“Okay, okay! Wait a minute!” Emilia didn’t quite yell—it was a little late for yelling, and even she had enough self-control to not yell when snuggled up so nicely next to a beautiful man who only vaguely tolerated her. Still! She had complaints about this story, and those complaints needed to be heard!
“Yes?” Olivier asked, the soft, horror-tinged tone he had been using to tell his story lingering within the amusement now twining through it.
“So, like, this story is great. Loving the
we’re telling horror stories in the woods and none of us will be able to sleep after this
vibes, but I have complaints!” Emilia told him, banging her fist gently against his chest; that was the best she could do to contain her outrage at his aunt for her terrible translation! “I know your aunt probably didn’t go to one of the, like, two programs in Baalphoria that teach anything about translation—”
“She did not,” Olivier agreed.
“—nor did she attend any of the programs in the Free Colonies that are available to Baalphorians—” There was one in Seer'ik'tine and another in Zironia that accepted international applicants, and while the ones in Norvel and Dion
technically
accepted Baalphorians, they also required a letter of introduction from
someone of note
—something few people the continent over could get.
“No, she attended no such programs,” Olivier agreed yet again.
“—and she probably only knew
some
Grey Sander from relatives—”
“She is relatively fluent, from what I know. Unless she has learned more since I was a teenager, I believe she would struggle to communicate with someone our age—too much unknown slang, and such things—nor was she familiar enough with older Grey Sander for this translation to be completely reliable,” Olivier explained, perfect happy to interrupt her rambling complaints and allow her to continue on as though he had never interrupted. It was the sort of skill some of her friends had, but it generally took some work for them to figure out a rhythm; yet, she and Olivier had flawlessly fallen into a gentle push and tug of words and Emilia… Emilia loved it, this easy friendship developing between them—maybe friendship. She could hope.
“—so I suppose the mistakes can be forgiven, but some of this is just so…” Emilia bit her lip, trying to think of the word for what this story—what the translation choices—were doing, the Baalphorian word escaping her.
In Dionese, the word was
tatarona
, meaning
corrupted through foreign eyes,
while the creations of such an erroneous and purposefully misconstrued Dion were known as
gintarsha,
which literally translated to
stupid foreign writings.
Gintarsha was an actual genre, though—a foreign one, and all gintarsha media was heavily mocked in Dion, for good reason! They were terrible, all set in Dion or prominently featuring Dionese characters in a way that was
wrong.
Gintarsha were a recreating of a Dion that only existed within the minds of foreigners, some of whom who never even stepped foot in Dion, many of whom were relying on ancient rumours of the
Corrupters and Brutes of the West,
concocting this version of Dion that had no grounding in reality—or was at the very least a serious bending of the truth for the creator and audience’s amusement.
Sometimes, gintarsha portrayed Dion as a terrible, brutal place; other times, it was an idealized world of court intrigue and arranged marriages turned epic love stories. Neither existed in reality; both were true and false in their owns ways. While the horrific version was a purist’s wet dream, at least the latter, idealized version wasn’t quite as noxious as the highly questionable works about The Core. At least in the case gintarsha, there were aspects of Dionese culture melded into them, inaccurate as the end result and the feelings the works evoked in those who consumed them were. More was known about Dion, so authors at least bent reality to their needs.
In the case of The Core, it had been isolated from everyone for so long that, as far as Emilia knew, the idealized stories of it and the scant historical documents about it that had managed to survive and were generally kept in private Free Colony libraries—and, therefore, not available for even Emilia to peruse, annoyingly—were the only things anyone knew about the secretive Free Colony. No one went in; no one went out. As a result, The Core that existed within the public memory was this highly technological developed utopia, all thanks to that idealized media and the knowledge that, when it had cut itself off from the outside world, it had been even more technologically advanced than Baalphoria. This had been a few thousand years ago, so who knew what the place was like anymore—AI apocalypse, anyone?
While the idealized stories of The Core were actually one of the few things that transcended borders, both it and gintarsha were far more common in Baalphoria and a few far western Free Colonies than other nations. As with many things involving the Free Colonies, Baalphoria had a bad reputation for either idealizing or degrading or—
“Exoticizing?” Olivier suggested with the confidence of someone who had also realized that his aunt’s translation of the story—and probably anything else she’d touched—was rather suspect.
“Yes! That’s the word! Like, I’d have to look at the original document—which I doubt your Censor let you copy—”
“It did not.”
“—but I get the feeling she probably didn’t mess up the substance of the translation too much, but some of this is just
way
too… fluffy? Or poetic, I guess? Like—and here’s your first official Grey Sander lesson—
moshuka
does literally mean
turns of the moon.
It’s still used today, but no one says
ita moshuka’lana
and is trying to literally say
two turns of the moon into the future.
They’re just trying to say
in two months.
”
Against her head, Olivier’s chin brushed her forehead as he nodded. “I had assumed as much,” he told her. “I have spent enough time in Dion for these trips, listening and recording as my Censor translates, to know their language is similarly
poetic,
as you said, but much of that extra meaning falls away once the word has been used enough.”
Agreeing, Emilia gave him a few more examples of that exact thing in the story he had been telling. Any reference to
summers
was just
years.
The
tidal cities
was probably a very literal translation of its actual name. “It’s like if someone took the Baalphorian name of
Piketown
and translated it as
town at the base of Mount Pike.
Sure, that’s technically the feeling the name evokes, and go back far enough and the name will be
Mount Pike Base Camp
, but to translate it as anything other than
Piketown
—for maybe,
Pike
plus the local word for town or city—is weird.”
