: Re: When should you convert a measurement in a local translation of a novel? I think that it fits better in certain books to use the local measurement system, but is there a rule about this?

@Nickens642

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IMHO ...

You're writing your story in modern English. Readers routinely accept that you "translate" dialog to modern English, even if the characters would really be speaking in ancient Sumerian or elvish or whatever. So for "casual" measurements, I think it's easier all around to use modern units. If I was reading a story set in ancient Sumeria and a character said, "It's 20 miles to Babylon, it will take us 4 hours to get there on my fastest camel", I doubt I would think twice about the modern units. If I even noticed, I would quickly tell myself, "Yes, yes, the writer has translated from whatever unit of distance ancient Sumerians used to modern units for the convenience of the reader, just like he has translated their language to English."

When you just want to give the reader an idea of how big or heavy or whatever something is, using local units would just be a distraction. If you say the hero had to travel 30 fwacbars to reach his destination ... is that a long distance or a short distance? Unless the reader is familiar with the local units, you have to explain them or he has to look them up.

And how do you explain them except in reference to modern units? If it is anachronistic to have a character say "I traveled 30 kilometers" instead of "I traveled 90 fwacbars", it is absurdly anachronistic to have a character say "A fwacbar is about a third of a kilometer". You'd have to interrupt the story at some point to have a narrator give conversion values.

Sometimes you could work "scale" numbers into the dialog. Like have someone exclaim, "But that's 30 fwacbars away! It would take us 2 days to walk that far!" That's not an implausible thing for a person to say, and it gives the reader an idea how far a fwacbar is.

I WOULD balk if the number is significant. Like if a character said, "It is 365 kilometers from Babylon to Ur, the same as the number of days in the year", I think I would say, Hey, wait, they didn't use "kilometers" in ancient Sumeria, so whatever unit they did use would not come out to the same as the number of days in the year, and this sentence makes no sense. Oh, but what sort of calendar did they use? How many days did they count in a year? Etc. (BTW it is not actually 365 km from Babylon to Ur, more like 340, but I didn't want to search too hard for an example.)

I think for most stories, measurements are brief asides that come up rarely, and it's easier for author and reader to just translate them. If measurements are an important part of the story, like if the story is all about building a bridge and the length of the bridge and how much weight it can carry and how far it is to the next bridge etc. are all vital parts of the story, then it might be a good idea to use local units for the sake of flavor. That is, I'd hate to interrupt a story for a discussion of units that only come up once, but if they come up a hundred times, there's more bang for the buck.

Side note: If you convert actual measurements, remember significant figures. Don't make the converted numbers more precise than the original. Like if you have some source that says that the dragon is 20 cubits long, that's 10 meters, not 9.144 meters.

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