Translating Gunnerkrigg Court (Update: Jun 29)

[Deleted]

I see! Thanks for clearing that up!

The kanji in column 29, row 23 of that image may possibly mean »big«. This is the only one I know apart from the three that make up »nihongo« and the character that the Chinese pronounce as »zhōng« (provided they speak Standard Chinese) in »zhōngguó«. Can you tell that East Asian languages are not my forte?

There's a few German loanwords in Japanese, like »arubaito«, but probably not too many. Regardless, Germany has actually exported its fair deal of culture, as it would appear: Hungarian, for instance, has loaned »joke« (vicc, »Witz«) from German of all languages. The irony bleeds my heart dry!

One of the strangest things about Germany is that its name is subject to quite some variation across the languages of this world. Obviously, it's called »Deutschland« by the natives. The French call it »Allemagne« after the Alemanni tribe, and most other Romance (and Celtic) languages similarly so, but the Germans are called »tedeschi« in Italian, which shares the Medieval Latin origins of »deutsch«; the British and Russians call us »Germans«, using a considerably older Latin term. The Finnish language employs the bizarre »Saksa« (Saxony) for the whole country, which I find hilarious, whereas the Czech use »Nemecko«, meaning »land of the silent ones«, originally used for all foreign countries. In Lithuania, it's »Vokietija«, a word that I cannot explain, nor could a single Lithuanian I asked. The most glorious name for Germany, however, is found in modern Nahuatl: the inimitable »Teutontlālpan«. It is both absurdly funny and absolutely fitting.

[Covalent]

Yep, 大 means "big" or "large"! And were you talking about 中? In Japanese, the word for the Chinese language is actually written differently. In Chinese it's 中文, whereas in Japanese it's 中国語.

And yeah! アルバイト means "part-time job". There's also kanji for "Germany", but no one uses them; katakana tend to be favoured. 独逸 if you were curious, but most of the time it's just written ドイツ. The funny thing is that first kanji means "alone". まだドイツ語を習いたいんですが、時間がないので日本語しか習えません。 (I'm still not the best at this. Also, Google Translate doesn't work for Japanese, so just a heads up, lol.) The one thing I find interesting about Japanese is that it's what linguists call an agglutinative language, meaning that you can keep slapping on more and more grammatical constructions to a root to create a whole combination of different phrases. For example 暖かくなりませんでした　or すわなければなりませんです.

Huh, well, in Russian (which I speak) we say Германиа for "Germany" and Немцы for "Germans". I should also note that the vowel ы doesn't appear in any other language that I know of.

[Deleted]

Here's another case, then, in which I should have paid closer attention to what I had written up there. Of course, you're right. I had inserted »Russian« into the sentence later and overlooked that it referred to »Germans«, not »Germany«!

I know that the sound of ы appears in Polish, Czech (both of which I don't speak at all, yet; but soon I'll have to) and Northern Welsh (which I speak very poorly), and I'm fairly sure Swedish has a very similar sound, at least. I guess it's still rather uncommon, though.

While I cannot comment on your Japanese examples, an agglutinative language that I'm acquainted with would be Hungarian, which uses a wide range of suffixes to express the grammatical function of almost every word in any given sentence. The result reads like the opposite of English.

[Covalent]

Huh, that's interesting because Japanese does the same thing. Instead of prepositions, they're postpositions and the grammar is essentially like English flipped upside-down. Like "in school" is 学校で which translates literally as "school in". There's a lot of particles that act as postpositions. I'll give another example using comparatives. あのリンゴはこのリンゴより大きいです。 "That apple is bigger than this apple", but literally translated as "That apple [topic particle] this apple [comparative modifier] big is." By the way, superlatives are constructed by putting 一番　(number one, or first) in front of the adjective being modified. Like.. 一番高い ("most expensive").

[Deleted]

Same thing in Hungarian. All locative relations are either expressed by something like twenty different »case« suffixes, or by various postpositions, so that »a belvárosban lakom« literally translates to »the downtown-in live-I«. And strangely enough, the one single prefix I've found in Hungarian is likewise used to construct the superlative.

Iranian is another such suffix-happy language, albeit with a lot of prefixes as well, for a change. What's more, the addition of a short E to basically any Iranian word creates a semantic link to the following word, called »ezâfe«, connection. Thereby, one can create phrases like, let's say, »ân šalvâre qadimíye sefide pedaram«: »those white, old-fashioned trousers of my father's«. The last word in an ezâfe chain receives no short E, signifying its completion.

Literally, the chain in this example translates as »that trousers-(link) antiquity-(adjective quality)-(link) white-(link) father-my«. Note the possessive suffix »-am«, and how the word order is essentially reversed from English again.

On another note, I find it rather amusing that, since short vowels are usually left unwritten in Iranian script, you won't actually see the ezâfe chains unless you know that they're required.

oh and the Iranian word for snow is »barf«.

