#lcc10 Natanya Norry - Experiments in Divergent Translation: A Showcase and Test Run of Rhapsodaic

details & slides: https://conlang.org/lcc10/#norry
speaker: Reddit u/Loria187, https://rhapsody-langs.neocities.org

For many conlangers, the ability to losslessly translate in and out of a conlang, with little to no change in meaning or nuance, is a major design priority. In this presentation, I instead explore the potential viability and value of conlangs where the tendency for translations of the same text to wildly differ from one another is an intentional feature.

Rhapsodaic is a written engelang built around combinations of a small set of root words, each of which refers to a cluster of emotional experiences. To refer to more tangible phenomena, the writer must phrase them in terms of the emotions they feel, elicit, or otherwise hold an association with for the writer. Different people’s translations into and out of Rhapsodaic are thus bound to greatly diverge, but this gears the language towards a process wherein writers can gain further insight into their subject matters, as well as one another, through the comparison and juxtaposition of their translations of the same material.

To test the function of this language outside personal use, I sent a number of participants Rhapsodaic’s full reference grammar and root word dictionary, a short story written in Rhapsodaic, and a short list of English words, and asked each participant to translate the material from one language into the other. In addition to a showcase of how Rhapsodaic functions, I present the results of this initial experimentation, and share my thoughts on its implications for “divergent translation” as a conlanging feature and design strategy.

Resources

Rhapsodaic discord: https://discord.gg/JGbyymgZks
https://opguides.info/other/conlangs/rhapsodaic/

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Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOSXnL88bvWv5AAOWy43J7Jy-Sh7gSF5B
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Captions by @stenoknight.