ᎭᏢ ᎠᏜ ᏗᏠᎯᏍᏓᏎ ᏅᏃᎯᏁ
hatlv adla ditlohisdase nvnohine
I've been in the translation business, on and off, since 1963. Some things have changed enormously, but others are still true, and always will be.
Back then, machine translation was only a dream. The early attempts at it were terrible, a joke, really. I assiduously avoided it, not dipping my feet into those smelly waters, even for very limited purposes, until the late 1990s. The software available then was atrocious, and led to disastrous results, more often than not, unless you knew the source and target languages well enough to properly edit the output of the program. In other words, it was almost useless.
Things began to change about ten years ago. There are still many very poor translation programs, but one or two are quite amazing. The one I consistently use, when I use one at all, is Google Translate. I am not aware of anything else that is as good. One can translate between any pair of languages out of a list of 100 languages. Depending upon the quality of implementation for any specific language, the results can be excellent. Most of the time, I only need to change a few words.
So that is where we stand with regard to the technical side of the process. Naturally, if you need to translate to or from a language that is not on the list, you are out of luck, and must do the whole thing manually. But there is something else to be considered, and it is the part of the process that fascinates me most: every translation is also a cross-cultural process. When the cultures are similar, as is usually the case among the European languages, there may not be much of a problem. When, however, you have widely varying cultures, as is usually the case with indigenous languages, the cross-cultural aspect can be quite challenging.
The Bible is the most-translated book on earth. It has been translated, in whole or in part, into more than a thousand languages. These translations often involve an enormous cultural gulf that must somehow be bridged. I am currently working on a translation of the Gospel of Matthew into Udugi, a constructed language that is based on Cherokee (Tsalagi, ꮳꮃꭹ) vocabulary, but has a much simpler, Esperanto-like grammar. I am basically translating Matthew from the King James Version (KJV) of 1611, frequently consulting the Cherokee New Testament, translated in the 1840s. In addition to a wide cultural gulf to be bridged, there is linguistic change to be reckoned with on both ends of the process.
Cherokee is extraordinarily complex in its verb system, which is one of the reasons why it is now an endangered language. In addition, it has an extremely restrictive phonology (it lacks the p, b, f, and v sounds, which are unpronounceable to a monolingual Cherokee-speaker). Among natural languages, there are only four others that have no bilabials: Wichita (Caddoan family), Aleut (Eskimo-Aleut), and Eyak and Hupa (both Na-Dene). One of these languages, Wichita, does not even have the "m" sound, which Cherokee does have. The others, like Cherokee, do have "m." Interestingly both Cherokee (Southern Iroquoian) and Wichita use the "Qu" (kw) sound to represent the unpronounceable "p" and "b" bilabial stops. Both languages are part of the Keresiouan macro stock within Almosan-Keresiouan, so they are distantly related. Linguistically, if no longer culturally, the Cherokee are "Plains Indians." Udugi, by the way, uses the Cherokee phonology, so has the same limitations as Cherokee.
The restrictive phonology mentioned above explains the name Qualla for the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina: it was named after a woman whose first name was Paula. It also explains why the Biblical name Abraham appears in Cherokee as "Equahami" (pronounced as "Egwahami" in Oklahoma). "Mary appears as "Meli" because the living dialects of Cherokee have "l," but not "r." There is no "sh" sound, so I have to follow previous practice and represent the name "Jesus" as "Tsisa." "Joseph" (also per previous practice) is "Tsowa," and "Herod" is "Elodv." "v" is a vowel that sounds like the "u" in the English word "but."
(to be continued)
Text and image © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler, ꮨᏺꭽꮅ.
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