[Covalent]

Are you a linguist?

[Deleted]

Not yet. I've been taking Law at Heidelberg, the first semester has recently ended, and I did quite well overall. Nevertheless, I've found that I can't bring myself to love this dreary subject, and it chips away at my diligence, so I'm planning a switch to Slavistics (75%) with Byzantine Archaeology and Art History (25%) thrown into the mix. Although I've always been interested in language, history, and literature, I've arrogantly never quite considered studying any of those, which may have been a mistake. Luckily, I'm not actually losing much time if I switch, since Law takes much longer than a Bachelor of Arts, anyway.

The only languages I can speak with assurance and proficiency are German and English, and the former is my native language, so I'm actually underachieving in this respect. I wish I could speak all the languages, but that alone doesn't qualify me for anything yet, and while the tid-bits of basic knowledge I've gathered from this or that foreign tongue may come in handy sometimes — since structural parallels occur where you'd never expect it — I'm ways off from the scientific approach. It's really just another hobby of mine. Until, well, I might make it my job a few years into the future. We'll see.

[GK Sierra]

One thing I will never regret is not following my fellow history major's pleas to join them in going to law school.

All of them are now less rich and more unhappy than they had anticipated. I'm not rich either, but at least I got to do what I wanted, and that makes a huge amount of difference.

[Señor Goose]

Holy shiiiit: this thread is blowing my mind! I can barely grapple one language, but goddammit if you aren't a bunch of polyglots!

Also, what sound does the 'bl' letter make?

[Covalent]

Mar 13, 2014 5:55:52 GMT Señor Goose said:

Holy shiiiit: this thread is blowing my mind! I can barely grapple one language, but goddammit if you aren't a bunch of polyglots!

Also, what sound does the 'bl' letter make?

Close central unrounded vowel, apparently. IPA symbol [ɨ]

[Deleted]

Basically, say »ee«, but put your tongue further back in the mouth, raised in the direction of the palate. If the result sounds Russian to you, it's probably not far off.

I also put thedoomblahsong's post in the OP, so that newcomers to the thread may find it more easily.

[Covalent]

It should probably also be noted that Japanese has a fairly extensive number of homophones. For example, over 50 different kanji pronounced カン. Of course, I need to explain a bit about the readings of kanji to explain the amount of homophones. Most kanji have two types of reading, the 音読み and the 訓読み (some exceptions have either one or the other, but most have both). The 音読み or On reading is the Chinese reading adapted to Japanese phonology. The 訓読み or Kun reading is the native Japanese pronunciation for the word. As a general rule, On readings are used in kanji compounds, and kun readings are used for verbs or words containing intervening hiragana or okurigana. I'll list one of many exceptions to this rule; 手紙 is pronounced as てがみ, which is a combination of the kun reading for "hand" and "paper", albeit with rendaku (which is another story entirely).

The main point here is that when Japanese adapted these characters, remember that Chinese is a tonal language, while Japanese is not. Chinese words can be differentiated by tones. When the pronunciations entered Japanese, they lost their tones, and so you ended up with a whole bunch of characters pronounced the same. So, when you encounter homophones more than likely you need context clues to figure out which one is being meant.

[DesTyn]

Hello Everyone!

I started to translate the Gunnerkrigg Court into Hungarian.

Here's a little preview of the project:

Attachments:

[Gulby]

I need some help here... In chapter 23, page 584, what is Parley going to say exactly ? "You sap..." What does it mean ? The only thing I could find is an entry in Urban Dictionary search engine, but I don't know if it is accurate. :/

Thank you for your help !

[Deleted]

www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sap, noun, second definition

I recommend the website in general, they also have some rather good quizzes for practice

[Gulby]

Well, thank you very much !

[Daedalus]

Spanish translation has begun. More help is always welcome. Or just check it out if you're interested!

We've decided on chapter names (which were hard), character names (which were easy), and the translation of 'blinker stone' ('joya éter' - ether jewel). We are now starting the actual translation of pages.

Also, is anyone here willing to help the Spanish-translators turn Spanish plaintext into glorious Gunner-ified pages, or at least teach me how to? I lack the proper scripts at the moment.

[hnau]

@korba:

Some of the links to the German translations are no longer working:

Disabled link
Access to this link has been disabled. Please ask the owner of the shared link to send a new link to access the file or the folder.

I suppose this is related to the web vulnerability they closed in May. There are instructions how to re-enable the links or create new ones.

Thanks.

[Deleted]

I've replaced all the links to the Dropbox with fresh ones. Thank you!

Edit: I've also updated the directory to include translations of all the chapter titles. Chapters 17, 25-28 and 38 didn't translate too well, but I'm fond of how Chapter 22 adapts to the German language. "Bande" can mean "bonds" or "ties", as in "Familienbande" (family ties), but also "gang" or "bunch", as in "Räuberbande" (gang of robbers). In the case of Chapter 45, I might have misunderstood what the title actually refers to.

