Tag: the silent coda

I’m honestly most excited about Allie and Hagan constantly not understanding each other because their languages don’t have a word for what the other’s saying and so the translator keeps messing words up and they keep misunderstanding each other, I’m delighted.

My thought process just now.

It’s fun that the alien races in this story don’t have a concept of the gender binary so I can just address them as “they” all the time.

[2 minutes later]

Wait, these alien races would also address the main character as “they” since the alien races have no idea what a girl is! And she could also not refer to herself as a girl because the alien races would have no idea what she means! Nice!

[….5 minutes later]

Wait, I could actually make the main character genderqueer yALL

Here’s how I weasel my way out of having to come up with names for things like races, languages, and planets in my story this time.

So the POV character is a human from Earth. Nobody else speaks the language she speaks in the story because everybody is alien races. Early on in the story she gets a sort of earpiece that works much like the translation matrix of the TARDIS in Doctor Who For Convenience’s Sake it translates everything you hear and see around you via science magic so we hear everything everybody says in English.

However this way some things can’t be translated to English since there’s a bunch of things Earth English doesn’t have a word for. BUT the translator still finds the nearest still compatible ~synonym to fill in the gap instead of just inserting the word (esp. if it’s not even a proper word because some races don’t communicate with words but sounds and vocalisations and shit) by calling races “people”, some planets just “planet” and even some names “person”.

Yes, sounding things out syllable by syllable can actually ~teach the person’s brain (and thus the translator) to fill in that missing word (like adding to dictionary in Microsoft Word) in the person’s vocabulary but they figure this out later on and besides it’s not that important for the story.