Date: Mon, 23 Feb 1998 09:17:45 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199802231417.JAA27434@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Don Wiggins Sender: Lojban list From: Don Wiggins Subject: Re: Translation Exercise (from ConLang) X-To: "lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu" To: John Cowan X-UIDL: 0d5f4ad50857b21222f212261f186111 X-Mozilla-Status: 8011 X-From-Space-Date: Mon Feb 23 11:59:15 1998 X-From-Space-Address: - la matiu. faupel. zo'u > > Two-bob is 2 times a twelfth of a British pound, if I remember my old > > money correctly. > I'm afraid you don't. A bob is a shilling, which is one twentieth of an old > pound. Two-bob is thus a tenth of a pound, the closest approximation now > being 10p. In my defence, I will say that I am too young to have ever used old money ;-) > so the translation should > either preserve completely the millieu and the terminology in some way, or > relocate the whole thing into Lojbanistan, complete with fictitious currency > and putative cost of a train ticket (as in the original attempt). Relocating, though, avoids some of the more interesting translation problems. 'Bob' was a commonly used and precise expression and therefore by Zipf is short in English. In lojban, such an expression will not be used very often (except when we translate Dickens :-) and correspondingly should be quite long. To be culturely neutral, it is necessary to encode the meaning fully so that anyone not familiar with English old money at least has a fair chance of understanding without recourse to a dictionary. The other suggestion I had was the fu'ivla 'fepnrbobi' that would leave the listener in the dark. ni'oco'omi'e dn.