Learn Dothraki and Valyrian

Learn Dothraki => Beginners => Topic started by: fasqoyi on December 18, 2013, 07:51:45 am

Title: Summertime Sadness in Dothraki, anyone want to check this translation?
Post by: fasqoyi on December 18, 2013, 07:51:45 am
Original lyrics: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/lanadelrey/summertimesadness.html (http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/lanadelrey/summertimesadness.html)

zokwas anna hatif elae
vorsaka athkhezhar
Anha disse zal yer nesi
rek yer avezhvenanaz

anha rey shor virzeth ajjalan
ezchirak mra shekhikh messhihven jalani
noreth at zhokwa ma lain ven khaleesi
orzi ejerva, frakholak thir

oh, vojjor anni, frakolak mae mra asavva
fiez towak oleth anni ven orzo
gizikh, nem virsalak, frakholak ei gache
vosi rokhi anna ajjin

(1, 2, 3, 4)

zokwas anna hatif elae
vorsaka athkhezhar
Anha disse zal yer nesi
rek yer avezhvenanaz

Anha rey vorsaka, vorsaka athkhezhar
v-v-vorsaka, vorsaka athkhezhar
Rey vorsaka, vorsaka athkhezhar
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh

Anha nemo frakholak sisi ajjalan
Dothralak osaan qisi chiqazat ma qazat
Rey khal anni dothralae hajekh anni
hash ek, nem adrivolak ajjalan layaf

oh, vojjor anni, frakolak mae mra asavva
fiez towak oleth anni ven orzo
gizikh, nem virsalak, frakholak ei gache
vosi rokhi anna ajjin

(1, 2, 3, 4)

zokwas anna hatif elae
vorsaka athkhezhar
Anha disse zal yer nesi
rek yer avezhvenanaz

Anha rey vorsaka, vorsaka athkhezhar
v-v-vorsaka, vorsaka athkhezhar
Rey vorsaka, vorsaka athkhezhar
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh

Dirgak fin avigererak yeraan ayyey
Ven shieraki avigeri shekh mra asavva ajjalani
Ajjalan asvezhvan vosi
akka yer e, anha adothralak

Anha rey vorsaka, vorsaka athkhezhar
v-v-vorsaka, vorsaka athkhezhar
Rey vorsaka, vorsaka athkhezhar
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh

zokwas anna hatif elae
vorsaka athkhezhar
Anha disse zal yer nesi
rek yer avezhvenanaz

Anha rey vorsaka, vorsaka athkhezhar
v-v-vorsaka, vorsaka athkhezhar
Rey vorsaka, vorsaka athkhezhar
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
Title: Re: Summertime Sadness in Dothraki, anyone want to check this translation?
Post by: Qvaak on December 18, 2013, 08:35:22 pm
Oh my. Happy times. Another huge translation attempt - and from a new fellow none the less. You are not, zhey fasqoyi, by any chance the Steelbolt from Reddit?

I'm the usual go-to guy for pedantic, meandering corrections & commentary, but it may take some time before I'll manage to plough through this one. If someone else wants to try their grammar skills, have at it - I can then comment on the commentary ;)

The first stanza for starters:
Quote
zokwas anna hatif elae
Zoqwas.
Elat is conjugated ee, not elae. I think Dothraki would also use a future even while English skips it, so vee.
Dothraki is a non-pro-drop language, and since even the English version has "before you go", Dothraki version should IMO be hatif yer vee.
Quote
vorsaka athkhezhar
Vorsaska.
The English line does not have a full sentence syntax, so translations may vary in interpretation. The way I read it, "summertime" is a modifier, adjective-like, eg: "Summertime sadness is the nicest kind of sadness". The Dothraki line, as it is here, works actually much more as a full sentence, and would translate to "Summer is sadness." Perhaps athkhezhar vorsaski might be a closer translation.
Quote
Anha disse zal yer nesi
Disse is awkwardly placed. Adverbs like it generally go to the end of the sentence. I guess it should come before the subordinate clause.
I'm also a bit dubious about the past tense of zalat. It works in English, and works in Finnish, so I guess it might as well work in Dothraki too. Still, it's a curious expression and might easily not translate well.
Auxiliary verb stuff works somewhat different in Dothraki, and while zalat is actually one of the more English-like auxiliaries, a full "that you know" should IMO be needed here, so meyer nesi.
Quote
rek yer avezhvenanaz
Here "that" is neither a demonstrative nor a relative pronoun. It's just a complementizer, and translates to /me-/ prefix. Thus meyer of course repeats, but that should not be too bad. Happens in English all the time with "that".
By general rule Avezhvenanaz should be in verb form, so in second person it would be avezhvenanazi. You actually can use a bare adjective to mark that you are speaking of an instinsic quality, not just of a current state, so maybe that would work well here. I'd go with conjugated verb, because the bare adjective can be read as a past tense verb. Often this would not be a problem, but here the interpretation is too fitting.

