#athian translation project

[phoenixiancrystallist]

@flyingwide @cruelfeline I'm still working on translating this, but I finally got a clear-ish photo of one of the books that Frey picks up and reads, and you can also see Treahy and Auden reading this one sometimes, too! It's about the lands of Athia, not random placeholder text! Well, technically the second page is because it's just the paragraphs on the first page all over again. But!!! Most importantly!!!! It confirms Praenost has super-blooms and Avoalet is the snow area!!!

[phoenixiancrystallist]

Month 11, day 19

Did a little bit of translation work tonight because I'm struggling to read Athian again and I wanted to practice it :)

I was not expecting information on pilgrims on papers that look like diagrams for something lol. Anyway, these are papers pinned to the boards inside of the Cognoscent's Guilds. My kingdom for rips of these texture/image files so I can have cleaner, clearer text to work with. Alas, these will have to do

[phoenixiancrystallist]

"Erected to honor the Tantas

Special Shelters

Pilgrim's Refuge

While ballow trees were long seen as sacred by Athians, making it a crime to cut them down or otherwise harm them."

...

I managed to get a good screenshot of the refuge book to translate, so let's talk about the Pilgrim's Refuge! Because I think they're nifty :3

Long before the Break reduced Athia to the zombie-infested wasteland we know and love today, people traveled from all over Athia to worship the Tantas. These people were known as pilgrims, and they built refuges to house them in their travels—a fact I'm sure Frey and Cuff are very grateful for today!

But what's interesting about these buildings is, well, many things, really. First, they're made from ballow wood. The ballow tree is sacred to Athians, and as stated on that pamphlet above, it's illegal to "cut them down or harm them." They seem to be very fragile trees, considering that simply harvesting their sap will kill them. But ballow wood has special protective properties, specifically the ability to keep "evil" at bay. Doesn't seem to work on Cuff, but that's a different post for a different time.

So the refuges were built to house people who traveled across Athia to worship the Tantas, and keep them safe from not just the elements, but from the wildlife as well. That pamphlet also states that the refuges were built for the purpose of honoring the Tantas. These pilgrims were all about their Tantas! And you can see on the refuges themselves that the people who built them put a lot of love and effort into not only making a sound structure, but a beautiful one as well. There's not a single inch of the outside walls that is not painted with murals of four women and depictions of the ballow tree that gave the wood for the refuge.

Here's the thing though: those aren't our Tantas. And the mural in the center seems to depict a fifth Tanta, or at the very least conspicuously leaves room for a fifth person.

Who are these four women? They appear to be representative of the Tantas we're familiar with, but they're not the Tantas we know. Or they're not exactly the Tantas we know. None of them are wearing their signature, iconic regalia. At least Sila's counterpart (bottom right) has a sword and appears to be wearing armor. And I can figure out Prav's (top right) because she's blindfolded, and as the saying goes: justice is blind. Olas (top left) and Cinta (bottom left), though? Olas's wears green and has darker skin than the others, and Cinta's might be petting a cat? Maybe? And those are my only clues for who these murals are supposed to depict.

So, considering that the pilgrim's refuges were built centuries ago to honor the Tantas and house the pilgrims traveling across Athia to worship said Tantas, it's reasonable to assume that the four women depicted on the refuge murals are our Tantas: Olas, Prav, Cinta, and Sila. However, no one knows how long ago the refuges were built, nor how long ago the pilgrims began their pilgrimages. It's entirely possible that these four women are the predecessors to our modern-day Tantas. In addition, that conspicuous empty space in the center mural could have been left open for the First Tanta—who knows how long ago she'd passed her mantle of Tanta onto her successors? The space may have been left to honor the Tanta who started it all, who saved Athia and brought it into prosperity so, so long ago that no one even knows when it all happened.

But that empty space also serves as an interesting look forward. It leaves room for a fifth to join the ranks as well.

[phoenixiancrystallist]

Month 8, day 13

I finally got a mostly legible shot of that other book! It's about the Tantas :D

I translated both pages just in case I was wrong about the text on the right hand page repeating from the left, and I wasn't wrong, lol. Even threw in some lines about the lands for spice! XD

[phoenixiancrystallist]

So I can sight-read Athian with some difficulty now because I'm fucking insane, and per @cruelfeline's suggestion I checked the torana archive entry. Y'all, it's fascinating. I'm absolutely delighted! :D

There are some words I can't quite make out or that the margins just plain cut off, but I can make a relatively educated guess on a few of them.

