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Post by Deleted on Sept 22, 2015 20:37:30 GMT
This thread concerns a tentative fan translation of the comic "Gunnerkrigg Court" into "German". This bountiful language consists of bouncy words like Schöllkraut, Schabernack and Schutzverordnung, and its native speakers, such as I, insist that a frolicsome staccato can substitute the fundamental spice of fluent speech. The humid countryside of Germany is chiefly populated by demure mushrooms, whose trivial names inherited from Medieval times may stealthily translate to "a vixen's huge fart". (Namely, these fellows.) I cannot fathom why such a treasure has been left to sleep unstirred for so long. Time to fetch my magic lantern: Kapitel Eins: Der Schatten und der Roboter. (Incomplete.) If this thing shall move at all, it will move slowly. (This time with pictures, at least.) Footnote: I'm using Uncial Antiqua as the only font, seeing as I found no version of Ale and Wenches or Spirit Medium that supported the Extended Latin characters employed by German orthography, most notably the letter that looks like a pregnant woman in profile with her hairless head bent towards the earth in melancholy (melanchthony?), one fiercely iconic invention that the Swiss saw no use for. In sober terms, I'm talking about an incidental relic of typesetting that somehow added itself to the canonical inventory. I recall that an unremarkable brand of milk chocolate used to bear the same name. |
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Post by Toloc on Sept 23, 2015 7:57:18 GMT
Nice idea, I might volunteer to provide some translations if I find the time.
The biggest problem that comes to mind would be the fact that German tends to be quite a bit longer than English with equivalent meaning. Fitting the text in the bubbles while keeping it at an acceptable size seems problematic.
Might I suggest a different font face? Uncial Antiqua gets very hard to read below a certain size.
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Post by Daedalus on Sept 23, 2015 8:08:48 GMT
@korba: Um. Weren't you...already doing this? Daedalus is confused  |
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Post by Toloc on Sept 23, 2015 8:58:13 GMT
Ah, that explains my very fleeting recollection of someone else doing a German translation. Thought I misremembered.
Alas, the last post actually adding something to that project was more than a year ago. It would probably still make sense to continue where they left off instead of starting anew.
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Post by keef on Sept 23, 2015 13:42:13 GMT
Good to see you started again @korba, difficult to read font though. Is there nothing else with an eszett? Except for chapter one I saved the cleaned pages (both text and jpeg artefacts removed from the bubbles, although of course not if the only text is "uh" or "antimony!"). I'll drop them in the main directory of my Dutch translation. |
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Post by Deleted on Sept 23, 2015 17:15:05 GMT
Your posts will be addressed posthaste in order chronological: Nice idea, I might volunteer to provide some translations if I find the time. Good to hear, thank you. The last time I did this, I've seen several people make great contributions -- hnau went over every single chapter to make improvements and famously defeated the dread doormat in Basil's lair, eightyfour spotted an opportunity to use a rare and perfect synonym for "beginning", and fish caught the correct, immensely esoteric translation of "rain guard". (It's Überfanglappen, proving that the German language can even disassemble swords into bizarre, bureaucratic contraptions with its incentive towards "corkscrew reasoning" -- thanks, Pterry; I couldn't have said it better.) Tell me about it. Having typed in the first boxful of German, I was inexorably reminded of my silly Prussian Procrustes comment of eighteen months ago. Justified text-alignment makes this even more finicky to handle; I'll probably discontinue it. I'm not sure which one to use. I'd like to stay close to the vaguely Gaelic look of the original, but perhaps I should opt for a 19th-century Gothic typeface or straight-out Elder Futhark. I've also considered the use of Wingdings. @korba: Um. Weren't you...already doing this? Daedalus is confused The korba form is dead, insect. Are you afraid? What is it you fear? [...] Alas, the last post actually adding something to that project was more than a year ago. It would probably still make sense to continue where they left off instead of starting anew. I'm still using the old documents for reference, because I'd be remiss to discard all that work, but apart from the issue with space constraints that you've already raised, I'm discontent with some of my decisions (Robot, for example, is going to stay "Robot" this time, unless I'm persuaded otherwise) and furthermore, I have misplaced my notes, such as those on keeping the characters' individual dialects consistent. Besides, I'm not keen on thoughtlessly copying the text into the appropriate boxes for the span of seventeen chapters before any actual work should commence. Good to see you started again @korba, difficult to read font though. Is there nothing else with an eszett? Public discontent with the font has reached alarming levels. I shall forward this concern to the Federal Chancellery on short notice. Be patient, please; the Internet is terra nullius -- I mean, terra incognita to us all. That's mighty kind of you, thank you. When the hurly-burly's done, I'll upload the pages of Chapter One, rinsed of text, to match the rest. Thus it was spoken. More will be spoken, and actual work be done, as soon as I find a font that does not require prospective readers to be assisted by a cryptopalaeographer. |
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Post by thehkx on Oct 15, 2015 9:33:32 GMT
I'm new here so a formal "Hello fellow Germanic friends" would be more than appropriate.