So I guess my correction proposal would be
zoqwas anna hatif yer vee
athkhezhar vorsaski
anha zal disse meyer nesi
meyer avezhvenanazi



----

Gosh crickey darn I gotta get my fat ass on some project of my own. It's a disgrace that us oldies have so little to show while newbies produce in volumes. Whelp, I guess we might have the poem challenge vol. 3 soon, so that at least should light some fire on these decrepit bones of mine.
Title: Re: Summertime Sadness in Dothraki, anyone want to check this translation?
Post by: Qvaak on January 02, 2014, 11:18:04 am
No comments? I'll look through another stanza. Give a holler if you want more. All questions, such as (for example) "Are you sure you got what I tried to do there," "Why would it go like that and not like this," "Is that info somewhere on the wiki or blog" or "What if I tried to say it like this" would be appreciated. I'm not entirely sure if my comments are all that welcome.

Anyway, here's the second stanza:

Quote
anha rey shor virzeth ajjalan

Rey (or ray, to be exact) does not work here. It's "to have" only in the sense of past perfect; there is no link to the actual concept of having something. Ray means more or less "already". Ray also is not a verb. The way it works is closer to an adverb. "To have" is a tricky concept to translate to Dothraki, as they don't have any corresponding general verb expression. Often mra qora serves, like Shor virzeth mra qora, but here I think a better solution would be to use ondelat.
If you use shor virzeth as an object, you need to decline it. Shor is, if we're not mistaken, an animate noun, and consonant-ending adjective agrees with singular non-nominative case, thus: shores virzetha.

Quote
ezchirak mra shekhikh messhihven jalani

ezhirak
Anha is of course missing again, but as this line builds on the line before, I think it works perfectly fine - as it does in English.
Ingsve once translated "Have you danced with devil in the pale moonlight?" as "Hash yer ezhir ma vojjoroon mela mra shekhikh jalani dei," and there are a couple of good points in that translation.
You both go with mra, and I think that's the likeliest alternative, but it's worth a mention that mra has narrower meaning that English in and is centered on the concept of inside, so it might be a bit off here, and she is a possible alternative. We don't know for sure, as far as I know.
Dothraki has a system for human skin colours, comparing them to horse colours. These are not general-use colour words, and though in some lyrical works you might use them metaphorically, I think calling moonlight pale skinned won't work. Ingsve used dei, and that should be quite spot-on.
The word order you have is the surest one: adjective placed after the noun and the possessive coming last. This is normal and should pose no problem. However, this woslauld trante to "pale light of the moon". If you want to go with moonlight, the words need to be bound tighter together. Ingsve has done this by creating a word-compoundish construct shekhikh jalani. This is pretty cool touch, but probably not perfect. Even compound-light English glues moonlight to a single word, and Dothraki seems more prone to compounding, so we should probably expect a compound, possibly simply shekhikhjalani.

Quote
noreth at zhokwa ma lain ven khaleesi

This line is tricky, and IMO rather broken.
Past singular of tat is et. I take this is a typo, 'cause it would be stange to get it so close without the right intention.
Should noreth be treated plural? Perhaps. I can't find any support for either singular or plural.
Hair is not that which does, it's the one that's done. I guess you might argue that noreth is a fronted object and the subject is still the same anha as on the lines before and thus legitimally skipped due to redundancy. It's just really confusing, so passive would probably work better: noreth nem et.
How zhokwa ma lain ties to the syntax is also a problem. Using bare adjectives as objects does not look right. They might go as manner adverbs, but even that is iffy. Maybe you could nominalize them and perhaps put them in allative, as they describe the goal of "doing".
Even the conjunctions are slightly questionable. In principle, Dothraki uses conjunctions in pairs, but I'm not entirely sure, how that would work here. Basically it would be ven ma zhokwa ma lain ven khaleesi.
Anyway, tat is very dubious word choice here. The way English say a hair is done is a curious expression and IMO you should not expect it to translate straightforwardly. We don't have much hairdo vocab, so I think the most reasonable thing to do would be to simplify a bit and just say "Hair is big and beautiful like a khaleesi."