"Torana" is misspelled at the top of the left-hand page; it actually says "Trana." I find this amusing :P

"The gate of mind thro[ugh] the Other S[???]"

The diagram is labeled with a T on the far left, A1(number I don't recognize, so it's either 4, 5, or 6) on the smaller circle, D on top of the big circle and Q on the bottom, and on the right side of the circle is four words that I'm reasonably certain are DIST, SPA, TIM, and POW, or distance, space, time, and power

The spiral diagram is labeled Day 2(another number between 4 and 6) at the top, and at the bottom in the middle I think is GP (the G is hard to read and probably isn't even a G) and W on the right

The paragraphs between those two diagrams read (as best I can tell) "It seems that it is pos[sible to] alter the nature of distance [???] through sheer force of will [???]" and "By visualizing where one wi[shes to] be, and firmly fixing that i[mage in] mind, a connection between [our] present location and a des[ired] destination can be establi[shed] [???] "hole" punctured in the v[ery] [???] space."

The diagram at the bottom has ?K at the top (where the ? is a letter I can't read) and P(a third number I don't recognize between 4 and 6) at the bottom

On the right-hand page it says "o[f] ability to exploit this phenomenon improves with [???] [passi]ng day, and we are able to reach ever more [???][ding] locations."

"[???]ingly, the need to clearly visualize the intended [???] seems less important than first imagined."

The diagram below is Q on the left, S in the middle, and L,PM on the right

The last two paragraphs read "While these results are encouraging, the technique will need to be pushed to its very limits if it is to prove the solution to our current crisis of scarcity."

"And as we push, the risks grow ever greater..."

...That's not ominous.

In other news! I've discovered I need a clear, high-res texture of the book Treahy's reading, because it's completely illegible no matter how close I zoom. And unless that's placeholder text like the other sheets I've been translating, I expect it to be fascinating.

Problem is this is the best I've got:

The only thing I can read is the drop-cap letter A below the diagram XD

[phoenixiancrystallist]

Month 7, day 21

Monument to Strength, Monument to Justice, and Familiar Monuments all translated! I'll work on getting the capital letters off of the familiar monuments tomorrow; there's a lot of them and they pixelate weird compared to the others for some reason. I did get three new capitals thanks to Sila, though! B, P, and Y :) I'll be able to get D, E, F, N, R, and V off of the Familiar Monument, and then I also have a plaque for Junoon that'll get me J and U. The Visoria and Avoalet plaques won't get me any more capitals, though ): I'll have to guess and free-hand the rest.

I love how the Tantas felt the need to modify the Familiar Monuments with "the cat's a liar, we already fed him" XD

That said, has anyone else noticed how weirdly isolated from the rest of Athia Praenost is? It's the only realm that doesn't have a road leading into another besides Cipal, or at least none with the flagged gates like Avoalet, Visoria, and Junoon share (mostly Visoria with the other two since Junoon and Avoalet don't share any common borders). Not to mention the impassable mountain range between Praenost and Cipal. I imagine there had to be some connection between Praenost and Avoalet, on account of that's the route the Rheddig took when they invaded 25 years ago, but I've scoured every inch of border Praenost and Avoalet share and there's no gates anywhere! So strange. Gives me thinky thoughts :3

[phoenixiancrystallist]

Month 7, day 18

This looks like I'm going backwards but I promise I'm not lol

So last night I'd looked up what those little lines on the sides of the boxes mean, and it turns out I'd been sizing EVERYTHING wrong. So yesterday I'd gone through and resized everything to fit within those lines!

Well, today I discovered upon closer inspection that there is a subtle difference between lowercase t and capital T, so I erased what I had and tried again. And wouldn't you know it, copying the tracing of the letters on the labyrinth plinth is exactly the correct size for this font sheet! I'd been resizing everything the whole time, thinking I had to fill the whole box, and then I went and downsized everything, so all of the aliasing wound up funky, which means I had two options:

Leave everything alone and adjust any new characters coming in to match with the accidental stylization changes I'd been making

Redo the whole fucking thing from scratch because I'd also gotten lazy and used line and circle tools instead of freehanding which resulted in inaccurate lettering anyway

Obviously I picked option 2. Why would I not make more work for myself? :P