(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

[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?