Author notes

Ch. 14 Page 04

dragonsong12

on Dec. 12, 2010

Jaith is having a bit of a moment here…

Translations for panel 1 are:
"You shouldn't tease them."
"Why not?"
Panel 4"
"There's no sport."
"They don't even know how to fight back."

Now, time for SUPER LONG AUTHOR'S NOTES on the language. I did shorten it a bit, though, by removing anecdotal stuff, but it's still pretty long:

First and foremost, I would like to point out the fact that I am not a linguist. I have never actually studied languages and the closest I've come were the Spanish classes I took throughout high school, so I imagine anyone who has studied language would find my efforts here somewhat laughable, but that's okay. I just wanted to make sure you knew going in that there was nothing expert about how this language was constructed.

Second, I'm sure you've noticed that I'm not translating what they'e saying within the comic itself, putting the translations in the author's notes instead. If you're wondering why, it just makes the most sense to me. I read a comic once before which had two characters conversing in another language, and in every panel, there were large white boxes of translation footnotes. It kind of made me wonder why they bothered with another language instead of simply putting it in brackets or something. With Twisted Mirrors, the pages are already somewhat small, so I didn't want to clutter it with additional text, but it was more than that. The reason I have these characters speaking another language in the first place is that there's something of a sense of alienation when you're around people speaking a strange tongue. It highlights to the characters that even though they look the same, they come from very different worlds, and I wanted you guys to feel that too, even if it was just for a moment before scrolling down and reading the translations. If you're wondering how I'll handle this when it goes to print, I'll likely simply put the translations in the back. However, you have my word that I will never put important plot information in the other language (unless it's to hide said plot information, in which case, I reserve the right) so you will never need to know what they're saying in order to read the book. I'll also never make a page that's just them talking in another language, because the page needs to stand without the translations, I think.

Now, as for the language itself: this is not simply a word replacement for English. If it were then it would still be English, just in code, not another language. The English translations that I give aren't exactly what they're saying; it's what they would be saying if they were speaking English. Sometimes you'll see the translations be longer or shorter than what's being said as I use phrases the boetheri don't have, or they use boetheri phrases we don't have. Basically, the boetheri language is pretty simple; whatever the sentence is about almost always comes first. They are a very practical people and it seemed to me that they'd want to know what they were talking about right up front. I would like to, at some point, post a glossary of terms so you can see for yourselves how it's constructed, but at the moment, the list of words I keep on my computer is pretty long and in alphabetical order by English word, not boetheri (the other way would probably be more convenient for you guys) so I'll need to work with it at bit.

As far as pronunciation goes, they do say some letters a bit differently that we do. R's are generally rolled, and T's are not spoken with the sharp staccato sound we use, but softer, closer to a D. Vowels are always pronounced out and they follow the same sounds as Spanish vowels use (I didn't intend that, but once I realized I was doing that, hey, it's an easy way to explain!)
A = 'ah'
E = 'eh'
I = 'ee'
O = 'oh'
U = 'oo'
When you see two vowels side by side, both are pronounced with a slight emphasis on the second one. "Raag" would be "Rah-AHg".

If there's anything else I forgot, or you just want to know about, let me know and I'll add it into this explanation.

Thanks for reading! See you next week!