I’ve said it before – Steven Spielberg utterly shattered by Suspension of Disbelief at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when he has Indy, Willi, and Short Round jump out of the falling plane in an inflatable raft, which falls none too softly on the snow, careens down the snowpack of the edge of a cliff into a river, lands in the river and goes through roaring rapids. And nobody gets hurt. There should be multiple broken bones at a minimum, and a triple death more likely, but they have not a scratch.
Bothered me mightily, that did. And this in a movie with magical glowing shankara stones, a guy reaching into another guy’s chest and pulling out his heart, the guy’s chest wall magically healing, and the now-heartless guy not expiring. Not to mention a cave full of insects with no obvious means of support. None of that bothered me all that much, but I had a hard time getting over that raft parachuting.
What annoys me is in almost exactly the opposite direction. I just read The Goblin Emperor, a lovely new book of court intrigue.
Except.
Characters were variously identified by some combination of their first names, their last names, and their titles. All of these were multisyllabic and idiosyncratically inflected according to a system the author came up with.
First name and last name, I can barely deal with. But don’t invent a whole new word for “Sir” and “Madame,” goddammit. The whole book is presumably translated from whatever language the goblins and elves speak; go ahead and translate the words for “Sir” and “Madame” while you’re at it! Same for words like “Advisor” and “Guard”: your fancy schmancy elven words for these job positions can get translated along with everything else.
One thousand times yes GuanoLad! This is my most hated thing about The Chronicles of Riddick, when they tell him he is “all ‘back of the bus’”. Back of the bus is such an Earth-centric phrase it makes my ears do a record scratch sound when used in a alien world setting.
What ruins stuff for me is when they have animals perform behaviors that are not natural. Horses do not whinny all the time, yet in every movie they play a horse whinny to alert the viewer that horses are coming.
A scared horse/cow/bunny/90% of all prey animals don’t make noises when they are trapped or hurt.
Can’t we assume there was a classic well-known and quoted-to-the-point-of-cliché book in the fantasy world with a similar-meaning phrase, and the translator did a good job? I mean, if someone was translating from Spanish, and the original had a similar phrase from Don Quixote, wouldn’t using a similar-meaning Shakespeare quote be the best translation? So assume there’s an equivalent book in the fantasy world.
IIRC, In the books, they invaders are explicitly described as burning haystacks and farms in the plain.
Yup. He does find them east of Osgiliath, but then he takes them to the western shore of the city. (This is a deviation from the books. In the books he doesn’t take them to Osgiliath at all.) The eastern shore of the city is held by the forces of Mordor and there’s a whole amphibious assault bit later where the orcs cross the river in boats to attack the men on the western shore.
Faramir even describes the silliness explicitly: “This is the old sewer. It runs right under the river through to the edge of the city. You’ll find cover in the woods there.” :dubious:
I don’t know if this is exactly what the OP is looking for, but I hate when fantasy worlds are almost-but-not-quite geographically Earth, so that I feel like I’m spending most of my brainpower separating fact from fiction rather than just enjoying the fiction.
The word he actually used in his native Westron would likely have been nîn-phûru; the literal translation is “water-delving”. Faramir was probably using it to mean “river tunnel”–an escape or sally tunnel that passed under the river. The term would have been somewhat dated, but given that the tunnel was an old construction, an archaic place-name would not be out of place.
The translators of the Red Book have a tradition of attention to detail, but perhaps we can forgive such a small slip as taking an archaic word for “water tunnel” to mean “sewer”.
