Re: Conlanging as a personal thing

On Tue, 11 Mar 2003 22:34:29 -0500, Mike Ellis <nihilsum@...>
wrote:

>  Do you find also that straight Olaetian material has more real "Olaetian-
>isms" than the translations? I've only written a couple "original" pieces
>(news articles, mostly, and some correspondence between characters in the
>story), and I find I shed a lot of anglophone patterns that way.
>Perhaps a goal should be to write a piece in one's conlang so well that it
>is difficult to translate into one's native tongue.
>
>M
Well, it's been 15 years or so since I wrote any original Olaetian material
-- about the only things since then were my project to translate the text
of Adventure (the classic text adventure game, the one with the Colossal
Cave and the maze of twisty little passages, all alike), which never got
very far, and the "North Wind and the Sun" translation. But in general it
seems that original material is better for getting away from the stylistic
influence of English. I think translations directly from languages other
than English might also be helpful (that's one of the nice things about the
relays). But I think one of the things I'd like to do with Lindiga is to
avoid any direct translations until the language reaches a certain stage of
development (one project I have in mind is a rudimentary Zelda
walkthrough).

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