Sep. 11th, 2005

nemorathwald: (Matt 2)
Watching [livejournal.com profile] netmouse put together a jigsaw puzzle at [livejournal.com profile] brendand's birthday party got me thinking along lines that caused me to realize why translating into Lojban can be so satisfying. Each new sentence is like a puzzle or riddle that one might find in the pages of a games magazine. Natural language grammars are filled with exceptions for little or no reasons, but the grammar of Lojban is as regular and immutable as a series of physical puzzle pieces that can be counted on to plug into each other in predictable ways. The language is so alien that it requires unpacking a natural language utterance into the underlying structural meaning like a disentanglement puzzle so that it can be completely re-packaged like a Soma cube or Tangram mechanical puzzle. Take, for instance, the sentence, "Only another breath will I breathe in this still air," from my current project to translate Kahlil Gibran's globally famous inspirational novella "The Prophet."
Read more... )A translation worthy of Daniel Jackson? You decide.

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