(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

So i made this post last night about how in most fantasy, we should implicitly assume that the characters aren't speaking English or whatever Earth language you're reading in, they're speaking they're own unrelated fantasy language and we assume by convention the text is a translation.

This has different levels of being spelled out; sometimes you have an appendix talking about your conlang, sometimes you have a translator's note in the text talking about how this sentence specifies different amounts of information than the translation conveys, sometimes you give it a fancy fantasy name, sometimes you have people with multiple unintelligible languages all having their meaning represented as English in each of their PoV chapters, etc, etc.

And sometimes you fail at it; I have complained before that I find puns in fantasy very immersion-breaking, because wordplay is in general hard-to-impossible to translate.

But even when people do this, I work under the assumption that they are doing translation convention, they just don't think about it much or think giving up on puns entirely is not worth it. To which someone could reply: that's just your assumption, why are you forcing it?

For example: to the best of my knowledge, nothing breaks if you assume that ASoIaF never does translation convention when people are talking in the Westerosi Common Tongue, by some cosmic coincidence it just happens to be identical to English (as opposed to Dothraki or High Valyrian or whatever, which we know some handful of words from).

I don't like this, because it makes zero sense; it's postulating that the linguistic evolution process ran twice on different inputs and produced the same outcome. That just doesn't happen!

...on the other hand I am willing to grant that fantasyland has humans, which makes even less sense; if linguistic evolution doesn't work that way, much less so the evolution of life. On that I have no principled defence; I do not demand that writers acknowledge that their fantasy characters are actually nonhumans being translation-conventioned into a familiar form, even though that's totally a thing they could do. My fantasy characters don't speak English (or Spanish), but they are mostly biologically identical to Earth humans modulo magical powers and I don't plan to change that.

Comments

[feotakahari]

To paraphrase Isaac Asimov, he'll say his characters put on shoes in the morning, and if you don't think people from another planet would have shoes, you can substitute a made-up sci-fi word in your head.

[lunartulip]

That last paragraph has me thinking, now, that it could be cool to do a story with aliens-to-humans translation-convention implemented deliberately sloppily so that their alien characteristics remain visible in the narrative cracks where the translator can't figure out how to map them neatly onto human things. Thus you end up with a surface-level story about some relatively-familiar human activities, and hiding underneath that a piece of interesting xenofiction, and if you do it right you hopefully specifically end up with the two of them twining around one another in mutually-bolstering fashion. The human facade helping to make it more approachable and less immediately Too Much/learning-curve-ish than a pure-xenofiction rendering might otherwise be, and the nonhuman underpinnings adding a layer of interestingness and depth to the surface-level narrative.

(Or possibly it ends up thoroughly failing such that the two end up clashing against one another rather than bolstering one another. Such is the danger, when it comes to that sort of fancy metanarrative structure. But it's fun to imagine a successfully-implemented version, nonetheless.)

[contrarianarchon]

Onward To Providence does some of this when it's letting you assume that the humans in it's setting are alike to IRL humans and while I'm quite fond of the effect lots of people find it incredibly frustrating, IIRC?