(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

[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