Translation is the Key

Posted On: 12 Dec 2024, 06:09 PM
Posted By: fragmented_imagination

When building a constructed language, one of its largest and longest drawn-out elements is developing a vocabulary. No matter what kind of language you’re trying to build, one of the most difficult parts is actually coming up with an inventory of words. And, quite simply, sitting down with a dictionary is not the best way to go about it. Thinking you're going to translate a whole dictionary ignores that you are trying to create a language from a unique culture, forcing you to have to think about whether words would be appropriate to your setting. And, unless you’re some kind of psychopath with no outside life, you are not going to sit down with a dictionary for hours on end translating words into a language you made up. There is no reason to think you have that kind of mental stamina. So, what’s the solution?

Translation.

Fleshing out a language is already a daunting task without adding the frustration of trying to blindly translate words. You risk ruining the whole process for yourself by making it less fun thinking up words for a language when there are just far too many to choose from at any given moment. However, there is much more merit to translating into your new language. Follow me for a moment with this one.

Linguistics defines the most general form of words into two categories: function words and content words. Content words make up the bulk of language since they represent things and actions and descriptions (which generally means nouns, verbs, adjectives, and a majority of adverbs), and tackling content words is probably what you will be spending most of your time doing when you’re developing a language. On the other hand, function words are quite valuable and very small in number compared to content words. Function words are conjunctions, adpositions, numbers, and any other odd parts of speech which do not have the same kind of meaning as a content word but help organize content words into a cohesive and meaningful statement. This is where translation comes in. When translating something, you force yourself to figure out what function words you need, whether you want prepositions or postpositions (or anything in between, such as circumpositions or inpositions), to what extent conjunctions function, and so on. Building a list of function words is essential to getting a language off the ground because it helps solidify the language’s grammar for future use.

Translation is also good for building the kind of vocabulary that your language uses. You can take a word such as “abchalazal” out of a dictionary because you decided to translate it front to back, but do you really think you will have a use for a word that you had probably never encountered up until this point in your life? What purpose does it serve in your language? Translation circumvents this likelihood by targeting the types of words you need in order to create and use a functional language. Having a vocabulary based on a source in the language you want to make helps focus your creative processes on the kind of words you are most likely to need in the course of using your language. Even if you translate something as simple as “My brother threw the ball to me.”, right in that one statement, you have a familial term which you can expand on by thinking up words for “sister”, “mother”, “father”, and so on; you have a verb which would require complements such as “catch” or synonyms such as “chuck” or “loft”; you have something of a basic shape or a toy, which can lead you into more of the same category like “cube” or “pyramid” or “glove” or “bat”. Just taking this one sentence and translating it focuses your goals to develop a vocabulary by giving you pinpoints to words you know you need and following it up with similar words which will be just as important down the road.

Now, when I say “translation”, I’m not talking about just flipping open a dictionary or thinking of a word that you may or may not need. Those methods of translation are too arbitrary and have no immediate goals. What I mean by “translation” is something that you can use to actually show the language in use. Perhaps one of the most common translations these days is Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I have found this a good place to start because it helps create a situation in which language building is essential to produce complex statements and thoughts without overloading a person. I have translated Article One in every language I have invented, and it has helped produce vocabulary and grammar that I have continued to apply much further down the road.

There are always things to translate. For a writer, who wants to show the language being spoken, the best translation is character dialogue. This helps develop voice and, if you feel daring, dialects. Even if you decide to have the characters speaking English for the sake of not having a reader flip back and forth to a glossary, translating dialogue meant to be spoken in a constructed language gives you a source to better explore how your language works when spoken. It focuses on the more practical conversation aspects, which helps you develop you own voice if you actually intend to use your language.

Another good source of translation is metafiction, these fictions-within-a-fiction that helps build a world for your language. Metafiction presented in its “original form” gives focus to those many content words that are otherwise a pain to plan out as well as an abundance of practicality to function words. Stories are some of the best places to increase a language’s vocabulary, while poetry lets you develop the rhythm of the language as well as exploring alternate methods of presenting the language.

For those who focus on the visual aspects of a language, signs, logos, and maps help give a sense of the world in which the language exists. Signage gives rise to a more specific variation of content words, the variety which are important to daily living in your language such as knowing what shop to go to or where one should be cautious while traveling. Logos give rise to the communities that speak these languages, from clubs to whole governments. Maps give you locations, landforms, and a sense of the physical space these language speakers reside in.

So, translate. It could be a phrase, it could be a short story, it could be anything already in existence (Klingon’s major foothold on the conlang community comes from hobbyist translations of Shakespeare, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Tao Te Ching and Sun Tsu’s The Art of War, The Wizard of Oz, and other pre-existing works), it could be something completely original (such as Tolkien’s poems “Namárië”, the longest Quenya text, and “A Elbereth Gilthoniel”, the longest Sindarin text, from The Lord of the Rings, which were written specifically for his work). I myself have written out a few short stories in Bashyran and Latek and have even started a book of poetry/short stories, A’umaa Sískaasha (“The Book of Roads”) in Batum as part of the Sands series. These three languages I’ve mentioned are some of my larger languages in terms of vocabulary.