Re: Translating large works

In a message dated 7/28/04 3:36:53 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
fiziwig@YAHOO.COM writes:

<<  I just forged ahead, one line at a time
 through the first six or seven chapters, making up
 whatever words and sentences structures I needed as I
 went along.

 The problem is, by the time I got through chapter six
 the language had already evolved to be quite different
 than it was at the beginning of chapter one, so I
 would have had to go back and re translate the earlier
 chapters.
  >>
I have had similar problems.  When I wrote the Dizilali Wivaroha, which rans
about 60 small notebook pages, I began with a very limited basic form of
Rihana-ye, and by the end of writing it, the language had developed a lot.  When I
typed it up, I tried to "normalize" the language, but I found I was not making
consistent choices.  I would have to go back through it at least one more
time to truly normalize it.
I believe (though it was a long time ago now) that I had similar problems
when I translated Genesis into Natece. It did leave me with Natece versions of
all sorts of
obscure Biblical tribes, though. After doing Genesis, I translated a number
of shorter Biblical books (e.g. Rith) and I believe the language was more
consistent as much of the necessary vocabulary (and grammar, insofar as Natece ever
had adequate grammar) already existed.
Similarly, after I did the Dizilali, I found I could write quite a lot of
original texts without great expansions in vocabulary and grammar.  I suspect
this would be true for other conlang translations, as long as they were on
similar subjects.
John Leland