as 'I know a song that climbs on everybody's head'. However, while 'climbs on everybody's head' is a perfectly idiomatic expression in Malayalam similar in connotation to 'gets on everybody's nerves' in the original English, it's not necessarily the best translation into Malayalam. More likely, we'd just say something like 'I know a song that nobody likes' in Malayalam, but a translation like this would probably distort the final translation even more.

Vijay wrote: ↑Thu Sep 19, 2019 11:45 amOn the one hand, I think this could potentially make the game less fun; on the other hand, I also think trying to come up with the best translation possible could actually make the final product even more messed up! For example, if I had to translate the sentence "I know a song that gets on everybody's nerves" into Malayalam, and I knew that someone else had to translate my Malayalam into Mandarin Chinese, my Malayalam translation might be more literally translated as 'I know a song that climbs on everybody's head'. However, while 'climbs on everybody's head' is a perfectly idiomatic expression in Malayalam similar in connotation to 'gets on everybody's nerves' in the original English, it's not necessarily the best translation into Malayalam. More likely, we'd just say something like 'I know a song that nobody likes' in Malayalam, but a translation like this would probably distort the final translation even more.

The last time we did this, I found that some of the more interesting mistakes came from idiomatic expressions that were unfamiliar to the participants. This is to be expected when we're stretching ourselves a bit and using languages we're not all that fluent in.

In my German > Spanish translation, there were several places where I could've cleaved closer to the syntax of the original. This would've produced something acceptable to Spanish-speakers (who are accustomed to reading a lot translated prose in their language) but it didn't have the ring of something composed originally in Spanish, so I made adjustments. (I'll save specific examples for the end of the game.) This may slightly increase the chance of a misunderstanding, but I think more likely is just a permanent shift in the syntax.