This is a quote from a song in the animated movie Tangled. I find translating this kind of sentence especially difficult:
(A) What is it like out there where they glow?
She is looking through the window in her castle and sees the glowing lanterns that are falling in the sky. This is when she sings the song in which the quote appears.
I think that the word "it" in (A) means the outside world where they glow. But how can we analyze sentence (A)?
And tomorrow night The lights will appear Just like they do on my birthday each year What is it like Out there where they glow? Now that I'm older Mother might just Let me go
She has spent her entire life locked up in a tower, never being allowed to get out and see the world. Every year on her birthday she can see Chinese lanterns floating in the sky, in the far distance. She has no experience of the outside world and longs to know what "it" (the world beyond her tower) is like.
