20 KiB
[RST][BST] Language as an early obstacle to the plot?
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Author: u/IridiusLemming *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3uuhmd/rstbst_language_as_an_early_obstacle_to_the_plot/
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Score: 6
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Created: 2015-11-30T12:53:30
Post:
There is this story cooking around in my mind that I never really got to starting. The premise centers around the main protagonist being pulled from the modern world into a high-fantasy/steampunk world where the laws of physics does apply to some extent (yet are modified by the presence of magic). In a way, the views the main character brings to the table compared to how the local population does so with regards to magic are rather reminiscent to HPMOR.
However, there is one certain problem that comes to mind. Inevitably, there must be a language barrier, since to me it is highly improbable that both would speak English. Having this obstacle that early in the story seems like a dealbreaker, since the story isn't about the language barrier but more about the protagonist munchkinning/min-maxing his way to power, Rationalist-style.
What is the best way to deal with this in order to keep the story interesting? Show the MC slowly learning the language, or somehow flash-forwarding (which seems contrived)? I do have the idea of using language - more specifically, the ancient language - as an early method of demonstrating the MC's munchkinry.
It could be as simple as the world using magic by saying these words because they work. But what if you were to say them differently? Experimenting with grammar structures, portmanteaus, etc. and all that with the Ancient Language would be unheard of to that world, but would be logical to the MC because of the foreign perspective. I don't know; any ideas?
Comments:
u/IomKg [+7] (19 minutes later)
if its not important for the plot and you don't want to use it as a tool for having a chance to convey the experience why not just solve it with magic? to be honest if its not central to the plot who cares how likely is it that its unlikely they speak English? or alternatively you could just say the MC studied some random language at the university\school because of Reasons and was lucky enough that their language is the same\similar enough not to be an issue?
u/IridiusLemming [+3] (an hour later)
I care because I want to minimize suspension of disbelief. Ie., reducing the parts of the worldbuilding which can be explained by "oh it's coincidence", and increasing the parts that can be logically deduced/explained.
However, I never really thought about solving it with magic (brain-fart moment). Perhaps there could be a sort of linguistic magic that translates ideas/intentions into understandable language.
u/IomKg [+5] (2 hours later)
While its best if those kinds of moments could be minimized in the end hand waving it away is not that big of a deal, and personally i wouldn't really be bothered by simply ignoring it either.
In the other hand, if it seemed like an important thing magicking it away would bother me just as much.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (an hour later)
In Lester Del Rey's The Sky is falling the protagonist was created as a homunculus - his original's personality and knowledge layered on top of a mandrake root. His language skills were overridden, and he had to make an effort to even re-create the sounds of English. When he tries to say "bulldozer" it comes out as
"Bull," he croaked. "The bull sleeper!"
"Delirious," the first voice muttered.
"I mean - bull pusher!" That was wrong, too, and he tried again, forcing his reluctant tongue around the syllables. "Bull dosser!"
Damn it, couldn't he pronounce simple Engaliss?
u/IridiusLemming [+1] (2 hours later)
I never really realized the difficulty of speaking in another language; this could certainly be a good idea to explore (especially for the humor component) if I do have my MC exploring the new language.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (2 hours later)
The shtick here is that Dave Hanson no longer knew English, just the language of his new world, and at this point hadn't realized it. And they didn't have bulldozers so he had no word for it.
u/RMcD94 [+1] (2 hours later)
You'd notice instantly when things don't rhyme no?
Really bothers me when people using magic translators pun and use wordplay as even in human only languages with common origins we still have hardly any language neutral puns
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (2 hours later)
Depends on whether "knowing what rhymes" is part of language. It seems like a fairly minor thing compared to parts of speech, grammar, declensions, and everything else.
Also, this was from his "first waking up in his new body" scene.
As for multilingual puns, read a few volumes of Asterix the Gaul and remember that the translators had to translate all those puns into 115 languages.
u/RMcD94 [+1] (2 hours later)
While sure I agree that grammar word sounds and the such are obviously the first clue I can imagine you not noticing that if you were magically switched languages to believe you're still speaking English, but you'd know when songs or rhymes don't work.
I highly doubt the puns are really translingual I had a hard time finding any working transliterated puns
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (3 hours later)
Not all languages even have a concept of rhyme in poetry. Even English didn't really consider it notable until the 10th century. If you're thinking in a language like that, you wouldn't expect "bokomon" (plane) to rhyme with "pazmaga" (train).
Seriously, I think the first hint you'd get would be trying to express a concept that doesn't exist in the new language (which is what happened to Dave). Particularly when moving from one society to another with a completely different technological base, as here.
As for Asterix, my point is that virtually all literary translations are colloquial, and good colloquial translators will insert the equivalent of puns and plays on words to carry the sense and feel of the dialog into the new language. I've helped translators out with this before, and they spend quite a bit of effort on it.
