random realization

[kaigou]

It occurred to me that you can't really refer to something in a story as a D-ring, if your characters don't use an alphabet that contains the letter D.

Comments

[aldanise]

*snicker* Ah, worldbuilding.

[kaigou]

Ah, yeah. Heh.

[jakfrost]

It depends on the voice of the writing. If your character is speaking or narrating then that is completely true. If it is third person, then I believe you have the choice to either use language for your characters to understand or to use it for your audience's benefit. The important thing is to be consistent.

[kaigou]

This is true. I probably should've added that D-rings need to exist first, and then one can ask oneself whether "D-ring" is what the characters would call it, in their culture. Heh.

[nagasvoice]

There's also the question of consistent voice about translation of the language of the world into terminology the reader can handle.
Having to reinvent the name of everything is annoying to the reader. However, giving a name to something that serves the same purpose but isn't quite the same--as so many reinventions of the wheel come out just a little different, or have different secondary abilities?--strikes me as completely legitimate. Having to stop and explain this can be an info dump, or it can turn into a really fun plot point.
Also, even if it's a legitimate translation, some phrases are just too evocative of their original sources, and bump you completely out of the fiction. I found this was a problem when I was trying to use brief but precise terminology for roughly fourteenth-century (meaning anti-blade, anti-crushing blow, not effectively anti-projectile) armor. Sometimes the best term was German, or French, or Japanese, and on rereading it, it just jerked my mind right out of the fictional world. Food and clothing terminology is similarly tightly-bound in culture and local technology.
That means that where you choose to turn your attention while reinventing terms is very revealing too--you can use that focus to reinforce our impression of the knowledge base of a character.
Somebody who's involved in ordering the economics of an invented world will use a different focus of attention than the folks doing that person's laundry for them.

[kaigou]

I read a book review recently that had a critique for the story using too much cant. (I had to take a second and remind myself 'cant' != 'Kant' and then I was okay, but I'd have the same critique even if it was Kant and not cant. ANYWAY.) The worst is really science fiction, where it can't be a tablet, it must be a 'hand-held' or a 'PCD' or 'pers-auto' or some other bizarre mix of somewhat similar and woah, that is NOT what we call it. Somewhere on the web is a short story -- like six or seven paragraphs -- that's basically two people packing, arranging for house sitter, getting in the car, riding to the airport, checking in and catching a plane... and almost every blasted noun is replaced with some kind of high-faluting descriptive noun or faux-brand-name such that if you didn't think, "car", and "luggage" and "checkin gates" you'd be all, ooooh, science fiction. because, hey, SCIENCE.

I can actually forgive subtle anachronisms easier, since not everyone knows when the zipper or the ball point pen was invented. And in the case of what I was talking about, the fact that a roman alphabet is foreign probably means that D-rings are anachronistic, too. Since they came along a whole lotta time after cultures met on the high seas. I have far less issue with a science fiction story set two hundred years in the future calling books, "books" and phones, "phones" or sofas, "sofas" because with the exception of phones, most stuff in our daily lives hasn't changed that much, purpose-wise. I mean, coffee makers that grind for you are fancy, but their basic premise is the same as four hundred years ago -- it's just that now it's one machine to do the grinding, heating water, etc. Actually, it's less annoying in science fiction, because I want to spend my time fascinated with the space exploration part or the science part and not the terminology.

That said, I did run into the same jolt as you, when trying to describe a decorated bead as 'cloisonne' -- it's an art that's originally middle-eastern, then went to China, and I really don't think the Chinese called it by a modern french word for the five hundred years or more they were making cloisonne pieces. I ended up describing the item instead, and figuring if someone doesn't realize it's 'cloisonne' then it doesn't matter; the only really important detail is for the reader to know it's supposed to be pretty, and colorful.

Somebody who's involved in ordering the economics of an invented world will use a different focus of attention than the folks doing that person's laundry for them.

Absolutely. Just a variation on what I always keep in mind: if you're from a culture and/or in it daily for a long time, you don't notice stuff, because that's How It Is, for you. It takes a stranger to say, "you do what when you eat?" and to see it as peculiar or interesting or telling.

[nagasvoice]

Yes, cloisonne is a very good example of what I was talking about. Craft words too, pottery terms such as raku or celadon, or words for carpentry exploits. I almost hate to reference fiber arts because it's too easy to give too *much* information that a particular character would not know, they'd never notice.
It's maddening sometimes because looking up the details and the history will enrich the background of the story so much, and you realize how impossible it is to use a different unfamiliar word that's not technically correct but won't jar people so badly as the "right" word.
I should probably add that I've read critiques that discuss the difference in expectations by lit'ry readers vs. scifi readers on unfamiliar vocabulary. You may already have seen this but, just in case...
Lit'ry readers expect to have to go look things up immediately, the writer isn't going to cater to them at all. (Bits of untranslated foreign languages, for instance, for the naughty bits.) If you missed it that's not their problem. The scifi writers use throwaways a lot, and if you don't get it, don't worry, we'll explain the bits you really need to know for the plot, because we like wallowing in the tech so much it's disgusting.
My personal opinion is, scifi *and* fanfic writers vary across a huge spectrum on how much they're going to hold the reader's hand. Some of them don't explain anything,t hey expect you to be up on your physics. Others are intermediate--if you get the injoke in this reference or that description, you'll enjoy it more, but we're not going to stop the train to explain.