Translation Guide

This will be a short guide on how to translate into the Dragon Language, and some exercises if you want practice.

A good translation captures the original meaning of the source, not necessarily a word-for-word translation of it.  The Dragon Language is a blunt and effective instrument and knowing the prefixes & suffixes can go a long way towards making a good translation.

1. Search for the word you're translating

To start, search for an exact match of the word you're looking for.  If it's a short word like "at" or "in", you can filter the results by part of speech to make this easier.

Oftentimes, you won't find an exact match because the word will be a different form of a root word.  For example, you might not find a word for "torn", but you will find a word for "tear", "Vaaz".

2. Use prefixes and suffixes to capture the original meaning

If the sentence you're translating is, "I have torn Time apart.", a good knowledge of the suffixes will help you arrive at the conclusion that "vaazaan" is what you want to use for "have torn".  There are a lot of other prefixes and suffixes that can help shorten what might be long phrases in English.

3. Piece together the sentence, remove extra words

Once you have all of the individual words you want to use, put them together and decide which ones you don't need.  The Dragon Language lets go of a lot of extra words like "the", "a/an", "is/was", and even some prepositions, especially in writing.  Decide which places you want to keep these words and which places you can afford to throw them out.

For example, if you have a proper noun like "The High King of Skyrim", maybe you want to keep "faal" to mark that it is a proper noun.  Where to get rid of "los" depends on how it's used.  For example, if I was translating "The river is red with blood", I'll probably choose to keep "los" because it's the only verb in the sentence.  However, if it was instead, "The river is running red with blood", I would cut it out since the suffix used to make "running" from "run" already implies "los" for me.

4. Make compound words

Compound words are two or more words combined to make a new word.  This isn't seen a lot in English, but is more common in languages like German, and it's prevalent in the Dragon Language too.  With our previous example, "The High King of Skyrim", one way to translate it might be "faal Kriis Jun do Keizaal".  However, it would be more fitting in the Dragon Language to make a compound word for it: "faal Kriisjunsekeizaal".  Remember that "do" means "of" in sentences, and "se" means "of" when making compound words.

You can also make compound words out of improper nouns.  For example, "I hail from the northern mountains" could be translated as "Zu'u meyz nol strunmahhesebrom."

5. Exercises - Britdur

1. "The cold winds of the north do not welcome any who are unprepared."
2. "I will gather as many men as can be found."
3. "Fight me, and you will die with honor.  Flee, and you will die a coward."

6. Exercises - theezra

1. "How many men does it take to kill a dragon?"
2. "I should have known you would betray me."
3. "Skyrim belongs to the Nords!  May no man name himself our emperor."

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I have a problem, as prepare is Nahlok, how do i chage it to prepared so i can add von to make it unprepared?

i cant find verb to adjective in the prefix/sufix lesson page

You can find how to turn change verbs into adjectives in the "Verbs" lesson.  I will update the prefixes/suffixes list soon because it is somewhat outdated.

There is a prefix and a suffix you'll need to make "unprepared".  The first is the prefix "Vo-", which means "un-", "in-", "de-", etc., it makes a word mean its opposite.  The second is the suffix "-aan", which is not only the suffix for making several of the past tenses, but is also used to make adjectives out of verbs such as "unprepared", "killed", "eaten", etc.  So, "unprepared" would be "Vonahlokaan".

Understood, so thanks for your help