While occasionally you get narrators doing something like:
"Well his nose was thoroughly bent, eh?"
This was hilarious, because in Spodnusian "bent" sounded a lot like the word for Marflexian flu, so it sounded like his nose was full of green mucus...
Normally this kind of exposition is restricted to situations where the characters are learning or encountering new languages, so the details of translation matter. And even there it's going to be at a minimum and limited to humorous works (I think Keith Laumer used this schtick a couple of times). More common you get things like:
"You will be picked up by a peasant from the Vaccinae tribe."
"Really, I didn't know you had to be vaccinated to get into Spain."
I have no idea what play on words Uderzo had in the French original, and of course it would make no sense at all in first century Gaul. It doesn't matter. There was a play on words in the original. There's a play on words now. The colloquial sense of the language is carried on.
u/RMcD94 [+1] (3 hours later)
I agree that saying a concept the language doesn't have would obviously be another way, so I guess it's whether you believe that a language is more likely to have a concept unintelligible than it is to use a wordplay, be it song, phrase or pun.
I don't agree that just having a pun is a good enough translation, you see it in mangas (and sometimes anime) a lot translators will put an asterisk and explain the pun where there is a visual pun or a written one. Which is what you were talking about kind of but this is in addition to colloquial translation. Of course it is possible that you could just rename the tribe in your example to fit with whatever word but as you get into more complicated word play it quickly fails, you also better hope the tribe name is never brought up again.
If you listen to subbed stuff you can hear often the failures of translation for rhymes and such.
I mean that's apparent from how few songs get translated, it happens most commonly in Chinese, Korean and Japanese. And in many pop cases lyrics are almost irrelevant so if you can get it sorta close you'll be fine.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (4 hours later)
Anime and manga and other similar amateur (in the purest sense, work done for love) translations are quite a different matter than colloquial translations. The translator and the intended audience are explicitly interested in the cultural and linguistic environment of the original work.
Colloquial translations are telling the story in a new language. Rewording and rephrasing the text to carry the sense and feel of the original is the norm. When the original language is itself imagined (and may not have been imagined beyond a handful of words and names) even trying for the kind of transliteration you're suggesting seems rather a high hurdle to leap.
u/Uncaffeinated [+1] (2 hours later)
If you're already going to a fantasy world with magic, then translation magic isn't going to add any additional burden.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+3] Roll the Dice on Fate (2 days later)
Take a look at The World Waits on Evil for an example of a writer narrating an entire story in a not-quite english style due to the natives not having words for all of the concepts and connectives. Note how it is interesting at first as a cool idea, but quickly becomes annoying and disruptive as you have to go back and re-read things to understand their meaning. The writer sacrifices eloquence for realism, and I think in the final counting he comes out worse off as a result of that deal. It would have been fine as an early problem that was swiftly resolved, but keeping it any longer than that becomes problematic.
Seems relevant, anyway.
u/IridiusLemming [+1] (3 days later)
I will take a look, definitely. Thanks for the resource! This sub has been very useful and passionate about helping out its fellow rationalist!
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+1] Roll the Dice on Fate (4 days later)
Well you know, happy to help. People round here tend to like solving new and interesting problems.
u/wendigo_days [+2] (6 hours later)
As a foreigner, he's the only person who can speak or write the Ancient Language without it having an impact. They use him to write the first magic dictionary ever, necessitating that he meet with all the top speakers. For bonus points, the language doesn't even need to be magical.
u/Jiro_T [+2] (2 days later)
Fantasy stories often work on Translation Convention. And that works for language-specific things too. If the characters don't speak English, and are saying some kind of thing that only makes sense in English, the reader is supposed to assume that the characters are "really" saying something equivalent in their own language.
u/IridiusLemming [+1] (3 days later)
The issue is that the main character does speak English, but the world he got pulled into doesn't.
u/iamthelowercase [+2] (3 days later)
Frankly, though, there's a stock solution for this. When he gets pulled over, he picks up a magic Translation Convention. But because you want to use the different languages as a plot point, for whatever reason he notices that he's not "actually" speaking english (or whatever his native language is).
Then you also have an excuse for him to be able to speak Local both fluently (magic translation) and badly (what he's learned 'without' the magic translation).
