Re: Round Robin Transcreation

Gary, did you or someone else suggest this before on CONLANG, about a year
ago?   Because this sounds very familiar!  Several of us pursued a game like
this for about a week.

Sally

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary Shannon" <fiziwig@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2004 3:35 PM
Subject: Round Robin Transcreation


> Here's an idea for a conlang "game": Round Robin
> Transcreation.
>
> The moderator has a list of graded sentences starting
> at the most elementary level (e.g. "See the girl." or
> "John has a book.") and working up, over the course of
> a few hundred sentences, to a more spohpisticated
> level (e.g. "Are you seriously suggesting that we just
> sit here in the dark until somebody gets around to
> rescuing us?")
>
> Participants sign up to join the game and once a month
> or so, when their turn comes around, they get a single
> sentence to translate, so the burden of participation
> is not exactly onerous. But what do they translate
> that sentence into?
>
> The first player gets a single sentence and nothing
> more.  That player may create any translation
> whatsoever that he or she thinks fits that sentence.
> (e.g. "See the girl" -> "Suve kiru.") But the
> translator does not get to say anthing beyond that
> translation. It's not allowed, for example, to say
> "kiru means girl", or to give any hints about how the
> grammar works (like saying "Stuve is the imperative
> form of stuvin").
>
> The second player gets the first sentence with it's
> translation and the second sentence (e.g. "I see the
> boy."), and nothing else. This player's task is to
> translate his sentence in any way he sees fit, as long
> as it is reasonably consistent with the translation of
> the first sentence.
>
> The third player gets the entire corpus up to that
> point (i.e. two sentences and their translations) and
> is called upon to translate the third sentence (e.g.
> "The boy has a book.").
>
> Each subsequent player receives the entire corpus of
> translated sentences and is called upon to translate
> only one more sentence and add that translation to the
> growing corpus.  When every player has translated one
> sentence the next sentence goes back to the first
> player again, and so on around the circuit.
>
> Players are not to discuss grammar rules or vocabulary
> among themselves. Instead, it is up to each player to
> make what they will of the grammar and vocabulary
> entirely from the existing corpus and to apply that to
> the translation of their own assigned sentence for the
> month.
>
> What makes this "game" interesting (in my warped
> opinion) is the task of figuring out the grammatical
> and lexical rules from the corpus, creating something
> new to fit within those rules, and finally, to see
> what kind of novel conlang emerges from such a joint,
> but non-colaborative process. No one player has the
> power to dictate the direction the conlang takes, yet
> each contributes something to the mix.  In the end it
> would probably become a conlang that no one player
> would have created on their own.
>
> Finally, when the game had gone twenty rounds and each
> player had translated his or her 20 sentences over the
> course of a couple of years, and the two hundred or so
> sentences were completed, then it would be interesting
> to sit down with the corpus and describe the grammar
> that had emerged.
>
> I have a hunch the resulting conlang would not be
> particularly "exotic", and in fact, due to having 20
> players pulling it in 20 different directions, it
> would probably end up being a semi-Germanic,
> semi-Romance-with-a-touch-of-Slavic, Frankenstein
> monster that was, in spite of being somewhat ugly and
> unpleasant to the ear, very ultilitarian and easy to
> learn.
>
> P.S. The competative version would assign the same
> sentence to two players at a time. Then the remaining
> players would vote on the two contributions to decide
> which translation to admit into the corpus and the
> winning transcreator would be awarded the point for
> that round.
>
> --gary
>

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