Conveniently Precise Translation: Difference between revisions
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There's a phrase that's important to the plot or arc (possibly [[Arc Words]]). There will come a time the characters encounter the phrase in a foreign language. The foreign phrase will always be translated ''precisely'' to the important phrase, even though linguistic quirks would make this unlikely.
However, in TV land, languages have [[
An ancient inscription will always be rendered in complex long words with nuanced meanings, despite the fact that on-the-spot translation typically sounds more like a two year old trying to put together a sentence.
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It gets even more amazing when [[Prophecies Rhyme All the Time|ancient spells and prophecies rhyme]] or are puns in English.
For a good real-world demonstration, see [https://web.archive.org/web/20070701111927/http://www.tashian.com/multibabel/ Lost In Translation].
An exception occasionally pops up when the form of a word in another language (usually with declensions, like Latin) reveals information such as number or gender that would require additional words in English, allowing the translation to be more precise than one would expect.
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* The movie ''[[Stargate (film)|Stargate]]'' had Daniel Jackson correct a translation of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, changing "door to heavens" to "Stargate". This is possibly because "Stargate" [[Rule of Cool|sounds cooler]] than "door to heavens". However in the SG-1 episode Moebius Jackson travels back in time and helps plan the uprising that would lead to the stargate being buried along with the coverstone with the hieroglyphs (which we can assume he helped write) which he would 6000 years later translate as being Stargate. So it's not suprising he can translate it as he wrote it.
** Lightly spoofed and subverted in ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'', where Dr. Jackson (now the team linguist) once translated something as "the place of our legacy" but expressed some doubt by adding that it could also mean "[[Either World Domination or Something About Bananas|a piece of our leg]], but the first seems to make more sense."
*** This was done again when SG-1 was searching for the [[Atlantis|Lost City]]. Jonas Quinn thought that it should be translated as the City of the Lost because the [[Precursors|Ancients]] couldn't possibly lose one of their own cities and of course, Jack O'Neill took this to mean the City of the Dead. They came full circle when Dr. Jackson [[Back
* Subverted in ''[[Event Horizon]]''. The distress signal sent by the titular starship contains the Latin phrase ''liberate me'' ("save me"). It was later realized that the message was actually ''liberate tutame ex inferis'' ("save yourself from Hell").
** Amusingly enough, the translation was still a little off. It would more accurately mean "free me/yourself."
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* The novel ''[[Trixie Belden]] and the Mystery of the Blinking Eye'' features a prophecy written by a Spanish-speaking woman, in Spanish, which is then translated into English. Amazingly, it was written so precisely that it rhymes perfectly in English, and although it becomes a plot point that they aren't sure whether a line ought to read "big headed man" (as in, a man with a physically large head) or "big-headed man" (as in, a man who thinks a lot of himself), this is only an artifact of the English translation, and no such confusion could have existed in the original wording.
* In the first [[Artemis Fowl]] book, the titular character is able to write a computer program that is able to decipher a written language that predates Egyptian hieroglyphics, and then translate it into English in perfect meter and rhyme. All this without actually having any knowledge of other languages himself. Sure he's supposed to be a genius, but...
** Then again, Gnommish is less an ancient language and more a [[
* A poem in the final ''[[Deverry]]'' book includes a note that it rhymes in Deverrian, but not English.
* Averted in the [[Star Wars Expanded Universe|StarWars]] novel ''Traitor'': Nom Anor (A Yuuzhan Vong who speaks Basic, i.e. English), while listening to an excruciatingly boring shaper's drone, muses (apparently in Basic) that "maybe that's why we call them drones". He decides not to share this with anyone, because it's only a joke in Basic. ([[Incredibly Lame Pun|And a really weak one at that.]])
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== Live Action TV ==
* Subversion: In ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' the [[Arc Words]] in Season 7 are "From beneath you, it devours". Andrew and Jonathan reveal in "Conversations With Dead People" that, while in Mexico, they've had dreams with the refrain "Desde abajo te devora." Andrew translates the phrase as "It eats you, starting with your bottom". The literal translation is "From below, it devours you", but this particular phrase probably ''would'' translate fairly closely to Spanish and back.
** Andrew provides his own lampshade a little earlier in the scene when he complains that Klingon was easier to learn than Spanish because the former "had much clearer rules on transitive and intransitive verbs."
* Used twice in ''[[Angel]]'': The so-called Shanshu Prophecy says that the vampire with a soul will "shanshu" as a reward if he makes it through his trials. Wesley struggles with finding a translation for this word, first going for {{spoiler|"die"}}, but finally discovering that {{spoiler|the word means both to die and to live, explaining that the original authors of the text thought of life as cyclical and thus equated the two concepts. He realizes this means he will "live until he dies", or in other words, become human again.}}.
** Also spoofed in an episode where Lorne states that a group of demons "...either are going to discuss it with the prince, or go eat a cheesemonkey".
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