“It is a forcing of some
otherness
into the wording that doesn’t exist outside the translation,” Olivier agreed, and where did
he
learn so much about this? Such things definitely weren’t taught outside those few specialized programs—not as far as Emilia knew.
“One of my law school classmates was from a small, southwestern Free Colony. She was one of the few classmates who was nice to me,” Olivier told her when she asked, still happy to go along with her tangents.
“Oh?”
“Yes. Mirin would invite me to sit by her, and would often share food with me—usually things her family had made based on food from their homeland, although I believe sourcing many of the ingredients was difficult. They moved here due to internal issues in her home nation, although Mirin would never say more than that, never even telling me exactly where she was from.”
“There are quite a few Free Colonies in the far west that have internal issues going on— I mean, pretty much all nations do, even Baalphoria, but the western Free Colonies have had more civil wars and police actions in the last century or two than anywhere else. Something to do with how Dion released—or lost, depending on who you ask—their influence in a bunch of them during the last Colonial War. Too much focus on fighting Baalphoria, and they loosened their grip too much, I guess? Most descended into war soon after that, then settled for a bit under new governance. Eventually, conflict bubbled back up—it’s part of why so many of those Free Colonies aren’t considered safe for travel by most nations. Too volatile, and a lot of people fled—especially those belonging to powerful families in those governments that first popped up, or even whatever governments existed under Dion’s influence. Ooh~ maybe that’s why she wouldn’t tell you where she was from! She could be some lost princess, just waiting to be swept off to reclaim her lost crown!”
“Perhaps,” Olivier said, contemplative and completely ignoring her princess speculation. “It was clear she was still attached to her home nation, and she wanted to become a lawyer specializing in aiding Free Coloniers living and working within Baalphoria, so many of her presentations and choices of cases for mock trials and such were related to such issues.”
“So you learned about translation issues from those presentations?”
“Yes. She once gave a presentation on the negative effect of a law requiring human translators within many court cases, rather than utilizing OIC-assisted Censor translations. While not always required, it causes backlogs, as not many Baalphorians can speak any foreign languages without their Censor. There are also constant issues with their translations. Not only are many of the translators less than capable, they often translate in ways that are so literal it makes the person they are translating for seem, well, crazy.”
“Some Dionese does translate
really
badly, when taken literally,” Emilia mused, telling Olivier that a particularly bad culprit was
jinri
which meant
murder
but literally translated closer to
speaking bisection,
a reference to an ancient myth in which a corrupt ruler would kill anyone he disliked by slicing them in two with a core ability. One moment, someone would be speaking to the ruler, the next, he would be slicing them in two. “I could definitely see how a literal translation of that could make the person seem not quite right in the head.
‘I did not give that person a speaking bisection!’
or something, although, it would probably be something more like
‘I give speaking bisection to not that person,’
and that is weird and almost implies they murdered
someone
, just not this person? Messy.”
“Indeed. Mirin supplied many examples of such issues. It was a summer project, and she even travelled to Seer’ik’tine and visited many of the embassies, asking to speak with people who spoke Baalphorian and the language in the examples to understand how they would have translated it. The number of cases where a Free Colonier’s testimony was disregarded as irrelevant or unreliable due to a faulty translation is not something I am likely to ever forget—Mirin, either. I believe she intends to challenge the law, eventually.”
“Eventually? Why not now?”
“Funding, partially. It would also require the right case in appeals, so she not only has to wait for such a case, but also then convince numerous people to allow her to use the case for this, and that could be… complicated. In addition, many of the judges who currently preside over appeals are known to have purist leanings.”
“So, she might have to wait for a few to die or retire?”
Dark humour lathered through Olivier’s voice as he agreed.
Emilia wanted to ask what sort of people would need to be convinced to allow Mirin to
use the case
for her cause, but that seemed like the sort of question liable to end in a lecture about all the people involved in various types of cases. This wasn’t something Emilia minded! Despite being an interloper in Olivier’s class, she really did like learning about the law! Not enough to become a lawyer, but there were a few universities that offered classes through the Virtuosi System, and maybe—only maybe!—she had been considering taking a few, once she convinced the man to take her case… or once the case was over. Emilia was currently undecided.
Still, long as their entire conversation was going—not that Emilia felt sleep tugging at her anymore, what with the mystery and horror of Olivier’s story still rattling through her—it was probably best that she not ask for such specifics. Later, maybe. Annotations might be best? Or perhaps the man already had notes for a class where he covered such details of convincing people to let you use their case for something completely unrelated? Unknown, but something to find out later.
“I’m glad you had at least one friend-type person in law school,” she said instead. “I had gotten the impression that you were alone the whole time.”
“Not quite,” Olivier admitted, a small smile in his voice as he added that they weren’t quite friends—and he certainly wouldn’t randomly message her to catch up—but he had appreciated her kindness, viewing it as a hand extended to a kindred spirit. “We were two strange creatures in a class of students who often faded into the group.”
Emilia had to laugh at that, asking what in the stars that even meant. More laughter followed as Olivier admitted, his voice full of embarrassment because he knew what he was saying was a little mean—if still correct—that many of his classmates had simply been generic, and fuck, Olivier being mean? Olivier actually saying bad things about his former classmates—and now technically colleagues, she supposed?
That was the sort of distraction Emilia was 100% on board for. Chances like this didn’t come around often—not in her short acquaintance with the man, anyways—and there was a chance she would burn the entire ship down just to make sure she heard the details of his
generic
classmates.
Arc 9 | Chapter 351: Translate (Badly) For Me
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