Recently, there has been a serious dispute and even a quarrel about the translation of naquadah in Chienese GT community.
Naquadah is a fictional material in the movie Stargate. Its name comes from the fictional town Nagada in the film. This material is also an important part of the gt5u technology tree, which is used to make some ultimate goods and use as nuclear fuel. Since there is no official Chinese translation of this substance in the Stargate series, the translation of “硅岩”(siliceous rock) has been used for a long time in China’s GT player group. This is obviously not a proper translation, because this material has nothing to do with silicon, but looks like quartzite in setting.
Recently, someone found this problem and wanted to modify the transliteration of “纳夸达”, which is considered to be more appropriate. However, this idea has been opposed by a large number of old players, because the translation of “硅岩” has been used for a long time and has basically become a habitual translation in this circle. At this time, changing it will inevitably lead to confusion. The two sides launched a fierce debate, and even turned into a meaningless abusive quarrel in the end.
The reasons for both sides are:
Supporter: the translation of “硅岩” is inexplicable, which can not be explained from transliteration and free translation. Translation must be rigorous and accurate. It is not allowed to correct a wrong translation name after a long time. “硅岩” is easy to mislead novices and make people mistakenly believe that it has a relationship with silicon. “硅岩” in reality refers to a rock containing silicon, which has nothing to do with this fictional element with a large amount of energy. Some mods that simulate real geology may add “real ‘硅岩’” (siliceous rock) and lead to more serious misunderstanding and confusion. This also leads to ignorance that the element naquadah comes from the science fiction work Stargate.
Opponent: it has been used for a long time to modify the translation name rashly, and the generally default translation name in the player group will cause confusion. In particular, gt5u already has a complete Chinese tutorial. For those old tutorials that are different from the new translation name, it is easy to cause confusion for players. It must take a lot of time to do anti-confusion, and many people can’t quickly realize that 纳夸达=硅岩. Different branches of GT are in the charge of different Chinese groups. If different Chinese groups have different opinions, it will lead to more serious confusion. It’s better to keep a common default translation. The GT player group in China is basically in a long-term and stable state. The players are basically the same group, and there will not be much increase now. In the face of such a small group, it is not necessary to change the current default translation between players in order to “accurately”.
This has a great impact on the current gt5u and gt5u high version reproduction (such as gtce). As for gt6, because naquadah in gt6 is not particularly useful (it can only be used as nuclear fuel and some super alloys), the impact is not so great, but it still needs to be considered in Sinicization.
In addition, the translation of the two isotopes of naquadah also needs to be discussed. Enriched naquadah (Nq528) is usually translated as “富集/浓缩硅岩”. If it is directly changed to “富集/浓缩纳夸达”, it will not cause any problems for the time being. But how does naquadria(Nq522) translate? It is translated into “超能/不稳定硅岩” in different places. What if you want to transliterate it? 纳夸达利亚?
I don’t think Greg will be of much help in this matter because he doesn’t understand Chinese. What do you think of my family? Welcome to discuss (but don’t quarrel…)
