(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

fantasy pet peeve: when your characters live in an entirely different universe with an entirely different culture speaking an entirely different language, yet somehow puns, wordplay, and ambiguity all work out exactly the same as in English. breaks my immersion every time.

Comments

[isaacsapphire]

God, yes.

[lunartulip]

I feel like as long as it's kept to micro-scale conversational moments it can be explained away via translation convention as "they're actually doing a different pun in their language, it's just rendered thusly in the English-language localization". But that breaks down once it exits the micro-scale conversational context and actually influences the broader conversation or the plot, like if that pun is a secret passcode or if it causes the wrong sort of shift in conversation topic, and at that point I'm with you.

[discoursedrome]

Yeah, this is more or less my position on it. As long as it could plausibly be a proxy for something that wouldn't translate in the fantasy language people actually use, I think it's OK.

Anecdote: I used to play Werewolf, where wolves had their own language based mainly on body language, and I spent way too much time talking/thinking about how it made sense to talk in that language, like whether wolves would have a way of saying "hat" or whether they'd come up with some sort of indirect compound to express the same idea

[contrarianarchon]

+1

[savioto]

That kind of thing bugs me too.

[stoicjester]

Unless a work of literature was explicitly making a big deal about linguistics or philosophy of language, I've always just assumed that the text we are reading is not the actual words being spoken, but rather what our brain hears after the actual text has been run through the equivalent of Farscape translator microbes. The humor works like ours because it's been translated to be understandable.

[sigmaleph]

But some things just don't translate!

The thing that prompted this was a character in a book remarking that thye read the word 'lark' and originally interpreted in the sense of 'having a lark', but actually it was meant to reference the bird. She was not reading English, so why should we expect her language to also have a bird name with a spelling ambiguous with the other meaning of lark?

And there's plenty of characters making English puns in the book. Trying to translate a pun between two unrelated languages almost always results in the translated version making no sense or feeling extremely forced, so what are the odds this unknown fantasy language happens to have puns that work in English every time?