User:AgProv

Just to create the page! Male, too old, should have grown up gracefully but hasn't. Originally from the Flintshire region of Llamedos and functionally illiterate in several languages, including Welsh. (You know you're multi-lingual when you can pull off typos and spelling errors in more than one language).

Ac yn y Dysgfyd...

Rwyf wedi prynu y llyfr hwn. Yr ydym yn trafod cyfieithiadau o Terry . Dylwn i ysgrifennu adolygiad . Rwy'n rhy ddiog ar hyn o bryd .

I've bought this book . As we're discussing translations of Terry (albeit in Polish, for now). I should write a review . I'm too lazy at the moment. My time is indeed being stolen. "Gohuriaeth yw lleidr amser!"

Specific translation notes

It's interesting that time spent on newspapers and press release work trained Terry to write in short, pithy sentences (at least up to about Unseen Academicals and The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day, when he got an urge to start rambling a bit). These lend themselves extraordinarily well to translation into Welsh - TP's deceptively simple, straightforward narrative style is a translator's gift. It's like "Basic English" only with a much expanded vocabulary. so far this is the only Welsh Discworld novel, so a lot of recurring characters, who don't appear in this book, don't have Welsh names yet - a Welsh-language wiki would be a very spare one. But a note or two on those who do...

• Mam-Gu Ogg There is more than one word for "grandmother" in Welsh. It's interesting Parri uses the South Wales version "Mamgu". (Maybe because this is as near to "standard Welsh" as it gets? North Wales uses the variant term "Nain", sometimes "Naini". Hell's bells, this is how English gets the word "Nanny"! Too obvious? Or perhaps as North Wales has more Welsh-speakers and is therefore the biggest market for this book, using a word from a different dialect of Welsh reinforces the notion that Lancre is slightly strange and isolated and backward compared to civilisation... I wonder how the Granny in "Granny Weatherwax" would be rendered, though.

• Myria Cath-Rawd. Still puzzling this one out. The nearest straight or surface translation I can get for Cath-Rawd is many cats. In English, "LeJean" is a hidden pun for "Legion", which appears in the Bible in Matthew 5:28 as the collective name of 6,000 demons who have turned one poor guy's mind into a tenement block. LeJean has to be a stealth pun which only becomes clear much later in the book means "Legion" in the Biblical sense - she is the first intrusion on the Auditors, who are legion, into the specifically human world in a human body. Just as the original Legion is cast out into a herd of pigs who then do a lemming off a cliff, Myria is "exorcised" from the human world by jumping onto a vat of chocolate. I'm wondering if the "many cats" thing refers to the proverbial impossibility of herding cats - thousands of self-willed independent creatures. The Auditors think and act with one mind - until they make the mistake of incarnating as people and discover individuality, and that it takes a particular frame of mind (which they haven't got) to "herd" all the individual drives, organs, hormones, instincts and directives that make a human body... there's no help in the Beibl story in Marc 5:9, where on being asked Beth yw dy enw?, the demons reply Lleng yw fy enw; am fod llawer ohonom. (Who are you?/Our name is Legion, for we are many.) Here the word for Legion is Lleng.

Just bought my copy of A Blink of the Screen

And there is much to discuss. And to think I deliberately did not shell out £20 on the hard-back because I thought I'd read most of it before, elsewhere... £7.99 paperback.

An Experiment:

Thought about this for some time. Translation conventions for people, places, and things in the Discworld. Just experimenting:

Concept in English	Cymraeg	Francais	Nederlands/Afrikaans	Comments
Translation Credits:	Dyfrig Parri	[Patrick Couton]	[Venugopalan_Ittekot] (Ruurd Groot)
Carrot Ironfoundersson		Carotte Fondeurenfersson	Biet Yzergitersen	"Biet" is Dutch for "beetroot"
DEATH	ANGAU	LA MORT	DE DOOD
DEATH OF RATS	ANGAU LLYGOD	LA MORT DES RATS	DE DOOD VAN RATTE	Welsh translates as "Death of Mice" Squeak =Couiiii (Fr)
Granny Weatherwax		Mémé Esmerélda Ciredutemps	Opoe/Ouma Wedersmeer
Magrat Garlick		Magrat Goussedail	Magraat Knophlox
Myria LeJean	Fonesig Myria Cath-Rawd			Welsh: Myria "Many-cats" ? Fr: Une Contrôleusse, Contrôlix
Nanny Ogg	Mamgu Ogg	Nounou Ogg	Ootje Nack
Sam Vimes		Samuel Vimaire	Douwe Flinx

Life Imitates Art:

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Life imitates art! Totally independently of each other, Herself and Myself each picked a colour to redecorate the house with.... these are not going in the same room, btw, she wants a coral pink feature wall in one room, I'd quite like spearmint green in another... but here we bloody well are, pink and green again... Go, Dimmers!

