Reference:RAWA/RAWA's translation process

Personal email to Larry Fontenot, date unknown

Maybe it will help to go through the steps of a translation. I have an English sentence that needs to be translated. [He went to the store and ate a sandwich.]

Then I rearrange it to D'ni word order. This is the place where mistakes, um, linguistic anomalies, are most likely to occur. I don't remember all the rules necessarily (especially these days). [went-he to-the-store and ate-he a-sandwich]

Then I turn that into D'ni syllables. Here's that process in excruciating detail. I don't remember much, so it will take longer than it used to.

I don't remember "went," so I go to my dictionary and search for "went." It doesn't exist, so I remember that D'ni would just say 'past tense-go-he'. I don't remember 'go', so I search for that. I find 'tsar'. [ko-tsar-en be-re-...]

I don't remember if there is a word for 'store'. I search for that and find nothing. Normally, here I'd stop and figure out what I wanted 'store' to be. For that I'd want a verb '(to) store' and go from there. I'm not going to do that for this example. Pretend {store} represents the D'ni word that I took half an hour to think through. [ko-tsar-en be-re-{store} gah (I look up eat) ko-rees-en erth-{sandwich}]

Then put it into the D'ni font spelling: .Koxaren bre{store} ga KorEsen erT{sandwich}

Done.