Re: Multilingual translation exercise, part 1

On Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 11:09:36AM -0700, Nihil Sum wrote:
> John Cowan et al,
>
> Well it nearly killed me, but I translated that bloody thing.
[snip]

Wow. You are a brave man. :-)

I did try to consider how I would go about translating it, but I gave up
after realizing that my conlang is just way not ready for it. Now, I
*might* translate Padraic (aka agricola)'s parody of it... but it's a bit
hard to catch the humour in my conlang.

> Translating things is the best way (eye emm oh) to identify and fill in
> "gaps" in one's lexicon. And boy did I have to make a lot of new words.
> Naturally I used borrowed words for things that don't exist in the Rhean
> language (Rabbi, Cardinal, Mason).
[snip]

True, although I'd say it's more in *writing* things that helps one do so.
About a third of my conlang's current vocabulary comes from writing a
little short story about one the folklores of the conculture. That
exercise led to the introduction of optative and subjunctive particles and
conditional constructs, as well as the entire system of prepositions. I
get the feeling that if I just wrote a few more pieces of folklore, I
might actually get my conlang to the point it can handle everyday
conversation.

I've always been a bit cautious about translations, out of admittedly
paranoid fear that my conlang's vocab would be too much like re-lexed
English. Of course, one might argue that my conlang's already weird enough
the way it is, but I like it to be unique. :-P


T

--
It is of the new things that men tire -- of fashions and proposals and
improvements and change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It
is the old things that are young. -- G.K. Chesterton