Phil's Relto Journal - Capitalization when translating

Uru Localization Project

Phil's Relto Journal - Capitalization when translating

Postby OHB » Sun Aug 22, 2010 3:28 pm

Tela brings up a good concern about translating Phil's Relto Journal into German. The original English version is entirely lowercase.

In German, however, all nouns (as I understand it at least) are capitalized.

I think it may be necessary to first deduce /why/ Phil's journal is all lower-case before determining the appropriate way to write it in German.

I can think of two possible reasons: a) laziness, b) a mechanism to create a distinctive look but nothing more.

Would anyone like to weigh-in on this?
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Re: Phil's Relto Journal - Capitalization when translating

Postby Leonardo » Mon Aug 23, 2010 1:45 pm

In italian proper nouns always start with a capital letter (I thought it was like this in every language?), but I think that if Phils Journal was written all in lower case it's because they wanted to show a part of Phils' confused(?) mind, so I'd leave everything in lowercase even in the translations
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Re: Phil's Relto Journal - Capitalization when translating

Postby OHB » Mon Aug 23, 2010 4:18 pm

Leonardo wrote:In italian proper nouns always start with a capital letter (I thought it was like this in every language?), but I think that if Phils Journal was written all in lower case it's because they wanted to show a part of Phils' confused(?) mind, so I'd leave everything in lowercase even in the translations


Some languages don't capitalize things like...languages. I guess what qualifies as a proper noun changes from language to language. German goes a step further - as I understand it - in that all nouns get capitalized.
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Re: Phil's Relto Journal - Capitalization when translating

Postby Paradox » Mon Aug 23, 2010 7:49 pm

Right, all nouns are captialised in German. In some (many?) cases, it's the only way to distinguish between a noun and a verb.

(So in German, that above text would be written like "Right, all Nouns are captialised in German. In some (many?) Cases, it's the only Way to distinguish between a Noun and a Verb.")
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Re: Phil's Relto Journal - Capitalization when translating

Postby diafero » Tue Aug 24, 2010 1:53 am

In some (many?) cases, it's the only way to distinguish between a noun and a verb.
That's only for some cases :) Which is why in chat language many Germans also leave all letters lower case. Pure laziness :lol:
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Re: Phil's Relto Journal - Capitalization when translating

Postby *L.K.* » Wed Aug 25, 2010 7:35 am

Hah, so I finally made it in :P
my name's Laura, I am called Tela in MOULagain and therefore the person OHB was referring to in the first post.

With all that I say, consider it's my own personal opinion and "feeling" of the language, that any other native speaker might see differently.
This is why we wanted to ask people for their opinion first before editing it just like that.

Phil's Journal is written non-capitalized entirely and I am sure this has to do with showing his confused mind, just like Leonardo said.
Now, the translator's task is it to show that confusion in the translation, as good as possible. Writing everything without capital letters would perhaps be an obvious answer, but I for my part would not recommend doing that. Since German has a lot more capitalized letters, it looks differently when they're missing all of the sudden. For me, it would look like chat language, since we often neglect capitalization there ;) Now Phil has most probably not used his pc to write his journal and the journal would perhaps even give another impression (correct me if someone else thinks differently!)

A suggestion of mine would be for example to neglect capitalization at the beginning of a sentence - or a paragraph, in this case. It might give the feeling of everything being one big pile of thoughts that are not really in order. In addition to that we could leave away periods and other forms of separating parts of sentences, as it is also done in the original.

What do you think? Perhaps it is similar in other languages, too, so it would be comparable.

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Re: Phil's Relto Journal - Capitalization when translating

Postby kaelisebonrai » Wed Aug 25, 2010 7:41 am

phil's journal looks like "chat language" to me, in english, so, perhaps using no capitals would be appropriate. =P
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Re: Phil's Relto Journal - Capitalization when translating

Postby *L.K.* » Wed Aug 25, 2010 12:00 pm

so here we have two different basic assumptions: a) Phil's Journal shows his confusion (e.g. by lack of capitalization) and b) he's using "chat language" and probably too lazy to write properly.

hhm... you know, when you are writing in chat language, you are probably not confused. You don't use shift out of pure laziness, because it takes extra effort to reach out your finger and hit the key :P When you are writing something with a pen, this is not the case. Even though the capital letters are normally bigger than the normal ones, it doesn't take more effort to write them.

So, is Phil's Journal written with ink or pixels?
(oh, btw, kaelis, thanks for your response, I don't mean to say you're wrong, I was only trying to put it in context - for me, too, I have to admit :P)

any other suggestions or opinions?
I personally still think a) is more probable than b), but they can as well be both valid.
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Re: Phil's Relto Journal - Capitalization when translating

Postby DanTheMystFan » Wed Aug 25, 2010 2:26 pm

I used the LanguageChanger in Uru:CC and in German, it looks like Phil's journal entries aren't capitalized at all except for the first word.

Can I ask what the point is in translating it *again*? Unless you're trying to avoid copyright issues.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm just curious--I'm not trying to be rude or anything.
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Re: Phil's Relto Journal - Capitalization when translating

Postby OHB » Wed Aug 25, 2010 4:25 pm

DanTheMystFan wrote:I used the LanguageChanger in Uru:CC and in German, it looks like Phil's journal entries aren't capitalized at all except for the first word.

Can I ask what the point is in translating it *again*? Unless you're trying to avoid copyright issues.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm just curious--I'm not trying to be rude or anything.


That's a VERY good point. This is a failure on my part. I was working from the content in MOUL...because there is stuff there in 5 languages. I failed to consider that there would be translated content in CC that wasn't included in MOUL. I'm going through now looking for missing pieces.

EDIT: OK...new journals imported in French and German: all 7 journals in the Watcher's Pub, DrWatsonJournal, and PhilJournal.

Tela worked very hard to get DrWatsonJournal and PhilJournal translated - neither of us knowing that there was a translation already done. I feel like a bit of an idiot! But, I don't all is lost.

Tela's translations have been removed (but not deleted!) and replaced by the original translations as per the current policy. HOWEVER, there is still the open question about re-translating content that is deemed to be a bad translation. That's a discussion for another thread...and should we move in that direction, I will bring Tela's translations out of the depths of the database at that time.
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