Sally wrote: <<Kai wrote, among other good stuff: <<<with Vila one always gets the feeling he should sound more colloquial than <<he does.> << <<This is a problem with Vila in English as well :-) I've read a number of <<stories where he's written with a heavy and intrusive 'dialect', supposedly <<to emphasise his lower class, and always find it distracting.>>
The dialect thing is one question I think I did ignore completely. Finnish does have a rich variety of distinct regional dialects, which can be written out fairly easily, but they are not socially coded in a way that many British English dialects still seem to be. Travis 2's accent played no role in my translation of "Star One".
With Vila it seems to be more an attitude, rather than anything specifically tied to either vocabulary or pronunciation, that screams "informal" in my ear. I agree that a thick dialect would be just pandering to a contemporary stereotype. I wouldn't mind a more liberal use of dialects in the series, as long as they didn't go to feed the existing prejudices (where are those illiterate, ignorant beggars who speak perfect RP?)
<<<It may also be the dialogue's tendency towards the kind of neutral sci-fi <<dialect, where temporal tell-tale signs like contemporary slang or <<pronounced regional accents are downplayed to homogenise the language and <<also to make it sound more "timeless".> << <<I also think any attempt to invent 'new' slang or word usages tend tto jar <<horribly (in Stardrive, for instance).>>
I don't find the stabs at slang in "Stardrive" or elsewhere problematic, but I do find the question of slang use in speculative fiction in general very much so. Of course, language, just like technological or social details, changes over time and what seems absolutely utopian now, may well sound antiquated or worse, unintelligible half a century later (how about Avon telling Vila to "hide the oodle" in "Gambit" or Servalan telling Travis to "ice Blake and his havage"). Still the linguistic conservatism of the space opera genre particularly annoys me sometimes. Apart from the requisite technical gobbledygook (something that Blake's 7 mostly handles with dignity; no "abfurcating the endoligroinial coils in the taurofecal wanga-wangas" here), there is little linguistic invention, as if to confirm that despite the tinfoil clothes and Fairy bottle rockets we're still playing the old game of cowboys and Indians and this is the way that all people talk everywhere, now and in the future. Even antiquated jargon might sound better, simply because of its defamiliarising effect.
Again we can say that what we are hearing is actually a translation in itself, and the language that the characters really speak is not English at all or is an eight hundred years older variant of English that bears as little resemblance to Modern English as Modern English does to the language of Beowulf. Yet you'd think that people who have grown up in completely different circumstances on planets with no mutual contact in centuries would not sound like they went to the same public school or referred to things that neither of their cultures probably has had in ages. Things can stay in the language long after the original concepts have disappeared or lost validity, but though lot of Western languages retain metaphors or expressions coined by nomadic tribes a couple of thousand years ago, it's a bit too conceited to expect all our petty little things that are currently in fashion to be around pestering the people after a couple of thousand more years (even if you are just using the future as an allegory for passions present or past).
So yes, as easy as it is to get it wrong, I would like to see more linguistic innovation is science fiction, new slang, new colloquialisms, new expressions. I like Vila's "bubble in a black hole", Cally's "may you die alone and silent" (which I read as the most vulgar curse ever said in the series) or Bayban's "son of a slimecrawler". Far from original perhaps, but at least something that you could imagine has risen out of the characters' respective circumstances. Something that in its own little way enhances the illusion that these people actually are born out of, belong to and have to function within this make-believe world, instead of the impression that they have just walked in from a very late-20th century pub or detox clinic.
Kai