Quote
orzi ejerva, frakholak thir

Shoes are in plural even though it's not marked in the noun itself, so past plural is needed: ejervash.
The shoes have not done any removing; they have been removed: Orzi nem ejervash.
Frakholat is conjugated frakhok. I'm a bit doubtful about its exact meaning, but apparently for no solid reason.
Again, I don't see any reason to skip the pronoun when English version does not, so I'd go with anha frakhok.
"Alive" is AFAIK an adverb, plain and simple, and would be best handled with k'atthirari. A bare adjective as an object is still quite certainly ungrammatical.

Thus, again, a rough correction guideline:
Anha ondek shores virzetha ajjalan.
Ezhirak mra shekhikhjalani dei.
Noreth zhokwae ma laina ven khaleesi.
orzi nem ejervash, anha frakhok k'atthirari.
Title: Re: Summertime Sadness in Dothraki, anyone want to check this translation?
Post by: Hrakkar on January 02, 2014, 01:32:47 pm
Wow! Somehow, I missed this one! And as an administrsator, I check this site almost every day ;)

Thank you, Zhey Qvaak for always being willing to take these on and do a great job at them. Alas, I have not have the time I used to have to really get into translations like this, but this definitely looks like one worth studying!
Title: Re: Summertime Sadness in Dothraki, anyone want to check this translation?
Post by: fasqoyi on January 03, 2014, 10:09:19 pm
Thanks for the tips, they are extremely educational, much more than the lyrics themselves. I don't think I remember complementizers in Sunquan's tuturials, but I've found the wiki page summarizing the difference (http://wiki.dothraki.org/Other_word_classes (http://wiki.dothraki.org/Other_word_classes)).

"Mra qora" is an interesting way to think about possession and getting around "to have" when we can't just use the genitive. I was relieved to learn that there wasn't some obvious word I was missing ("ray" somehow felt incorrect even before I read why it was).

Quote
and would be best handled with k'atthirari.

Ki to genitive apparently means "by, because, of". Making the line "I'm feeling of life". That is quite a useful word. I could say anha frakhok k'vorsaki etc, making it a significant way of avoiding using adjectives as objects, or having to nominalize them.

The verses left are:

oh, vojjor anni, frakolak mae mra asavva
fiez towak oleth anni ven orzo
gizikh, nem virsalak, frakholak ei gache
vosi rokhi anna ajjin

Dirgak fin avigererak yeraan ayyey
Ven shieraki avigeri shekh mra asavva ajjalani
Ajjalan asvezhvan vosi
akka yer e, anha adothralak

Anha nemo frakholak sisi ajjalan
Dothralak osaan qisi chiqazat ma qazat
Rey khal anni dothralae hajekh anni
hash ek, nem adrivolak ajjalan layaf

Here is my updated version, with a lot of similar mistakes fixed:

oh, vojjor anni, anha frakhok mae mra asavva
towak nem shina oleth anni ven orzo
gizikh, anha nem virsak, anha frakhok mae mra ei gachesi
vosi rokhi anna ajjin

Anha dirgak meavigererak yeraan ayyey
Ven shieraki avigeri shekhes mra asavva ajjalani
Ajjalan asvezhvana vosi
akka yer ee, anha nem adothralak

Anha frakhok sisi ajjalan
Dothralak osaan qisi chiqazat ma qazat
Khal anni nem dothrae mra hajekh anni
hash anha nem ek, anha nem adrivolak ajjalan layaf


Title: Re: Summertime Sadness in Dothraki, anyone want to check this translation?
Post by: Qvaak on January 05, 2014, 04:22:06 pm
Quote
Thanks for the tips, they are extremely educational, much more than the lyrics themselves.
Thanks for the thanks  :P

