Sunday, June 08, 2003

There’s a brilliant teenage gal, Rachel who managed to translate It Is Well With My Soul into the elvish language of Sindarin.

What I find amazing is her post that follows the translation of the song.

About that translation… If you don’t understand what’s involved in translating something into Elvish, it’s tricky. There are only about a couple thousand words, attested or derived. Sometimes you just can’t say what you want to. You have to say it in a roundabout way, or you have to say something different.

I couldn’t translate that song literally, since not all the words exist. :) For example, there’s no word for “attend,” so I couldn’t say “When peace, like a river, attendeth my way.” I don’t think “attends my way” would actually make any sense if I could translate it literally. (We don’t even say that in regular English.)

Also, if I were to follow the song literally, I’d have to look up archaic Sindarin verb conjugations. “Attendeth,” “thou hast,” etc. would have to be translated into their equivalent. (Why on earth do we still sing such songs? Why were they even still writing like that in the nineteenth century? And what’s up with the people who say anything but the King James Bible is evil? Is there something inherently virtuous about archaic language?)

So don’t yell at me because I didn’t get all the words right, okay?

[via Thinklings]