This is a very good question, that I've actually tried to solve on my own, in my currently-halted Alice in Wonderland translation project. In this project, I opted not to use punctuation, but instead to use line breaks to infer new ideas, as is most similar to word-walls. However, this is a very big challenge, especially with dialogue (direct quotes). I tried to just infer the meaning (abridge it a little for the sake of the language), but this is used only in the minority of dialogue. Here's how I went about translating direct quotes as direct quotes: Take this sample: "Well!" thought Alice to herself, "after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!" (Which was very likely true.)
I translated it as such: alis lorot ful! mindin mah med daar mah tum stegniir los nid nust koraav zey kril ahst hofkiin saag nid waan mah nol hofkah tol lost lot grozein vahzah Notice how the first line in the quoted paragraph indicates the person speaking, as well as defining what he/she is doing to produce the quote (says/thinks). And to end the quote, a double line-break is used to show separation (as I do with each new paragrah, though the Dragon-Tongue paragraphs don't match up to English paragraphs because paragraphs in Dragon-Tongue are shorter, so there is oft multiple Dragon paragraphs per English paragraph). This isn't quite a cononical way to do it, but it's the closest that we're going to get. EDIT: I forgot, I do use punctutation, but only exclaimation marks. |