Concepts and translation

[velartrill]

"How do you say ‘noble’ in Smoppian?"

Professor Jurgen Prinz von Arschegesicht-Hosenscheisser sighed, and delicately adjusted his horn-rim spectacles. “You don’t,” he explained.

"Sorry?" The student blinked. "But—"

"Unless, ja, you mean in the sense of, er, aristocratisch,” added Arschegesicht-Hosenscheisser thoughtfully. “In that case, you say ‘jogspuldrup’, which, er, basically is synonym for ‘supreme asshole’ but with specialized secondary meaning, ja?”

The student hesitated for a moment, unsure of how she should respond, before deciding that a polite laugh was appropriate. It was not, which Arschegesicht-Hosenscheisser indicated by narrowing his eyes imperceptibly. “Yes, sir, no, I mean as an adjective. ‘He was a noble man,’ that sort of thing.”

"Then I refer you to my previous statement, ja?" said Arschegesicht-Hosenscheisser. "You wouldn’t say that. This is East Smoppisch, ja. There is, er, no word with an equivalent meaning." He sighed. "In East Smop, you compliment a man by not knifing his father when you are robbing his home, ja? The Parliament only banned rocket launchers from the chambers a few years ago. What use would the Östsmoppers have for a word like “noble”, yes? That is, er, not how they categorize the world.”

The student shook her head. “But surely they must have some way of saying it — ‘nice,’ at least?”

Arschegesicht-Hosenscheisser gave a slightly superior smile, as he often did. “Ja, they do — ‘zbilmop.’ It means ‘one who parts easily with their kidneys,’ yes? Or ‘one who is easily short-changed,’ that too. It is not a word you would use to describe somebody you, er, liked, ja?”

The student folded her arms. “Well, what is a word you’d use to describe somebody you liked, then?”

“Xlepskaya," Arschegesicht-Hosenscheisser suggested, after a moment’s pause. "It means, like, one who is stabbed and comes back the next day mit ein rocket launcher, yes?"

"That seems awfully… harsh," said the student.

"Ja," said Arschegesicht-Hosenscheisser patiently. "The East Smoppians are awfully, as you say, harsh.”

It’s very easy to get so wrapped up in the game of conlanging that you can forget there’s more to a language than its structures and patterns. But there is; languages are practically inextricable from culture. Languages exist as a tool for communication within a particular cultural paradigm, a particular set of procedures for parsing the world around you. Some words — most of the “simple” ones, I’m willing to bet — only make sense within a particular cultural context, and there’s no way to translate them from one language to another.

Let’s take a look at our usual go-to example, the exotic and terrifyingly sociopathic land of East Smop. Theirs is a culture of ceaseless corruption and strife, where Parliamentary parties are defined not by shared ideological ties but by desire for human shields to avoid being stabbed by other MPs, where if a child hasn’t knifed a man by her fourth birthday, she’s considered a wuss, where the symbol of national unity is the guillotine (or rather, a nastier, lazier variant called, onomatopoeically, the spxolk with a lumber saw instead of a dropped blade). The Smoppians are, by and large, not nice people. They don’t particularly approve of nice people. And so any word East Smoppian would have denoting the concept of “nice” is not going to have the same connotations that an English-speaker might associate with the concept.

And keep in mind, this is still relevant even if you’re not writing in a conlang. There are a lot of words that are extremely problematic if you’re trying to represent the structures of another culture with English (something that can only really be approximated, but it’s still worth trying). If you come from a warrior culture that exalts bravery and martial derring-do, maybe it makes sense to have a word that you’d translate as “glory,” but a colony of pacifist space elves is probably not going to be using language like that. Basically, it’s really important to keep track of the built-in cultural assumptions behind the words you use.