In Translation

In Translation
Ultra-Short Fiction from Sean Fenian

Negotiations with the Tlaalu had been going on for months.  It was an incredibly slow process, due not least both to the linguistic complexity of the Tlaalu language, and the sheer irrationality of human ones.

The Tlaalu language had a relatively small number of base words, less than a thousand, but modified and qualified and nuanced them by attaching prefixes and suffixes and intonation changes to refine their meanings and context — like Finnish or Hungarian combined with Mandarin Chinese, only even more so.  A single Tlaalu word could take thirty or forty seconds to finish speaking, and often expressed an entire sentence or even a paragraph in a human language.  As a consequence of the complex structure, it was impossible to figure out what the word actually meant until the Tlaalu got done with all of the suffixes.  They only created new words when they absolutely had to — when they could find no existing word that could be repurposed to express a new meaning without refining it so much that it actually negated its own core meaning.  Core meanings, to the Tlaalu, were sacrosanct.

English usage, by contrast, could be so irrational that words have literally become their own antonyms — ‘literally’ itself being one such example, meaning both ‘literally’ and ‘figuratively’.  Or consider the phrase “to table a motion”, which means exactly opposite things depending upon which side of the Atlantic Ocean the speaker is from.  A Tlaalu, confronted with such semantically insane things, might literally go mad.

This of course also meant that humans speaking to Tlaalu had to be extremely careful in their phrasing to avoid any such semantic contradiction.  One translator on the Tlaalu side had already suffered a breakdown during the course of this negotiation, and had had to be replaced.  That had delayed the negotiations for three weeks.

Nevertheless, the negotiation was still slowly proceeding.  The team of human negotiators spoke only through one of the very few somewhat proficient human-Tlaalu translators.  Kerry’s command of Tlaalu was incomplete, but she understood enough of the complex syntax to get most concepts across; and her opposite number, whose name sounded approximately like Hep-Yip-Yip-Tun, had grasped enough of the basic structure and the vast vocabulary of English that between the two of them, sometimes going back and forth several times over a sentence before both were sure that they were in agreement upon what it meant, slow progress was possible.

The subject of discussion right now referred to some nuance of trade quotas — Kerry thought — that she remained frustratingly unable to grasp, and which Hep-Yip-Yip-Tun seemed likewise unable to convey clearly enough for Kerry to understand it.

Now, once again, the head of the Tlaalu delegation was speaking to Hep-Yip-Yip-Tun. (He?) gestured with (his?) hands as, for the third or fourth time, (he?) worked (his?) way through a complex vocalization that might have been one word or several.  Kerry wasn’t sure.  She wasn’t sure whether ‘he’ was correct, either; about the one thing the human side were sure of about Tlaalu concepts around gender was that they didn’t map directly to human ones.

Then … the speaker simply stopped.

Hep-Yip-Yip-Tun looked back and forth between Kerry and the Tlaalu leader.  The Tlaalu leader looked back.  There was some uncertain-looking gesturing.  The silence continued.  And continued, and continued.

“What did he say?” asked Joseph Kaltan, head of the human negotiation team.

“I … don’t know,” Kerry replied, confused.  “He just stopped.  Mid-sentence.  Perhaps mid-word.  I’m not entirely certain.  I don’t understand what’s going on right now.”

After another minute or so, the Tlaalu team began quietly speaking among themselves.  Hep-Yip-Yip-Tun did not say anything, either to Kerry or to the other Tlaalu; (he?) just kept looking back and forth between one Tlaalu and another as they discussed among themselves whatever it was that they were discussing.  At times the discussion appeared to become agitated.  Kerry was completely baffled, unable to figure out what was going on, and Hep-Yip-Yip-Tun wasn’t telling her anything.  The members of the human delegation muttered uneasily among themselves, wondering aloud upon what rock the negotiations had suddenly run aground, and what the consequences would be this time.

Finally, after what must have been thirty minutes, the discussion appeared to stop and come to some kind of conclusion.  The head of the Tlaalu delegation said something long to Hep-Yip-Yip-Tun that Kerry couldn’t completely follow.  Hep-Yip-Yip-Tun appeared to pause in thought for a minute or so, then began speaking to Kerry in a mixture of English and Tlaalu.

“He’s asking us to wait,” Kerry told the delegation.  Then she paused again, as Hep-Yip-Yip-Tun continued his explanation.

After about another five minutes, a look of dawning comprehension passed across Kerry’s face.

“OH!!!” she said, at last.  “I understand now.”

She turned to the delegation.

“We will be able to resume the negotiations in probably about a month.  The Tlaalu have decided that they need a new word.”

"It's going to take them a month to coin a new word?" Joseph asked.

“No,” Kerry replied.  “Not exactly.  It's going to take them about a month of very careful, detailed deliberation, to define precisely what the new word should MEAN."