The struggle of researchers to revive 4000 years old Babylonian for the movie 'Eternals'
The Eternals – Marvel consulted me to help superheroes chit chat in Babylonian
https://theconversation.com/the-eternals-marvel-consulted-me-to-help-superheroes-chit-chat-in-babylonian-172009
Babylonia prospered in southern Mesopotamia, but one of the characteristics of the Mesopotamian civilization is that 'the purpose of the letters was a record.' Although many ancient Babylonian documents remain to this day, many are records of commerce and few letters to family and friends. There are many mysteries about how Babylonian people actually talked, as there are no sentences or expressions to describe casual conversations.
Therefore, in order to reproduce the 'Babylonian conversation' in the movie, it was necessary to create a new 'colloquial expression' that imitated it based on the officially remaining documents.
For example, there is a scene where Gilgamesh, one of the characters appearing in Eternal, shouts 'Go through the gate!'. The content of Babylonian documents usually exists as a 'complete sentence', so it is unclear how people will cut out words. In addition, Babylonia has 'abullu' and 'bābu' as words to describe the gate, and there was a problem of which one to use, but Mr. Washington thought that 'shorter words should be used in urgent situations'. , 'Bābu' was decided to be used. In addition, because verbs tend to be omitted in linguistics, we translated the Babylonian word 'ana libbi bā bi,' which is translated as 'into the gate' in English.
There were other translation issues as well. In Babylonian, the preposition 'ina' is translated as 'in' in English, and 'from' is translated as 'ana'. At this time, prepositions such as 'to' and 'for' are combined with the following words to form one word, but in is expressed in two words. It is not known about the difference between one word and two words, and the issue was how to use this in the movie. In the end, Washington decided, 'In more formal situations, use two words, and in an emergency or casual conversation, assign one word.'
In addition, the film exchanges many words that may not have existed in Babylonian, such as 'thank you,' 'help,' 'feel,' 'vibrate,' 'legend,' and 'myth.' Since it is a non-existent word, it cannot be translated with regularity. We had to think about each on a case-by-case basis, and Mr. Washington looked for phrases that could be used each time and tried to translate them so that they sounded as natural as possible. As a result, 'myth' is translated in Babylonian as 'singer's lie,' and the character's line, 'I feel everything around me vibrating,' says 'everything around me keeps touching me.' Give the translation 'feel like' and apply the new word 'lapātu', which is equivalent to the word 'iterative', which is a combination of 'feel' and 'vibrate', to the part 'keep touching'. That's right.
Regarding the translation work for Eternals, Washington said, 'It was a great training to treat Babylonian as a spoken language. This is what I have been trying to incorporate into my education.'
The trailer for the movie Eternals can be viewed from the following.
The final trailer of the Marvel movie 'Eternals', which depicts the successor hero of the Avengers who will face the crisis of 7 days until the destruction of the earth, is released --GIGAZINE
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in Movie, Posted by darkhorse_log