continueing on from the previous post, my six years of german and then ten years of pretty much not German-ing have led me to fuck around with that fic a little

I don’t know enough German vocab to keep going through cold, so I hit the translate button to see the gist of the thing so I could just scroll over it instead of inching through every sentence and I’m just like ‘wow okay then’ about the plot of this, but I have become unexpectedly charmed by Chrome’s translation algorithm and that it doesn’t pick up on trailed off words, alien/human combo words, and certain phrases.  

Even just looking at the raw German, I can see things that have translated two times - once into German for the localization of the show, whatever form that took, to be put into this person’s story, and then once into English again, but not the original word.

Like, the christmas light flowers were evidently called Starlights in German, (Sternenlichter), rather than the Starlaces (Star Laces?) that we have, so Google translates in kind.

German B5 seems to have kept G'Kar’s name for Londo in his book as Prideful Windcatcher, or at least Prideful Windmaker, but Chrome has gone with a translation of 'imaginary’ for the word that means prideful or arrogant in this context.  It evidently can mean both, but it’s funny to me that Chrome went with the wrong one, so he ends up as 'inflated imaginary wind maker’ by the time Chome is done with him. 

It’s also funny to see the dialog translated So Literally that everything that even I can tell is sarcasm or a joke is just dead in the water to Chrome.  Also differences of one letter mean that thanks to Chrome Londo goes from saying, “I find it lovely that you’re all here to greet my daughter.  It’s an honor.”, to “I find it really irritating that you’re all here to greet my daughter.  It’s an honor.”  I kind of the like Chrome’s fuck up better, I just want to imagine him saying it through his teeth. “What an honor.”   

Meanwhile, it just has no idea what to do with Narnhochzeit because of German’s tendency to compound the fuck out of its words.  It’s just 'Narn wedding’.  Narn + Hochzeit, wedding, which is literally like, 'high time’?  and is used for 'wedding’ and also like… 'what a time to be alive’ kind of time periods?  I am suddenly struck by an inability to explain this.  

The actual content of this is like, Londo and Timov have a daughter (?!) - who I feel like must exist by only the grace of some Centauri deity or some poor decision making - and she’s of course uncomfortably devoted to Londo, like, they are joking (??) about Londo marrying her himself, and then I’m not sure if they’re like 'lol aliens marry their children’ or if this person is just writing a particularly nauseating father/daughter relationship, or if this has all been eaten alive by Chrome.  I lack the vocab and the time to look up every word on its own to find out the right contexts. Anyhow, then somehow she decides she’s going to marry Ta'Lon and this is used as something of a vehicle to get Londo and G'Kar together or something?  I scrolled, so I am possibly missing some key elements to this. 

But that was a thing that I looked at, wow.