On 3 Mar 2013, at 12:06, john knightley <[email protected]> wrote:
> When translating from one language to another there are always some words and > expressions for which there exists no exact equivalents. Yes, but that's not the issue here. > It is impossible to produce an exact translation of Alice's Adventures in > Wonderland in any language. Whilst with Klingon there may be more of these > than most other languages translation possible, through no commercially > profitable on this planet. It is easy to translate Alice into Esperanto or Volapük: these have massively huge vocabularies. It has been possible to translate Alice into Hawaiian and Samoan, in fact. But for Klingon, there simply aren't enough words devised, say my colleagues. And Klingon is hampered by having a creator of canonical vocabulary; nobody is "allowed" (by agreement of the community) to just make up Klingon words. (Esperanto and Volapük have committees that look at new terminology.) Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
