Names and Translations

From: POPEJ_at_cofc.edu
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 13:17:49 -0500 (EST)


On the question of which words in RQ are from Gloranthan languages and which are translations, Erik Sieurin asked:  

>...what about words that obviously are names, but
>which seem to be borrowed from earthly equivalents?
>Styx is the most obvious example; my players long before me
>interpreted Vivamort as "viva mort", "long live death" (?!)
>or something like that, for a more dubious example.

Interesting. IMHO, Styx and Vivamort are examples of translation; Gloranthan languages use different words for these figures. For Vivamort, I'd always thought that the idea that the translator was trying to get across was 'living death' or 'life in death.'

>And what about Arachne Solara,
>"Spider of the Sun (?)"? Why doesn't she get an English translation?
>...An explanation could for instance be that the
>Theyalan cultures uses a loan-word for Arachne Solara, and that is
>represented by having a non-English translation.

Sounds like a good rationalization to me. Alternatively, one could say that the name of Arachne Solara has been carried through unchanged from an earlier form of Theyalan, and the translator was attempting to capture the patina of age by using a name that sounds like Latin. Obviously, it would be easier to create rationalizations for the naming in RQ products if we had an idea of how the texts were transmitted and then translated into English. Some, like KoS, have obviously been translated into another tongue (that of the Harshax era) before being re-done into English.

Of course, if one wants to stop playing the "Glorantha game" for a minute ( i.e., pretending that Glorantha is a real place about which we can learn from published materials), it seems likely that any search for coherency in nomenclature is doomed to failure. If I recall correctly, the mighty Sandy Petersen once noted that (unlike MAR Barker and Tolkein) Greg Stafford had little interest in language per se and that names were made up as necessary with little in the way of guiding principles.

Jonas Pope


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