Quote
I don't think I remember complementizers in Sunquan's tuturials, but I've found the wiki page summarizing the difference (http://wiki.dothraki.org/Other_word_classes (http://wiki.dothraki.org/Other_word_classes)).
Ya Sunquan's tutorials don't cover everything. They are a great starting point, nevertheless. As for the wiki, you'll find complemetizers, relative clauses and whatnot also discussed at http://wiki.dothraki.org/Syntax (http://wiki.dothraki.org/Syntax) - which is IMO one of the most important pages under the http://wiki.dothraki.org/Learning_Dothraki (http://wiki.dothraki.org/Learning_Dothraki) hub. The word "complemetizer" is not mentioned there, though :)

Quote
"Mra qora" is an interesting way to think about possession and getting around "to have" when we can't just use the genitive.
Ya. We don't know much about idiom stuff, but luckily we know that one. You'll see it mentioned at http://wiki.dothraki.org/Idioms_and_Phrases (http://wiki.dothraki.org/Idioms_and_Phrases) ... note that mra zhor is another useful expression following the similar syntax.

Quote
Ki to genitive apparently means "by, because, of". Making the line "I'm feeling of life". That is quite a useful word. I could say anha frakhok k'vorsaki etc, making it a significant way of avoiding using adjectives as objects, or having to nominalize them.
I think it's intented to be "by, because of" - "because of" being a single prepositionish thingy (actually another complemetizer, I think). Ki seems to generally denote to origin or manner.
Ki (elided to k' because of the /ath-/ start) + nominalized verb (or adjective, as Dothraki does not make a big fuzz about the difference) in genitive makes for quite a specific construct: http://wiki.dothraki.org/Adverbs (http://wiki.dothraki.org/Adverbs). Note that you do need to nominalize verbs/adjectives and that using other nouns than nominalized verbs is already pushing a bit beyond the common pattern. I'd say anha frakhok k'vorsaki should work (something like "I feel firely/fireful" (if frakholat truly works for mind-type feelings, which I'm still not convinced it does)), but that's just a hunch. It's not a full-fledged adverb form.

The next stanza:
Quote
oh, vojjor anni, anha frakhok mae mra asavva
Interjections are not free from language and culture. When English express emotional upheaval with "oh", Finns (I'm a Finn so better get used to comparisons to Finnish) say "oi" - and Dothraki probably say something else. Unfortunately we don't know many Dothraki interjections. Throwing English ortography in the middle of Dothraki does not work too well either. "Oh" would not be read [əʊ], it would be read [oh]. There's one curious alternative, though. You might interpret "oh" as a vocative. Then there's a good simple translation: zhey. That's of course would mean the following "my god" would not be another interjection but an instance of addressing.
It seems we have no word for air, and there's no easy fix available. Asavva sound pretty bad. It's not even just that it's sky, and thus not really around us but far above us, it's also that Dothraki don't seem to have a different word for heaven, and their faith seems to build a lot on the mystical sky (as so many faiths do). Remember how Drogo yells "Asavvasoon! Asavvasoon!" I'd recommend gillosor. It seems passable approximation.

Quote
towak nem shina oleth anni ven orzo
tawak
You lost fiez from the rework. It seems pretty essential word. "Metal ropes" would be said fiez tawaki, though for most materials "made out of material x" puts the material x in ablative... Hell, no. It would be fiez taoka. We have failed to add the whole word taoka to our vocab list (probably I/we were initially a bit puzzled about it and then just forgot), but see http://www.dothraki.com/2012/02/modern-terminology/ (http://www.dothraki.com/2012/02/modern-terminology/).
The ropes are not, I think, made to fizzle out, they are simply fizzling out (and if they were made to fizzle out, you'd need causative form of the verb - I'll get back to this). Nem does not work here and is not needed either.
Shinat is pretty bad word choice altogether, as to me it does not sound like they are going out, rather they are unusually alive. Is it a bad word choice, though, if there are no alternatives? Our sound vocab seems next to nothing. No "buzz" "crackle" "hiss" "sizzle" ... I have no idea what a better word would be. Maybe we might make the expression a bit better by adding a continuative, zin. To be that sounds like they are sputtering out, but can't really finish doing so, resulting in a sort of drawn fizzle  ???
Shouldn't there be multiple ropes? Shinat conjugated to plural third person present is shini. Fiez in more than likely an inanimate noun (though it seems we don't know for sure), so it does not show the plural, and taoka is a vowel ending adjective, so that should not mark plural either.
I think "snare" is meant to be snare drum kind of snare, not trap kind of snare. But maybe we'll just keep with traplike metal rope out-fizzling so that we dodge one more case of not having any passable word (would kherikh hethke work? kinda sorta maybe)

