General Battuta posted:

I hate Hull Zero Three!

John Lee posted:

This is a really funny complaint for this book in particular

mllaneza posted:

Philip J. Fry, his eyes narrowed.

CaptainRat posted:

re: language and loan words, for years I had a snobby attitude about KJ Parker because one of his books used the word "kudos" and I found it unbearably anachronistic and wrote him off as a hack.

When I learned about it being a Greek loanword from the 18th century I felt quite foolish.

habeasdorkus posted:

Tiffany has been a common English language girls name since the 1100s. It's just the English version of Theophania.

Remulak posted:

Nooooooooo!

https://youtu.be/9LMr5XTgeyI?si=PChvGMamrEE5pLBR

habeasdorkus posted:

Darmok is definitely considered one of the best episodes ever, I've never even seen anyone get snippy over the universal translator not working. What nerds.

Yeah, this happens to me all the time. Like, finding out that Tiffany has been a common English language girls name since the 1100s. It's just the English version of Theophania.

mllaneza posted:

Philip J. Fry, his eyes narrowed.

Ravus Ursus posted:

We've gone further than that. We have entire meta communication where a few symbols or letters or even file names convey language, though it's mostly niche subcultures.

General Battuta posted:

habeasdorkus posted:

Darmok is definitely considered one of the best episodes ever, I've never even seen anyone get snippy over the universal translator not working. What nerds..

an ironically long explanation of ‘semantic convenience’ posted:

Kalgash is an alien world and it is not our intention to have you think that it is identical to Earth, even though we depict its people as speaking a language that you can understand, and using terms that are familiar to you. Those words should be understood as mere equivalents of alien terms-that is, a conventional set of equivalents of the same sort that a writer of novels uses when he has foreign characters speaking with each other in their own language but nevertheless transcribes their words in the language of the reader. So when the people of Kalgash speak of "miles," or "hands," or "cars," or "computers," they mean their own units of distance, their own grasping-organs, their own ground-transportation devices, their own information-processing machines, etc. The computers used on Kalgash are not necessarily compatible with the ones used in New York or London or Stockholm, and the "mile" that we use in this book is not necessarily the American unit of 5,280 feet. But it seemed simpler and more desirable to use these familiar terms in describing events on this wholly alien world than it would have been to invent a long series of wholly Kalgashian terms.

In other words, we could have told you that one of our characters paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything might have seemed ever so much more thoroughly alien. But it would also have been ever so much more difficult to make sense out of what we were saying, and that did not seem useful. The essence of this story doesn't lie in the quantity of bizarre terms we might have invented; it lies, rather, in the reaction of a group of people somewhat like ourselves, living on a world that is somewhat like ours in all but one highly significant detail, as they react to a challenging situation that is completely different from anything the people of Earth have ever had to deal with. Under the circumstances, it seemed to us better to tell you that someone put on his hiking boots before setting out on a seven-mile walk than to clutter the book with quonglishes, vorks, and gleebishes.

If you prefer, you can imagine that the text reads "vorks" wherever it says "miles," "gliizbiiz" wherever it says "hours," and "sleshtraps" where it says "eyes." Or you can make up your own terms. Vorks or miles, it will make no difference when the Stars come out.

shrike82 posted:

I liked how Vernor Vinge dealt with this in Deepness in the Sky and the spider civilization

habeasdorkus posted:

Darmok is definitely considered one of the best episodes ever, I've never even seen anyone get snippy over the universal translator not working. What nerds.

voiceless anal fricative posted:

Re: language in fantasy books, I know there's a balance to be struck between using a sort of "neutral" English, having in-world aphorisms and profanities and slang and poo poo, but also not making the characters sound inhuman. But the result is always that pressure from publishers and editors means "neutral" English is very American. That's why one of the things I appreciated most about the locked tomb series is how they're written in a NZ vernacular and it's even totally justified in-universe.

Ravus Ursus posted:

Is that what the gently caress is happening in here?

This entire thing makes way more sense when you retroactively apply an Aussie accent to it.

The second person stuff still feels like some David Attenborough whispered intensity.

Is the third book another pivot in style?

Tarnop posted:

Maybe just imagine the whole book, this writing stuff is tiring

habeasdorkus posted:

Darmok is definitely considered one of the best episodes ever, I've never even seen anyone get snippy over the universal translator not working. What nerds.

Gully Foyle posted:

There's so many other places that the universal translator makes little to no sense if you try to think about it (for instance, Picard using a French phrase, then having to explain it in English, or Klingon somehow being immune to translation). It's like the transporters, it's there as a way to make the show work, and shouldn't be examined unless an episode wants to use that piece of tech as a hinge point, and then you should just assume it works that way for that episode. There's no way to really reconcile all the ways writers have changed how it works.

So it works until it doesn't, then doesn't work until it does.

LifeLynx posted:

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch was a great take on the multiverse theory

mewse posted:

100% disagree, I hated this book. He writes himself into a corner and then resolves the plot with the stupidest outcome

Stuporstar posted:

Yeah, pretty much every abstract concept uses metaphor to describe it that’s so dead it’s no longer visible. Reading https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By, I was thinking about how an sff novel might better represent another culture by coming up with a completely different set of metaphors for common concepts, like not thinking of time as a limited resource as we do. I noticed while translating some hieroglyphics the metaphor “beatifying time” to mean leisure, which is such a foreign way to think about time that I’ve pondered it for a while.

Considering an sff novel a story translated into English is something else I think about a lot. Like in reading translated fiction, I’ve noticed the tendency to either completely localize it so it uses common English idioms in place of the original ones, or the more unusual choice of directly translating foreign idioms to better represent the original culture. The same choice is heavily skewed the same way in sff, probably just due to the relatability of the former and the latter is more effort. I really prefer the latter tho

Deptfordx posted:

Just finished Robert Jackson Bennets The Tainted Cup

Not bad, was more interested in the pretty cool world building than the plot, which is a servicable enough 'Fantasy world' x 'Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin*' story.

Would read a sequel.



* Lol. Of course the backcover blurb references Sherlock Holmes.

KKKLIP ART posted:

I've been working my way through the Cradle series and it is really scratching that "Dragon Ball Z but in novel form" itch that I didn't know I wanted scratched. I don't think its the absolute best thing I've ever read but I've been enjoying it enough that I have plowed through the first five books back to back. I think I got it for free on Amazon with the exception of the most recent book.

LifeLynx posted:

Maybe the translator picks up intent, and Picard intended to say something that needed translation? Or insert Futurama joke about French being a dead language here.

PeterWeller posted:

According to structural and post-structural theorists like Saussere, Derrida, and forums favorite Barthes, language itself is fundamentally metaphorical. Just like the metaphor's vehicle stands for its tenor, the sign's signifier stands for its signified, and that signified may not be a singular thing or idea but instead entire chains of associations that differ from person to person and context to context but are mostly close enough to work in everyday practice.

In that sense, the complaints about the universal translator are valid because the Tamarian language works like any other sign system. But since part of the episode's point is to illustrate the metaphorical nature of language, I think we can give the universal translator a pass.

Gully Foyle posted:

So it works until it doesn't, then doesn't work until it does.