So I ran across this again and thought, you know, it's so weird that multiple stories by different authors are making this exact mistake. And then I thought, well, with so much AI slop out there I wonder if people can't find good resources? Off I went to DDG and searched for "vulcan translator". My tablet's visible set of search results contained ONE site that I, personally, have used: the Vulcan Language Dictionary.
Everything else.....we will discuss in a bit.
The VLD is the largest source of Vulcan vocabulary available. It doesn't have a lot of grammatical information, but it does have a compilation of vocabulary from a lot of different sources, including some variant vocabulary (for example, two different words for "mountain"). It's a great resource and you can choose when you have word variations what you're going to do about it (is the variant a dialect word? A word from a different Vulcan language altogether? it's fun!).
Anyway. I loaded up the other sites to see what's what, and gave them all two translation tests: "mountain" (either of the results at VLD considered acceptable) and "Surak's sehlat slept" (vesht yuk-tor sehlat t'Surak). I chose this sentence for a few reasons. One, it's simple -- just three words -- but it provides a possessive, a proper name, a Vulcan loanword that doesn't need translation, and a verb that needs its tense indicated.
"Mountain" returned only the version "suk'kunel" ("big hill") for all the sites I tried. I personally prefer "heya" (from @dduane 's Spock's World), but all right, they fed their translators a particular vocab, that's fine.
"Surak's sehlat slept" got....terrible results across the board.
Top result in my search, LingoJam:
Between it being the top result and it returning a sentence structured like English and using an English possessive, I am putting LingoJam on my list of Probable Culprits for the English possessives I've been running into in fic with Vulcan sentences.
FunTranslations does the same exact thing:
These are the top two search results for me for Vulcan translation, and they're both just....wrong. Does anyone get it right?
No. Translatormind says it is AI-Powered for Greater Accuracy but I have my doubts. Also it wants to translate from Vulcan to English, which isn't what most people need. Not to be deterred, I tried it both ways! When you give it English, it does say "untranslatable" (mostly correct, although 2 of the 3 words are of Vulcan origin, so you'd think it would give me something).
When you give it "vesht yuk-tor sehlat t'Surak" you get "A sehlat follows the path of Surak". Which is....incorrect but fascinatingly so. The sehlat is correctly the subject of the sentence, but it no longer belongs to Surak, and yuk-tor's meaning and tense are both gone entirely.
For giggles, I gave the translator two other weak form verbs (ending in -tor) and two strong form verbs (ending in -au). To make it a little simpler, I took out the tense modifier and gave the following sentences:
gla-tor sehlat t'Surak (Surak's sehlat sees): Fascinatingly, "gla-tor" was translated as..."sleeps". The sehlat also now belongs to Surak again.
I will spare you the screenshots, but the rest of the test sentences here were:
ash-tor sehlat t'Surak (Surak's sehlat steps): "The sehlat of Surak's lineage"
tishau sehlat t'Surak du (Surak's sehlat likes you): "I am a sehlat of Surak's path"
tselau sehlat t'Surak (Surak's sehlat mutates): "Beloved sehlat of Surak"
I'm getting a little down the rabbit hole with this one because it clearly understands that "t'Surak" is a possessive and it sort-of knows about the VSO word order but (a) to use it you need to have the Vulcan sentence already? and (b) if you know enough Vulcan to use it you also know its results are ABSOLUTELY WILD. I would guess that some readers paste Vulcan they don't know into this one, though, and are perplexed at the answers. Cannot recommend. Am now adding Vulcan vocabulary to my endnotes instead of my usual practice of letting people have to figure it out from context.
Moving on! Mr Dialect, what say you....three options, all wrong: "Surak's sehlat t'kahr", "Sehlat t'kahr Surak", and "Surak's sehlat ha'kahr". All of these are gibberish.
kahr means town or city; the t' means "of" and is used to form possessives, none of these contain any verbs whatsoever, and ha is "yes" but can't be used as an affix to the best of my knowledge.
OK, now for my actual favorite, the one that made me snort tea: Anythingtranslate.
Surak's sehlat slept -> Surak's sehlat experienced a period of quiescence.
That's. That's not translating into Vulcan. That's just running things through a thesaurus. If you really struggle with making Vulcans sound formal enough in English, I....guess? I'd personally not use something like this. But it exists!
All right. So. What I have established here is that it's hard to get good information on Vulcan online and most of what tells you it is Vulcan is....not.
- Vulcan Language Institute, archived at archive.org. This has grammar lessons and a lot of information for the version of Vulcan created by Mark R. Gardner. This is a non-canon version of Vulcan (unlike Klingon, on-screen Vulcan exists only in a few words and phrases) but incorporates screen canon such as TMP's "Dif tor heh smusma" ("Live long and prosper"). Gardner calls his versions of Vulcan "Traditional Golic Vulcan" and "Modern Golic Vulcan", and this language may get called either Vulcan or Golic in fanfic.
- The Vulcan Language Dictionary. Mentioned above as the only search result I'd used. Most complete corpus of Vulcan vocabulary that I know of, includes Gardner's vocabulary, vocab from novels, screen vocab, and others. (Historical sidenote! Gardner's Golic is the most widely-used Vulcan today, but when I started learning Vulcan in the 1990s, a lot of fans used what is sometimes called Zvelebil Construction Vulcan, developed by Marketa and K.V. Zvelebil. Much of their vocab is included in the VLD, and their Lexicon can still be accessed via the Internet Archive from Marketa's fanlore page.)
- Korsaya. Not updated since 2014, but has a bunch of articles on Vulcan writing, etc. Created by Britton Watkins, who has done Klingon language consulting. Focuses on Golic.
- Kir'Shara. This has a lot of cultural bits on it, and the springboard seems to have been Enterprise and to some extent Spock's World. Very fun from that perspective. I mostly use this site as a good source of Vulcan names or ways to think about creating Vulcan names.
Anyway. If you come away from this post with nothing else, please come away knowing that using online Vulcan translators is illogical.
And again, if you need help with Vulcan, ask, and I will help if I can.