Quote
gizikh, anha nem virsak, anha frakhok mae mra ei gachesi
Gizikh is used for addressing, so it should be preceded by zhey. But the word is of course rather bizarre, as the endearment sense of "honey" is extremely improbable to be shared by Dothraki and English. The best enderment expression we know is shekh ma shieraki anni (and jalan atthirari anni, if the sex is changed). It's a bit heavy, but what can you do - Dothraki are not living in the modern hectic pace.
It's not "I am being burned," it's "I burn." Nem is again not needed nor wanted. But how would you know? It depends on what virsak exactly means. In English many verbs have sort of two meanings, transitive and intransitive, depending on how the sentence is built, but not so in Dothraki. Note that we have actually managed to mark virsalat as intransitive verb; that's the vin. at the front of the definition. If you actually wanted to say "I am being burned," that would be "Anha nem avvirsak."
Gache does not decline to gachesi; it goes: gache, gach, gachi, gachaan, gachoon. Here nominative gache should be the right choice (as AFAIK ei does not affect the case of the noun it modifies).
Note that your use of mra is generally a bit dubious. Dothraki she encompasses a lot of the field of at, in and on. I'd probably go with she ei gache, would definitely go with she asavva and would absolutely not use mra for stuff like "right side". Better understanding is needed.

Quote
vosi rokhi anna ajjin
"Nothing fears me" isn't right. You need a causative verb form arrokhat.
Nothing indicates that vosi should be plural, so the verb should be conjugated arrokha, not arrokhi. I'd also use future, varrokha.
You should be able to put ajjin in ablative to say "from now on": ajjinoon.

Thus, again, a rough correction guideline:
Zhey vojjor anni, anha frakhok mae mra gillosor.
Fiez taoka zin shini oleth anni ven orzo.
Zhey shekh ma shieraki anni, anha virsak, anha frakhok mae she ei gache.
Vosi varrokha anna ajjinoon.
Title: Re: Summertime Sadness in Dothraki, anyone want to check this translation?
Post by: Qvaak on January 13, 2014, 08:12:46 pm
OK. I've been responding to King Alan the First of His Name for a bit, but haven't forgotten this experiment.

Comments on penultimate stanza:

Quote
Anha dirgak meavigererak yeraan ayyey
Dropping the repeating anha should be good, but makes me wonder, how well that /me-/ prefix attaches to stuff. Normally it's attached to nouns, so m'anha would be a bit surer path, but I'd keep m'avigererak (note that you need to elide /me-/ to /m'-/).
You've noticed that vigererat assigns a special case for the object, which is nice, but the case should be ablative, not allative.

Quote
Ven shieraki avigeri shekhes mra asavva ajjalani
Not sure about ven, can't offer any better ideas. Kivenosi is a much worse idea.
I think stars already miss sun, so just vigereri, not avigereri.
Shekh is, surprisingly, an inanimate noun, so the accusative is just shekh.
I'm not sure, why you changed morning sky to night sky. Granted, we don't seem to know the animacy of eana, so it could be either asavva aeni or asavva aenasi.

Quote
Ajjalan asvezhvana vosi
"Tonight is better than never" is, I guess, a decent approximation of "Later is better than never." "Later" is hard to tackle with our vocab.
"Never", on the other hand, we have, and it's avvos. It could be a problem to use adverbs in a syntax like this ('cause we use them as nouns), but in practice I think it isn't. Or maybe vosi was used intentionally and you just felt "Tonight is better than nothing" rang better than "Tonight is better than never"?
I'd also use davralat instead of vezhvenat, but that's a matter of taste. Anyway, the comparative used as a third person singular verb is avezhvenana and assigns ablative.

Quote
akka yer ee, anha nem adothralak
Getting akka and/or hash-syntax to deliver the sense of "Even if" feels hard. Fronting akka and going without the hash-syntax might actually be pretty clever idea. I wonder if you might use akka as a repeting conjunctive :o
To get from "you go" to "you're gone", I'd recommend yer ray e.
It's not "I'm gonna be ridden", it's "I'm gonna ride", so no nem.
Dothralat should be conjugated adothrak.

I short:
Anha dirgak m'avigererak yeroon ayyey
Ven shieraki vigereri shekh mra asavva aeni
Ajjalan avezhvenana avvosoon
Akka yer ray e, akka anha adothrak