The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day

Trying to get into the new book. Really trying. The scientific bits are, as usual, challenging going, but once you grasp what they're getting at, it actually gets quite interesting. But the Discworld story, so far, is... well, lacklustre. It doesn't even feel as if he wrote it, if you see what I mean. It reads like second-division fan fic. The sort that isn't bad, tells a decent story, the characters are in context... but the author only gets the classic Terry Pratchett voice here and there in little flashes of brilliance. If anything, the Margery Dawes bits (and why does that make me think of Matt Lucas dragged up) read as if they're in the Felicity Boodle voice TP devised for The World of Poo. I really, really, hope it improves.

Another little problem as I get further into the book: the balance is wrong. The science chapters are too long and the Discworld chapters are too short. Not. Enough. Discworld.

And it used to be said about Terry that he avoided the "plots-r-us" school of dialogue. His dialogue between characters here not only appears to take the place of plot, the speeches are far too long. Dialogue sequences used to be short, pithy and bang-bang. Now there are whole paragraphs of character-led exposition. Rincewind does not sound like Rincewind; the Dean is not the Dean. What's gone wrong? Was Terry just content to write an outline script and then let others - Rob Williams or Rhianna Pratchett or both - fill in the details? There are moments of the old Pratchett genius - his description of how Vetinari can force a crowded room into silence just by sitting there is excellent - but there are just too few of them. So far.

And Sally von Humpeding leaps straight from Lance-Constable to Captain without seemingly going through any intermediate ranks? Sorry, can't buy this. It took Angua years and even Carrot didn't make it all the way in one go.

Fan-art: a new venture.

This is a visualisation of one of my original characters in fanfic, one of the new generation of teacher-Assassins brought into the Assassins' Guild school to deal with the influx of girl pupils. this is a first go at classroom monster and teaching veteran Joan Sanderson-Reeves, professional teacher and, until the Guild caught up with her, successful freelance poisoner. With long experience in administering unorthodox food additives and really exotic herbs and spices, she is now Domestic Science teacher to pupil Assassins. She appears in several of my stories and has a starring role in "Murder most 'Orrible".

[[1]]

("Domestic Science at the Assassins' School, where whether you add almond essence is truly a life-or-death choice. Joan the teacher confiscates a copy of the "Tanty Bugle". And her past comes up to meet her...")

Drawn in pencil and coloured using MS Paint and Gimp.

This is a link to a visualisation of one of my Discworld characters - well, Terry's character, really, but outside a name and a job description she's just a placeholder. For some reason I haven't been able to post my artwork here, but here's a link to it and thus to my portfolio on deviantArt:-

Johanna Smith-Rhodes, visualised and sketched by AgProv

Not perfect, and with some glaring flaws, but now I have the bug I intend to so more to accompany the writings. As this is 95% my interpretation of the character and comes out of fanfic rather than canon, I have deliberately not placed this on the appropriate Wiki page. Drawn for the DeviantArt site and the Fanon Wiki, this is my interpretation of Terry's barely-there character Miss Smith-Rhodes. It hasn't quite got there and some aspects of the drawing are slightly out, but this is the adventuress from Rimwards Howondaland and Assassins' School teacher-with-a-litupa. (note purple sash denoting teacher. Something of a maverick in that she favours dressing in veldt-chic and not in the approved black - with something she does call a big knife, and dressed in bush khaki as if she were at Home in the Gods' Own Country - she has points in common with Crocodile Dundee.) Or at least, a first draft of how she appears in my mind.

More attempts to sketch and draw the Lady Assassins will follow. I have two in preparation, although both are completely non-canonical.