Reading

[sartorias]

Last night I finished a novel. It was a fantasy romance, enjoyable except for a few things that bothered me a bit. One aspect will mention here, to see if it bothers anyone else, or is this one of those visual-reader things that makes one sound nastily picky

Comments

[zornhau]

Agree. Fair enough, fantasy is theoretically written "in translation". But - like in real translations of Medieval sources - idioms should be literally translated, in order to convey world view, and prevent jarring imagery.

[rosefox]

Oh, that sort of thing drives me crazy. I'm trying to turn off my inner editor while I'm working on my WIP, but modern or culture-specific phrasing is one of the things I always have to correct immediately or it will nag at me forever.

Besides, figuring out metaphors and other terms that make sense within a culture is a great way for me to explore it, and to write about it in a way that makes it real. The trick is to find ones that add flavor without being the verbal equivalent of the uncanny valley.

[sartorias]

Wow, i didn't know someone had named that phenom, and had studied it. Thanks for that link: I knew of the concept, but only as fumbling and superficial discussion on con panels with others equally unaware.

And yes. Only the difficulty here is that in text, what evokes the "strange" for one reader might not for the next. Of course that could also go for visuals, but I wonder if there is a more clearcut division. The discussion about films would argue so, it seems.

[rosefox]

There's a fair amount of debate about the uncanny valley; it's a theory, and not one that has been proven in any scientific fashion. Certainly different people will have different thresholds for it, just as one person can perform open heart surgery while another will faint at the sight of a bleeding hangnail. I do think it's useful to remember that between "wholly unfamiliar" and "wholly familiar" is a curve rather than a line, though.

[sartorias]

Excellent point. I'm so glad you linked that, though, it's something that's come up in conv. over the years, and it's delightful to discover that people are studying this phenom.

[faerie_writer]

Nope, modern tone in a fantasy setting (without explanation) would bother me too, Sherwood.

[sartorias]

China bothers me because of the instant and almost overwhelmingly vivid mental images, but porcelain doesn't bother me at all. "Cordwainer" would throw me out because the only context I have for it is "Cordwainer Bird" and "Cordwainer Smith". So yeah, I guess terms would vary from person to person--and what doesn't bother one will be a hassle to another. This book also signalled all emotions with flashlight eyes, but obviously the massive readership for the book is not seeing klieg-light eyes working like theatre-stage tech as I am

[starshipcat]

Names are often so deeply personal in their connotation that there's simply no way to anticipate them. Frex, I was almost unable to read a story I was supposed to be critiquing, simply because the name the writer had given the principal antagonist just happened to be the given name of my grandmother who had just died a few months earlier. I knew perfectly well the writer couldn't have possibly meant it as a personal affront (how could they be disrespecting my grandmother when there was no way they could even have known her), but every time I came upon the antagonist's name, it got my back up so bad I couldn't give the story an honest and unprejudiced reading. I finally just had to write to them and explain that a personal connection was making it impossible for me to look at the story objectively.

[dhole]

This is something that's always given me trouble. Modern metaphors can be fairly easily avoided, once you give a certain amount of thought to metaphorical language. Once you get to words, things become far more difficult. If you want to avoid words that refer to specifically our world concepts, you have to avoid things like "quisling", "machiavellian", "gatling gun", or "byzantine", but you also have to avoid things like "copper", "china," and "slave

[sartorias]

Yep--in agreement generally, though it does really look like these things work on a case by case basis, doesn't it? Hello doesn't bother me. It's sufficiently generic that I can handle it fine, though okay just seems so modern American with its specificity it poinks me right out--unless there's a connection in the story with this world and time, then I enjoy the connection, and start looking for cultural artifact conflicts and the like. Weird, brains are.

[rosefox]

Whenever I hear people talking on cellphones in languages that are not English, the words "hello", "okay", and "bye" almost always make an appearance. It never fails to make me grin. Apparently they're just very easily absorbed and introduced into other languages, which would perhaps explain why some native speakers wouldn't see them as out of place in other eras and locales.

I wonder whether that's true for greeting/parting/acknowledging noises in general, actually. If I lived in Italy, would I end all my English conversations with "ciao"? If I were in Japan, would I adopt the universally understood Grunt of Acknowledgement?

[sartorias]

When I was in Austria, partings swiftly altered from "Bye" to "Ba ba." Though usually with "Servus" before it.