Wahawafe - a multilingual translation project

[Trevor Jenkins]

On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 1:22 PM, Valerie Sutton <sutton at signwriting.org>wrote:

Nikhil needs the translations in written SIGN LANGUAGES, not spoken
> languages!


> I am not an ASL expert, or I would do the translation myself in ASL. I
> actually do not how to sign that phrase in ASL, so that is why I was waiting
> for someone who knows ASL to do the translation for NIkhil in ASL...written
> in SignWriting.
>

I'm in a similar situation with BSL. I'm increasing fluent in its use but
not a native speaker. However, I am fluent in English yet I don't know how
to understand the phrase:


> "We are humans and we are from Earth."
>

How many are the "we"s? English, plus I guess many (all?) of the spoken
languages given here as exemplars, the first person plural is uncountable.
It would be possible to translate it into Swedish with "vi" and still
obscure the number of participants. In BSL, at least, the first person
plural is countable; up to four maybe five even 10. It is signed differently
depending on the number of participants. For example, if "we" consists of me
and my wife then I sign that slightly different from me, my wife, and you
(Valerie), plus the physical proximity of the "we" one to another would
change the sign(s) needed. However these small groups are signed entirely
differently from "we" as the subscribers to this list (if all of us happened
to be assembled in one locale).

The presence of the "and" indicates that the second "we" is a distinct
different group from the first but with the speaker (signer) a member of
both groups. There is a famous phrase that exemplifies the same problem
"Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path." In this case the
AND is a transliteration from the source language but its inclusion creates
an ambiguity that is not in the original. If that second "we" of the sample
sentence were to refer to me, my wife and my dog then the "and" is vital.

There's also a BSL issue here. We have no sign for AND. There are ways to
indicate that two things are connected but not immediately.

The "from" affects the translational choices too. Where is this discourse
dislocated sentence being transacted and how did the various "we"s arrive
there, or were "we" there from the beginning. Similarly the actors to whom
this phrase is being relayed are they from somewhere else coming to the
"here" or were they there from the beginning. This information will change
how the sentence can be translated.

It's not that the sentence is un-translatable *per se* but that rather it is
not context free as Nikhil claimed somewhere (possibly on his web site). At
least for BSL, context is required otherwise the processing costs in the
sense of Relevance Theory is astronomically high. Without the enclosing
context it isn't really possible to provide a BSL translation.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!
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