Translation and architecturally odd invented languages in science fiction

ABSTRACT

Almost all invented languages in science fiction have the same architecture as spoken human natural languages. The article discusses six exceptions: languages which appear to be unusable because of the way they handle figures of speech; speech or writing directly connected to thought; speech that is not linear; writing that is not linear and not a representation of speech; lexicon, syntax and writing but no speech; and impoverished languages. If these odd invented languages existed outside fiction, they would be untranslatable into a human natural language in much the same sense that pictures, or communications to us by non-human animals on Earth, are describable but interlingually untranslatable. The translations provided by science fiction authors to enable their plots to advance are better seen as intersemiotic renderings. The article concludes with some similarities between translation studies and science fiction studies and the benefits of considering architecturally odd languages.

KEYWORDS:

• Science fiction
• linguistics
• architectures of language
• intersemiosis
• science fiction studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Conley and Cain list some 400 invented languages found in fiction. One of the best known is Klingon, a language devised by linguist Marc Okrand for one of the peoples in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek universe. Not only are a Klingon dictionary and grammar available (Okrand 1992 and kli.org), but there are even translations into Klingon of a few complete texts such as Hamlet and the Tao Te Ching. On translating into Klingon, see Meade (2019).

2 Unsurprisingly, only two of these publications have “translation” in their index, though magic translating devices are sometimes mentioned (“magic” because there is no explanation of how the devices work).

3 In one extraordinary case, Russell Hoban’s dystopian 1980 novel Riddley Walker, the entire text is narrated by the central character, Riddley, in an invented dialect of English spoken some two thousand years after a nuclear war. In 2012, the novel was translated into French as Enig Marcheur, for which translator Nicolas Richard invented a future version of that language.

4 One can write descriptions such as “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is in C minor but appears to start in E-flat major. It begins in allegro con brio tempo and 2/4 time. After a quarter-note rest, the strings and clarinets play, fortissimo, a four-note motif … ” and so on. But this does not convey the meaning of the music.

5 Within linguistics, there is a literature on impossible human languages (Moro 2015), but it is concerned with limitations imposed by human biology and the linear (one-dimensional) nature of speech. Chomsky talks about the usability of language but by this he means how syntax has to work in order to enable the linkage of sound to meaning (2005, 9–10).

6 “In sf, the idea of a writing system that could somehow directly communicate ideas without passing through verbal language has proved irresistible, solving as it does many problems for the science fiction writer as to how alien species that have evolved on different planets, with totally different anatomy and culture, could possibly communicate with humanity. This is perhaps the most easily demonstrable influence of European discourse regarding Chinese on the characterization of alien languages and problems of translation” (St. André 2019, 202).

7 Written signs typically represent phonemes (Spanish), syllables (Cree, Japanese katakana) or a combination of whole lexical items and sounds: 90% of Chinese characters are compounds – one part representing a lexical item, the other its sound (via the rebus principle).

8 Almost all human writing is linear (one graph after another); an exception is Korean hangul, where the letters are arranged in two-dimensional syllabic blocks.

9 It is possible that our distant ancestors first used language only to think with, not to communicate; speech or signing may have come later.

10 Unfortunately, we read that “Lydia’s own [written] tribute [to a murdered Logi she had worked for] has already been translated [into written Logisi]: she got someone from the [Logi embassy] typing pool to do it for her” (335). Decades ago it was said to be commonplace in Canada to give an English text to a Francophone typist and say “type this in French”.

11 Replacement was to be complete by 2050. The chief reason for the lengthy transition period was the time required to translate documents that were needed or worth keeping into Newspeak, a “slow and difficult business”, as Orwell mentions.

12 If Orwell had studied historical grammar, he would have known that irregularities appear and disappear in languages over the course of centuries. Perhaps he wrongly saw the elimination of irregularities as the counterpart of social regimentation.

13 The syntactic structure of human languages is non-linear: a word has no necessary relationship to the immediately preceding or following word. In “Who did she see?”, “who” is most closely related to “see”; it forms no syntactic phrase with “did”.

14 Translation between human languages is possible in part because words having the basic meanings of English water, sun, sweat, bleed, walk, head, die, mother etc. etc. can be found in every language. Aliens might not sweat or bleed; they might not have heads or mothers.

15 Translators are very familiar with noun/verb alternations: to translate “it’s raining” into Russian, one writes “rain is coming” (dozhdj idjot). While all human languages distinguish nouns from verbs, some have no adjectives or prepositions; instead they use verbs (be green, be under).

16 The idea of a changed brain may come from the common – but questionable – idea that our brains started working differently after the invention of writing, again after print, and again after electronic writing.

17 Kuang (2022) is about an alternative past in which the industrial revolution is based on the power generated from what is lost in translation when a pair of equivalents in two languages is inscribed on a silver bar. While ingenious, this does not qualify as hard sf!

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian Mossop

Brian Mossop worked as a French-to-English translator, reviser and trainer for Canada’s federal government from 1974 to 2014. He has also taught revision to BA and MA students at York University in Toronto since 1980. He is the author of the widely used textbook Revising and Editing for Translators (4th edition, 2020), one of the editors of Translation Revision and Post-editing (2021) and a member of the College of Expert Reviewers of the European Science Foundation. He has published some 50 articles in the field of translation studies (see www.yorku.ca/brmossop).