Or you could just do the "make him a linguist" thing. Depends on what you want him to be capable of with his pulled-over knowledge.
u/IridiusLemming [+2] (3 days later)
There are quite a number of rationalists here suggesting the plot device of a linguist if I were to further explore this field. This is definitely ripe in plot opportunities, but I'd have to take a closer look and study up on linguistics (since while I am a professional engineer and amateur mathematician/logician, I am no linguist) before I decide if going in this direction is feasible. I am rather keen on it if possible though.
u/GaBeRockKing [+2] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (5 days later)
Your protagonist got pulled into a different world. Why is he so special? In fact, maybe he isn't. Maybe there were previous events of this happening, hell, maybe it's fairly common. But because people aren't typically well suited to being forced into an entirely new dimension most of the time not much change is had. Where interdimensional entities have made a significant impact on history, their supernatural origins are transmuted by the constant re-telling of their fables into something unrealistic enough to be dismissed as fiction out of hand.
What does that mean for your protagonist? Cross cultural contamination, for one. Maybe interdimensional travelers have contaminated each world's major languages' jargon, syntax, and even grammar. Now, you're not working with a completely alien language, but something much more similar, and therefore comprehensible. Make your character a polyglot to begin with, and while you still have to take time to let them parse the language, they're not starting from square one.
And if you're wondering, this is basically my anthropic principle of interdimensional travel-- we don't see an interdimensional traveler be successful because they're just that special, we explicitly choose one of the luckier interdimensional travelers, who have an even easier job because it's been done before to some extent or another, for whatever reason.
u/IridiusLemming [+1] (6 days later)
This... is actually an excellent idea. Thanks for pointing this out! I'll definitely consider this in much greater detail. However, your idea of "luckier interdimensional travelers" is kind of what I have in mind, but it does fit in with the concept of cross-cultural contamination.
u/LiteralHeadCannon [+1] (3 hours later)
The protagonist has to learn the language over a realistic amount of time, but, seeing as it's not the focus of the story, you can cover it in the literary equivalent of a montage.
u/diraniola [+1] (4 hours later)
If you're going to have a focus on playing with language, make the MC a linguist, focusing on a wide variety of ancient languages. Think Milo from Atlantis.
A character who's main job in the modern world was to rediscover ancient languages would have all the reason in the world to deconstruct both the conversational language and the ancient magical language, with the skills to succeed in both endeavors.
u/MultipartiteMind [+1] (7 hours later)
As others suggested, 'solve it with magic'--I personally prefer the idea that imparting an acceptable grasp of the language (by this point more archaic than when the ritual was made, or updated if rituals are easier to alter?) as part of the summoning process, because if you're going to go to all the effort of tearing open a hole in reality and bringing a living being through it safely then you might as well add a language-imprinting section to the summoning ritual so that you don't have to spend months or years reaching a young child's level of communication with every summoned being.
If that's undesirable because you don't want there to be an easy way to magically transfer large amounts of information from brain to brain (also avertable by difficulty of recreation/alteration), you can have the 'Universal Translator' approach of a magical interface which automatically translates everything (and somehow preserving all joke-equivalents et cetera) or the anthropic approach of only summoning people from the worlds where the same language happened to evolve naturally by coincidence. (This, if I understand correctly, would require either 'English is a language of power there, but not in some other universes like ours' or 'English is the common language there, but there's /also/ an ancient language of Words of Power that can be learnt in a montage or magically.')
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (53 minutes later)
Interdimensional ergonal leakage caused by entropic osmosis through universal branes means that language spreads "sideways" in time.
That's why English is so messed up, it's actually a multiversal interdimensional pidgin that's seeded in every universe by the Time Patrol to make their job easier.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (8 hours later)
Except that modern english with all of its messiness and borrowed words and phrases didn't even exist for most of human history, right? Furthermore, how is it that the Time Patrol only cares about sapient beings that are capable of using audible speech? What about beings that communicate with flashing lights?
I suppose it could be explained with audible language being naturally much more common throughout the multiverse in the first place, though I have no idea why that would be. Maybe whoever's running the simulation is a native english speaker, or it runs on SQL instead of Hexidecimal or Binary...
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (8 hours later)
Except that modern english with all of its messiness and borrowed words and phrases didn't even exist for most of human history, right?
They recently switched from Klingon after the unfortunate incident with the visiting mentat and the uplifted camel in Universe 37 sub rho alpha.
Furthermore, how is it that the Time Patrol only cares about sapient beings that are capable of using audible speech?
The Danelians created a negative wedgie barrier around each probability sheaf, so the Time Patrol operating in our sheaf are humans.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (9 hours later)
But if there are any non-human sapient species in our probability sheaf, then it sounds like the Time Patrol in our sheaf have rather discriminatory hiring practices. And of course, they can just blame that on the negative wedgie barrier, even though they were the ones who created that barrier in the first place.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (9 hours later)
They've got a name out of a '50s pulp science fiction novel and you're worried about their hiring practices? You bet your sweet bippy they've got discriminatory hiring practices!
Though in this case it's not relevant because they don't have space travel, just time travel. The Danelians discourage space travel, it makes the temporal flux dispersal calculations too complex.