[quote]Ugh, and don't even get me started on trying to translate names... They did it with LoTR and Harry Potter, and it was equally horrendous to see some of the names that resulted from the attempt. I've personally been very annoyed with LoTR sword, Sting, in that respect, because some translator decided that its name in Danish should be "Stik" (which is the imperative form of the verb "sting", or the word used to describe the area that has been stung (a mosquito bite is, while we're at it, a "myggestik" - a "mosquito sting" (despite the fact that mosquitoes are not even in possession of a sting in the first place))) instead of what I thought was a much more logical name, "Brod" (the anatomical feature called sting, used to perform the aforementioned action). Doesn't make sense. Eh...[/quote]	The anatomical feature is called "a sting[b]er[/b]" (though this can rarely also be used for the entire being who committed the act). Hornets, wasps and bees have stingers, for instance... Simply "sting" is a verb - the act of stinging -, and "a sting" as a noun ... would be either be the [i]sensation[/i] of a certain kind of sharp pain (akin to that) experienced when stung or, indeed, the place which was stung, which makes the Danish translation under question a linguistically correct one, though most likely not one which carries the intended meaning, whereas translating it as "the Stinger" is a bit of a creative freedom... I personally have always interpreted the English variant as being the [i]verb[/i] "sting" for some reason (as this is arguably at least somewhat illogical way of interpreting a name); naming a sword after a feeling of pain (as most people who call themselves "Sting" mean it) definitely makes more sense than naming it after a sting as in the spot which was stung, though, so now when I actually think on it, it seems most reasonable to assume the sword is pretty much named a variant of "Pain". (That said, they actually translated the sword Sting into "Stinger" [as in the functional body part, not the culprit] in Estonian ... in I think all of the variants. Those that I've seen, anyway. Then again, the verb or sensation-noun might feel be a bit odd, or I'm just [i]used[/i] to it being "[the] Stinger" in Estonian - as I read/was read the Hobbit [i]long[/i] before I saw the English version anywhere, when I was perhaps four, which also might or might not have contributed to my mental image of orcs as toothpicks, as that was the most common kind of [i]"ork"[/i] I knew.) But yeah... "A stinger" is what one stings with (or a specific medical condition, or - rarely - someone who stings), "a sting" is either the pain or the site of it... 
	I should perhaps also correct myself: I prefer the fully Estonian translations, but only if the Estonian translations are actually any good. Granted, the fully Estonian translations definitely also have the general tendency to be better - I think because it forces the translator to actually [i]think[/i] on what makes sense and/or sounds good, as opposed to just putting down whatever word comes to mind first or just kind of "approximating," which can be either amusing or painful, but usually painful, especially combined with the cumbersome sentence structure that tends to result for not putting words in the order they are supposed to be in in the end-product language. Occasionally, bad translations are painful enough for me to just give up from the the constant desire to cringe and either find an English/Finnish version or abandon trying to read the thing altogether. As for more entertaining mistranslations go, I recall a rather curious article about the production of processors, with insisted that the deposits of a rare substance, called "siliitsium" are about to run out, and processors will thus raise in price, and we'd have to invent new alternatives to substitute for the rare "siliitsium"... (The Estonian word for silica is [i]"räni"[/i]. And no, it wasn't April fools.)
	- The "carnivorous squirrel" being an important thing was actually a reference in one of our private messages, in relation to me learning words of foreign languages which are of dubious worth in real scenarios that don't involve teaching your friends and acquaintances silly things. - The squirrel that started the conversation was one of the usual red omnivorous ones found in most of Europe, seen while we were wandering around in Vienna with a couple of locals (if you haven't seen one there, you've not been there). One of the other Estonian people with us asked what squirrel is in German, and then commented that "squirrel" might be the weirdest-sounding German word they've heard yet. We also saw a lot of crows, in one park in particular, sitting a dozen to two on each tree (the trees were maybe five meters tall at most, so quite small), and occasionally dropping down to investigate when someone dropped something, only to return to position right after. I think I only heard cawing maybe twice while I was there? The rest of it was in full silence despite of there being literally hundreds of the birds there. Reminded of the Rilon-scene, somehow, and those were mostly the black "carrion" variety of crow, too. A few were saddlebacks, and a bit more than the latter were hybrids. Tried to take a picture, but my cell-phone camera isn't always reliable.
	And we pretty much call chipmunks "striped squirrels" ... more specifically, the kind of stripe that goes the along the length of something, rather than transverse stripes. "Earth/ground squirrel" is a different creature, the same as in English. Ehh... They all are the same taxonomic family, though so are marmots and prairie dogs, which we do not call "squirrels".

	Any comments about my thoughts on mind-affecting spells and self-knowledge and awareness? Since, yeah, as long as it's not specifically [i]thought[/i]-control or the spell isn't sophisticated enough to separately null your knowledge of self ... I'd say any kind of generic-effect spell or abrupt illusion would actually be consciously rather jarring and immediately identifiable, especially when you're aware that someone was casting a mind-affecting spell. 
	Alright, and I'll write up something about the Illusionist (and a few other older things), then. There are a few things I said I would like to offer additional information in, actually, and at least one other thing that was left on OldGuild.