| In a message dated 6/4/2001 6:20:05 PM Central Daylight Time,
jjllambias@hotmail.com writes: >How is "Laughing and Grief" going by the way. The disasters of other translations (excepting fairly often the Vulgate) is one of my reasons for pessimism, the other is the four partial translations (out of what I remember as six) that I have turned up. You are one of about three people who might over come several of the problems that have been traditional in Loglan/Lojban translations, but so far you have only done so a couple of times. As for not reading them, I have read what is available, but the bulk ison a site aol says does not exist and requires a program (apparently) that my Windows ME will not run (in fact shorts out on). My Wizard is on his way over to look into these matters now. <Indeed, the most difficult parts are not the puns, those are difficult in any language and necessarily will not work as perfectly in Lojban as they do in the original, but I don't see that as a problem specific to Lojban. Where I have most difficulty is with the vocabulary. Deciding what to do with things like "yelled the Gryphon at the top of its voice". This kind of thing will appear in any ordinary translation.> I didn't mean that Lojban has peculiar problems with Alice -- other than the total lack of a culture to play off, of course; any translation into any language is going to be iffy at best and likely to be awful (the only one I know that rises to iffy is the Vulgate and that is because it takes the appropriately loose attitude toward the text). Actually, Lojban has some advantages in doing Alice, courtesy of their mutual connection to logic, but those spots are few and far between. <I promise you you won't lose me out of frustration over Alice. I doubt very much that I would enjoy translating Oz in the same way. Alice is a book that I like and find interesting, it is much more than a children's book. Of Oz I know very little and never had much of an interest to find out more. I might have contributed if it had been chosen, but probably not so enthusiastically. Also, I think someone who gets interested in Lojban, say two years from now, will be much more pleased to know that Alice has been translated to Lojban than it would be the case with Oz (pure speculation, I know).> I didn't imagine we would, you are in too deep to get out so easily. All of the perpetrators of the specimen I have, though, disappeared without a trace within a year of their sending the specimens in and in at least one case the reason for dropping out was simply that Loglan was much too hard (Alicebeing the only bit tried). Oz is less of a challenge and so less of a triumph if completed, but also more likely to be completed by some of the folk whoare always saying they want to translate something or that there ought to be more translated but who are not really very good yet. Some people loveOz, though I think for different reasons than they love Alice or even Wind in the Willows or Pooh <BTW, I went into a bookstore today and looked at three different translations of Alice into Spanish. None of them had a Lobster Quadrille that matched the rhythmic pattern of the original, even the rhymes were horrible. I think in Lojban we can do much better than any of those translations> I would expect a Spanish version to match a Spanish dance. The Vulgate is vaguely Virgilian -- not one of its most successful moments, I think. Since (the old problem again) there are no Lojbanic dances, it is hard to seewhat the Lojban ought to be. But it should be something believable andthat requires a tight rhythm, which yours does not yet have. <>Eventually, we will work out a way of doing some of these >thing, but we haven't yet. We are in the process of doing it. >Do try, but don't complain if we point out that >you haven't made it. There are ways and there are ways. You did not only point out that we haven't made it. You asserted that it is not even possible that we do, and you didn't even look at what's already been done, imperfect as it is. You had already decided beforehand that it would be bad.> Well, I generalized from experience and the samples I had, which tendedto cohere with that experience. As I have said, I'll be delighted tobe proven wrong (once I get over the shock in this particular case). And ifI am not, I shall claim the right to complain about the wasted effort again (or, in short, "I told you so") without a lot of carping about it. <>The Quadrille has four bars to the line, each bar four >beats with the stress on the last beat. The chorus is slightly different, >three iambs and a dactyl.> My wife (who hates Alice, I'm not sure why) insists that the second beat of each measure is stronger than the odd-numbered ones though weaker than the fourth. I'm not sure I hear it, nor that it is relevant to your version, so I give it for information only. |