Seeing that this post hasn't been updated in 3 weeks, I just wanted to inquire if the project still stands? For I am very interested in aiding this noble cause of spreading the holy word - and having fun while doing so.
All right, that was my try at being as eloquent as kobra! Nope, just won't do. Which is why I don't really feel like assisting much on the translating department of this project, even though I would give it a try. But other than that I can edit fairly well, also clean pages if there even are any to clean.
These are my two cents for now! Onto discovering the rest of the forums!
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Post by Deleted on Oct 16, 2015 13:51:11 GMT
In short, this will not find ignition before December, perhaps November at the earliest. No further useful information is contained in the paragraphs to follow. You're welcome to have fun before that point, though. In the usual verbosity for anyone who enjoys it, additional courses are keeping me busy with somewhat challenging but mostly time-intensive daily homework (a sample: "Convert a dozen of comically long Boolean expressions so that they solely employ the Peirce function"), and editing the text-bubbles (rather than the act of translating) constitutes an even more robotic task; I do not recommend it. At any rate, I have picked out a few fonts that I hope might prove more decipherable than Uncial Antiqua at 11pt, such as this one or this one. Regarding the mentioned outspokenness of Naja naja, possibly erroneous: Once upon a time I produced a crude picture of a snake, distinguished from a gardening hose by its shoeshine eyes and bifurcating tongue, and proudly subtitled it KORBA, at what I guess was roughly the same age as when I chalked up a menu on a portable blackboard to advertise my imaginary stock of RISENCURRYW URST, withholding all respect for the rules of partition by syllable, for the lunar price (to use a German expression that sounds better in English) of 5,- DM apiece: an impromptu masterpiece that has been preserved in my old home's basement last I checked (the blackboard, not the bratwurst). Thought it would make for a fun and vaguely avian name; later learned that it resembles the word for "crow" in multiple languages such as Scots and Italian. You are probably just as qualified to translate the comic as I am; my entire M.O. consists of transcribbling the words I see and scouring Merriam-Webster for etymological information. Here's how I construct a typical sentence in English by this method, using your light mockery of my lexicon as an example (someone please mumble the word "metafiction"): Now, to compensate for this nonsensical interlude, which I still found much more fun than editing images, have a Nabokov quote: "[...] but to build an ivory tower one must first kill a few elephants". That is to say, I'm back to my safari; good luck on yours as well. |
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Post by tiberius on Mar 22, 2016 12:55:47 GMT
Well, this is going to be quite weird, but here we go into a conversation using the second language for all of us. A few remarks on your work so far, korba: - We did have the font face mentioned in previous posts. I am agreeing with the former poster's opinions, that the current setting is hardly possible to read. Why not using a font face like Garamond, something which is a little lighter on the serif-portion of the letters but might keep the hint to the gaelic origin?
- "Schatten Zwo" might be a bit too informal here, what do you think? I always transleted Shadow as "Schatten zwei" during the first few chapters in my mind.
- "Robotisches Umherlaufgerät" sounds awesome! There are a couple of words which are so typically German and this might be one of the finest examples of them. However, I would change the sentence a little bit: "Ich muss ein robotisches Umherlaufgerät konstruieren, dass dich über die Brücke bringen kann" Less complicated, but for me, it sounds a little bit more fluid.
I can work on the text of the first chapter as a tryout. If you need any help, that is. However, I'm not sure, I can work on integrating the text into the pictures  |
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