Re: Translation Exercise (from ConLang)

[Don Wiggins <dwiggins@BFSEC.BT.CO.UK>]

la matiu. faupel. zo'u
> > Two-bob is 2 times a twelfth of a British pound, if I remember my old
> > money  correctly.
> I'm afraid you don't.  A bob is a shilling, which is one twentieth of an old
> pound.  Two-bob is thus a tenth of a pound, the closest approximation now
> being 10p.

In my defence, I will say that I am too young to have ever used old money ;-)

> so the translation should
> either preserve completely the millieu and the terminology in some way, or
> relocate the whole thing into Lojbanistan, complete with fictitious currency
> and putative cost of a train ticket (as in the original attempt).

Relocating, though, avoids some of the more interesting translation problems.
 'Bob' was a commonly used and precise expression and therefore by Zipf is short
 in English.  In lojban, such an expression will not be used very often (except
 when we translate Dickens :-) and correspondingly should be quite long.  To be
 culturely neutral, it is necessary to encode the meaning fully so that anyone
 not familiar with English old money at least has a fair chance of understanding
 without recourse to a dictionary.  The other suggestion I had was the fu'ivla
 'fepnrbobi' that would leave the listener in the dark.

ni'oco'omi'e dn.