Woo, this is a whole 'nother can o' worms (wyrms?). Anyways, should it be seen as acceptable or offensive to translate real life religious texts (e.g. the Bible) into Dovahzul. Please, when you answer, provide a reason and don't hate on anyone. The former adds credibility to your argument while the latter is for the sake of courtesy and to not break the rules.

As a religious person, I feel it should be acceptable. I think it would pleasing to my God to incorporate the holy text of my religion into my life in such an enjoyable way, but I felt the need to ask anyways. Y'know, just to be safe.

So, let's avoid all the nuclear landmines and have a civil discussion, shall we?

From a practical point of view, one way the Klingon language became so developed was through translating the Bible. In fact I believe that project is still ongoing. I don't see anything wrong with the idea.

I think I might start, but I'll wait to post anything until I get some more opinions.

I see no issue with this, as long as the text gets the correct message across.

It's more or less a tradition among conlangers to translate either the Lord's Prayer or the Tower of Babel text (or both) into their conlang. I've personally done translations of the Babel text in all the conlangs I've made, and I'm a Christian. Conlanging is an art form, and I feel like translating different texts in a conlang is showing a sort of respect to the original text, i.e. that it is important enough to artfully reproduce it in a constructed language. After all, who would want to translate the instruction manual for a laptop into their conlang? xD Not me, at least....

I guess we could at least translate maybe the first book of the Bible for now. But I think its a better idea to develop more dovah words first.

MekaX

I guess we could at least translate maybe the first book of the Bible for now. But I think its a better idea to develop more dovah words first.

I think we have more than enough words. Conversely, translating will help us figure out which areas of vocabulary we are missing.

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Hiith, neither the KJV or Tyndale translations are written in Old English; they're written in Early Modern English. >_< Old English is unintelligble to modern English speakers. For example, here's the first sentence of Beowulf in Old English, its original language: "Hwæt! wÄ“ Gār-Dena in Ä¡eār-dagum, þÄ“od-cyninga, þrym Ä¡efrÅ«non, hÅ« ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon." There actually aren't any English translations of the Bible that go back any further than Early Modern English. I also think it's a bit of a misconception to think that using earlier English translations is preferable to using modern ones as a resource, especially regarding translation. Preferably, you'll need to know Koine Greek and Hebrew, and base any translation on the actual original text if you really want a superior translation, rather than playing telephone through various other languages (remember that the KJV is partially based on the Latin Vulgate translation, which is not the original text). However, considering Dovahzul is just an artlang at best which could be classified as an auxilliary dialect of English, it would definitely simplify things a lot to just use an English translation....

I also totally disagree about your statement regarding the relevance of the Old Testament, but I won't start a religious debate here hahaha. xD I know modern Bible translators generally start with the Gospels when translating the Bible into a new language (I've done some work with Wycliffe Bible translators before). On the other hand, many conlangers start in Genesis. Really in this case I think it's more personal preference than anything. x)

You have my earnest apologies. krosis. I did find a Bible app that has Greek and Hebrew dictionaries, so I guess that's handy. It's called "And Bible". A question: how are the names of people and places to be translated? Just thinking.

In real life, the majority of names are transliterated (i.e. rework the name to fit into the phonology of the target language). For example, my name, which is "Tatum" in English becomes 泰特姆 (Tài tè mÇ”) in Mandarin, following Mandarin's own phonetic rules for names. (Personally though, I prefer using the name è¨±æ…§å©· (XÇ” huì tíng), which is the one I gave myself, when speaking both Chinese and Korean.) Translating names by translating the name's meaning is very rare and usually only happens in fictional literature, i.e. Harry Potter. If you're going to transliterate, you'll want to work with the original language, not the English variant which has already been transliterated once.

Like my name! (I knew I was doing something right.) So, apparently, Jesus's name would be something like iieysoos from his greek name "Iesous", pronounced "ee-ay-sooce'", according to this Greek dictionary (though I don't know what the apostrophe is for).

Most scholars think that Ancient Greek had a tonal aspect to the language (though I think it's assumed to have been a more simple tonal system like in Japanese than a complex tonal system like in Chinese), so the apostrophes and other diacritics mark the tones of the words. In all the Greek classes I've taken, everybody just ignores them when pronouncing the words though. xD

As long as the text is translated veritably and you manage to include as much of the initial tone, context and implications as possible, there is nothing wrong with translating religious texts.

The problem however arises from the fact that Dovahzul is still more or less in its infancy, and religious texts tend to be both verbose as well as filled with allegory and metaphors. You would either need to create many new forms or reduce the quality of the language into a simpler form. Corpuses such as the King James Bible for instance can be a nightmare to translate accurately even to existing, fully-developed languages (that is, if one wants to translate more than just the literal meaning of the words and the general message), and I cannot even imagine the vast amount of effort you would have to invest into something like that. But say you managed it, it would be an immense contribution to the evolution of Dovahzul.

So, apparently, Jesus's name would be something like iieysoos from his greek name "Iesous", pronounced "ee-ay-sooce'", according to this Greek dictionary (though I don't know what the apostrophe is for).

The apostrophe in Greek marks aspiration, so essentially you add a "h"-ish sound to that place. Also, that is a latinized version, Greeks have a /j/ sound, the Roman variant changes that to /i/ because the Romans used "I" to write both /i/ and /j/ - the pronunciation was probably with a /j/ from the start, since the Hebrew version is "Yeshua" /jɛʃua/.

You could either translate "Jesus" to "Kulserah" / "son of god," or you could go with simply using the same name, but pronouncing it as it likely would have been pronounced in Dovahzul, which would then be transcribed as something like "Jiizus" (keeping the English /dÊ’/, long /i:/ and the short /u/, along with writing the /z/ as "z" as is customary in Dovahzul) or "Jiizes" (if you want the second vowel to be closer to the central schwa-vowel as opposed to the more back-positioned /u/), or if you want to go back to the original pronunciation, "Yeshuah."

I think the last option would be preferable: as far as I know, no language litterally translated Jesus' name (even Tibetan, if my memory is good), so why would Dovahzul would be an exception? However, in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish, "Jesus" is translated by "Jessu", so I don't think trying to get close to English pronunciation is a good idea, as Dovahzul is meant to be close to Nordic languages. I think it wold be better if we had something like "Jessuh".

However, I am wondering, would it be ok to translate texts from other religions? (such as Buddhism). I have some texts in mind that could be not too complex to translate, but which could help to add vocabulary to the dictionary.