Corrections, suggestions, and beer are always welcome.

[Deleted]

I've just finished translating another chapter after three months of not lifting too many fingers for this project. Maybe I'll even work on the next one? In the meantime, enjoy the new and improved layout that should look exactly the same as before.

[Deleted]

Chapter 16 raises the count of translated pages to 360. If I arranged them all in a circle, they would form a circle. Amazing.

[Deleted]

The translation of Chapter 17 went mostly smoothly. If anyone happens to know the German translation for "rain guard", I'll shower such a scholar with my finest Chardonnay maybe.

[eightyfour]

Jun 29, 2014 15:53:26 GMT @korba said:

If anyone happens to know the German translation for "rain guard"...

Interesting. If there is a corresponding proper name for that thing in German, either the internet does not know it (*gasp* blashphemy!) or my google-foo is just not strong enough.

[fish]

Jun 29, 2014 15:53:26 GMT @korba said:

If anyone happens to know the German translation for "rain guard", I'll shower such a scholar with my finest Chardonnay maybe.

Here is what a quick goolge/wikipedia session revealed to me:

A rain guard is a piece of leather with the purpose of preventig water from entering the scabbard. Of course there is nothing to be found about it on the German wikipedia page. But a google-search for "schwert leder wasser regen schutz" gives a .pdf document as the first result ("Schwert und Dolch aus der Zeit der Schlacht am Morgarten, 1315"). In this document you'll find the sentence:

Vom Gehilze (Griffholz) und der ehemaligen hölzernen oder ledernen Scheide oder gar dem ledernen Ueberfanglappen, welcher das Eindringen des Regenwassers in die Scheide zu verhindern hatte, haben sich keine Resten erhalten.

However, google gives you NOTHING if you look for Überfanglappen... which is suspicious.


Sooo, you could either go with this, or simply call it "Regenschutz", haha.



Now let's meet up and open that fine Chardonnay of yours!

[nightwind]

Well, I found this: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rain_guard&redirect=no
It's got nothing to do with rain, more with swords. Maybe it helps?

If it's really the rain you're guarding against, "Regenabdichtung" seems to get close.

Of course context would be appreciated.

Edit: Ah, ninja'd.

[Deleted]

fish:
The quoted passage matches the purpose of the rain guard, so I'll go ahead and translate it as "Überfanglappen", perhaps the most German of all possible compound nouns. I'm irrevocably sure that no other language could describe the purpose of something so exactly, yet at the same time obfuscate its context with such hilarious stubbornness. I can't even read that word without thinking of Loriot.

It remains suspicious, though, that the only document to feature this term refers to the Battle of Morgarten, whose historical scale is unclear to the extent that it might have been a complete fabulation. This whole affair is starting to resemble the search for Uqbar.

As for the Chardonnay: I hope you appreciate the works of Schopenhauer and aren't secretly Peer Steinbrück, because the best I can actually offer is some €8 bottle of punk-ass Pinot and that's going to require some fierce exercise in Wille und Vorstellung. If you're anywhere near Hamburg in August and find the previous sentence to sound vaguely like a decent idea, there'd sure be time enough for a meet-up.


nightwind:
At first, I had been struggling to find a different, archaic meaning of "rain" because it didn't occur to me that the "rain guard" would actually, well, guard the sword from rain. I had imagined it to be some manner of thickened metal part used for parrying.

This is, by the way, the first word to give me such trouble translating (the doormat in Chapter 2 was beastly in a different way).

[Gulby]

Er, I may use a little help here. I'm currently translating chapter 25, and was wondering about the term "Sky watcher". Is that a proper noun or a common noun ? If it is a common noun, the only translation I could find was "vigie" in french (the sailor that was on top of the boat mast to scream "earth ! earth !" ), and I don't know if it really fits the situation here. My translation policy is usually to keep proper nouns the same (The Court is "La Court" and Gillitie woods are "les bois de Gillitie", for exemple), but if it isn't a proper noun, then I have to translate it the right way... Any help, please ? (And I'm reaaaaaaaaaaally sorry for my english, I'm tired, having a baby isn't exactly a sinecure...)

[Daedalus]

I think it's just a descriptor, and thus it should be translated as 'the one who watches the sky'.

[Deleted]

There's a precedent in John Keats, "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer", ll. 9-10:

Then I felt like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken, [...]

With my limited knowledge of French, the most direct translation I can point you towards is "observateur du ciel", which might sound too clunky. I really like "vigie" as well, since Sky Watcher's location atop the belfry is similarly isolated, and his task demands constant attention. Not only that, but the robots "remembering" Jeanne's death could also be called a vigil; overall, the word's solemn flow, far from ponderous, and its religious connotation fit with how seriously the gracile Sky Watcher takes his job. "Vigie céleste", maybe?

[Gulby]

Thanks, both of you ! :3 I'll pick vigie, then !