That was actually pretty informative, even though I'm glad I got to have the answers without having to ask the grating questions. u_u But wanting to think of sign language as somehow inferior, man, that's still a low I'd never sink to. I'm assuming it can be translated to and from just like the spoken ones, but I still wish I knew enough about it to include bits of it in a story or something sometime without misrepresenting it (although I suppose just giving a description of general content exchange between two people signing would be the best way not to make any mistakes about it, perhaps).
The closest pet peeve I have to this is that every damn sci-fi show out there's got a "universal translator", and as a translator myself, differences between languages often seems too complex, nuanced, ambiguous and context-dependant for it to be possible for something like that to really work. What about the connotations built up from culture and history, what about the psychological effects created by alliteration, what about what the etymology of words reveal about how the people who speak that language perceive reality...?
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-06-03 02:20 am (UTC)The closest pet peeve I have to this is that every damn sci-fi show out there's got a "universal translator", and as a translator myself, differences between languages often seems too complex, nuanced, ambiguous and context-dependant for it to be possible for something like that to really work. What about the connotations built up from culture and history, what about the psychological effects created by alliteration, what about what the etymology of words reveal about how the people who speak that language perceive reality...?