Translating is not easy.
It's damn ******** hard.
Translating from spoken English to spoken Irish is ******** difficult.
When I speak in Irish, I don't take each phrase and translate an appropriate linguistic contrivance from English to Irish any more than when I speak English with regards to Irish. Conversation in a language is easy.
Translators get paid big bucks. FOR GOOD ******** REASON.
Translating from any form of technical English to Irish is a ******** pain in the hole. Each word in English is
LOADED with meaning. Phrases? They're next to impossible to translate without producing errors. Legalistic contrivances, they are point-blank impossible.
I have been given a document in English and asked to produce the Irish that it was translated from.
I honestly think the person in question is blatantly ignorant of how impossible this is.
I don't think he's aware of the fact that if I produce a document, two other Irish speakers would produce two other documents.
I don't think he's aware of the fact that the document that I produce will have
at least two other translations that are
linguistically valid.
This is to leave aside the fact that there are terms like "Supernal", "Abyss", "Exarchs" "Awakened" and a whole host of foreign culture words in it. Then you have the misconception that there are hundreds of words for rock in Dwarvish, to steal a concept from terry prattchett. There are no words for rock in Dwarvish. To lump rocks together is a ridiculous concept, to dwarves. Much the same for dream and Irish.
Then there's the case of the noun "Wise". Wise is, generally, an adjective. So I could use the "wise ones" which has it's own problems. Irish is a language that makes liberal and frequent use of declension.
This would be headwrecking enough but, as ST Forsaken, I get 40 prestige a month. I've been offered 20 prestige to do this. Rather than being asked "what's the appropriate amount of prestige for this" I got greeted with the (completely unintentional but none-the-less horribly offensive) affront of having it be called "Free prestige".
This would be completely understandable if it were an american I were dealing with, no offence but I'm basing this on statistics and there are a lower number of multilingual americans (proportianally) than there are those who claim to be Irish speakers in my country
americans who speak foreign languages versus
irish people who claim to speak irish, but it's not. It's from an Irishman. The statistics lie, by the way. It's utter bollox.
They lie like rugs.
Dirty rugs that people have walked all over.
Funniest thing is, I'd have had no problem doing it, at all, if no mention of prestige had been made.
The assumption that it was easy, or trivial: therein lies the problem and offense.
Reconcilliation is difficult. I don't know the person. I suffer rather badly from social anxiety. I don't know how to relate to people who are clearly my intellectual inferior on a given topic and I hate the presumption.
None of this is his fault. I have to deal with this.
BUT ******** SAKE. ASK HOW HARD SOMETHING IS BEFORE PUTTING A PRICE ON IT.
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