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.
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Date: 3 Sep 2012 09:14 pm (UTC)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.