The Third Fictional Reporter reporting. . .
Columbus -- From his lair/“school” on the outskirts of Columbus, The Shadow has been firing off emails to everyone he knows, denying that there are inaccuracies in his translation of the Alienese ransom note delivered to The Fat Kid’s home in the city’s Clintonville section.
Controversy arose when that fat fuck took to decoding hidden messages sent by Decanus from what we can only assume is Biaveh, and discovered that there is possibly more to the story than the Shadowy translation reveals.
The Shat Kid and The Fadow have a strange history. At one time The Fat Kid considered himself a debunker of The Shadow’s ridiculous and irritating bullshit stories. However, after the release of The Shadow’s eBook, The Fat Kid seemed genuinely convinced that there was some substance to what The Shadowy bullshitter was saying. This new controversy, however, reopens the rift between them.
The Shadow, speaking from his desk at L’École Des Beaux Lézards’ Department of Alien Studies, said, “There’s nothing at all wrong with my translation, and the fact that that fat fuck would even question me is insulting. First, he doesn’t have the proper decoder pin to decipher the message, so how he can question my translation is beyond me. Second, he’s way too fat to think this kind of thing through. I mean, he must get tired after just the first couple minutes. A big chunk of cholesterol must be blocking the blood flow to his brain.”
The Fat Kid responded, saying, “He resorts to ad hominem attacks because he knows that there’s something wrong with the translation. He’s trying to draw your attention to my person, because doing so simultaneously draws attention away from the chain of reasoning I’ve established. Which chain of reasoning, I should add, is unassailable. There is no question that the translation we have does not represent the letter as it was written.”
When asked to elaborate, The Fat Kid went on, “The Shadow claimed that there was a one-to-one correspondence between the Alienese alphabet and the Roman alphabet. But if you look closely at the letter, and do some counting, you’ll see that there are significantly fewer characters in the actual note than there are in The Shadow’s translation. There are only two conclusions we can reach on this basis. Either that the note says something other than what The Shadow claims it does, or that the correspondence between the alphabets is not one-to-one. In either case, The Shadow’s translation is inadequate.”
I have looked at the note myself, and The Fat Kid is correct, blocked carotid artery or no. The actual Alienese letter has 336 characters, while The Shadow’s translation has 571. The Shadow’s translation is off by 235, which, as The Fat Kid pointed out, is a significant difference. The difference is quite readily observable, even at a glance. For instance, both the letter and the translation are formatted like a normal English letter -- salutation, body, signature. But the salutations, though formatted the same way, have different numbers of characters. It is my independent opinion that The Fat Kid is right insofar as the two conclusions one may draw from this, and that they indicate that The Shadow’s translation is inadequate.
The actual salutation shows seven characters, whereas The Shadow’s translated salutation shows twelve. Could his Shadowyness be wrong?
I asked The Shadow how he would respond to this, and he said, “I would like to point out that counting and numbers are ridiculous, and your illusion that they are verifiable forms is laughable. However, since you insist on using facts and reason to analyze the situation, rather than deferring to my Shadowy awesomeness, I would respond in this way: the alphabets do have a one-to-one correspondence, but the language is not the same. The correspondence simply allows us to transpose Alienese into a phonetic version of their language, the words and content of which must then be translated again. Their words differ from ours, which accounts for the difference in the number of characters.” The Shadow refused, however, to allow me to see the transposition from Alienese to Roman letters, and declined to demonstrate the pronunciation of the Alienese words.
The Fat Kid did not accept this explanation. He claims that The Shadow transposed the letter before his eyes, and that he transposed it directly into English, character by character. He will, he claims, continue to investigate. He has saved up many box tops, and sent away for an Alienese decoder pin, but delivery could take as long as ten weeks. The Shadow refused to comment, other than to say The Fat Kid should have sent away for some Fen-Phen, instead.
Check back for updates on this and other exciting stories!
And give to the (Canadian) Dollars for Decanus fund, damn it!
