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On Exotic Technorati Love and Klingon Conspiracies

I did a Technorati Vanity Check yesterday and noticed the following link: ผู้เชี่ยวชาญเกิดจากอะไร

Staying true to my culturally oblivious American (technically United Statesian) roots, I took some wild guesses and placed the language somewhere in the Middle East. Not surprisingly, I was not even close. It turned out to be a direct translation of one of my recent posts into Thai that was done by chatchai chailuecha, an Engineer from Bangkok.

<Shame>I hate to admit it, but I was blissfully unaware that there was actually a language called Thai despite the fact that it is spoken by over 60 million people.</Shame> Again, that should not surprise anyone. The rest of the world likely has such low expectations of us Am'Ricans that they are probably just grateful that I am able to speak English at all or that I even know the name of the language I speak.

On a side note, you may ask why poor misguided blogger from Thailand would choose to translate my post into Thai in the first place? Good question. I can only assume that some of the words got garbled in the translation and he accidentally mistook it for something of interest.

Anyways, after seeing this esoteric link, my first inclination was to do a theme post and provide my own translation of said post in a truly obscure language. This also should not surprise you since I am a shameless blog whore, as Raoul, a co-worker of mine who is well-known for his tact is fond of pointing out.

I am not really a huge fan of Star Trek, but I like to think of myself as a self-respecting geek so naturally chose Klingon.

At first, I was sorely disappointed in the sad state of Klingon translation software. At most I only got a few words of my post to translate into this highly revered fictitious language. I was starting to think that maybe geeks actually had better sense than I had given them credit for and didn't spend nearly as much time on this as I had assumed.

That's when I stumbled upon the Klingon Translation Bible Project.

 I kid you not. Someone is actually putting a good faith effort into translating the entire Bible into Klingon. Here is what the Book of Ruth looks like in Klingon in case you don't believe me. I'll pause to let that sink in.

 ...still pausing...

I'm not sure of what the official population of Klingons is, but I'm pretty sure that it is less than 65 million. It seems to me that the good people of Thailand would be disturbed by this knowledge.

 In fact, I'm almost positive that there is no good way to spin this to the rest of the world. At least before we could fall back on the excuse that we were linguistically retarded or just plain lazy. Now everyone will know that the real reason we struggle with one language when nearly everyone else in the world is multi-lingual is that we just plain don't want to talk to them.

Damn you Klingons!

Don't take it personally, world. There's not very many people I really want to talk to in my own country either.

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Print | posted on Friday, November 30, 2007 7:12 AM

Comments on this post

# re: On Exotic Technorati Love and Klingon Conspiracies

Requesting Gravatar...
Hi , Russell
First of all, I am sorry that I have translated your blog entry without asking for your permission. I have no intention to make benefit from your original content in anyway. I have my own blog at http://mahajone.blogspot.com. I noticed your blog from dzone and I thought it is ok to translate your interesting blog entry to my language as long as I gave credit to the original author and provided a link to the original content.

I will remove the translated blog entry. Sorry if I have disturbed you in anyway.
Left by Chatchai on Dec 03, 2007 3:38 AM

# re: On Exotic Technorati Love and Klingon Conspiracies

Requesting Gravatar...
Chatchai,
You misunderstand. I was very pleased that you liked my post enough to translate it. Please don't remove it.You can translate anything I write without asking my permission.

This post was my feeble attempt at sarcastic humor, which from my experience is one of the most difficult things to translate.

Best wishes,
Russell
Left by Russell Ball on Dec 03, 2007 7:34 AM

# re: On Exotic Technorati Love and Klingon Conspiracies

Requesting Gravatar...
For all you Trekies...Here are some links that a reader thought you might enjoy. I know it's a shameless advertising plug, but he asked nicely and it seemed like some relevant link love for this post.

Trek Passions

Gaming Passions

Nerd Passions
Left by Russell Ball on Dec 04, 2007 3:59 PM

# re: On Exotic Technorati Love and Klingon Conspiracies

Requesting Gravatar...
@Chatchai - interesting blog post about copyright issues related to translating blog posts. Good luck with your translation efforts.
Left by Russell Ball on Dec 04, 2007 8:28 PM

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