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Translations of 1984
Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2023 3:52 am
by alice
What do they do with the Newspeak, given that it's essentially based on English? Do they leave it in the original, or render it in some translated form? And, given that Newspeak was a parody of Esperanto, what would an Esperanto translation do? Would we have something like "duoplaplimalbona novparlo" (eeeeaaaaaggggghhh)?
Re: Translations of 1984
Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2023 6:00 am
by bradrn
I don’t see Newspeak as being based on English at all. In fact, I would consider it quite easily translatable, since it’s intentionally formed from as few bland words as possible, plus a handful of simple derivational affixes.
Re: Translations of 1984
Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2023 6:06 am
by Ares Land
The French translations calque the English: novlangue, doupleplusbon. It's just as effective as the original!
(The actual calques vary on the translator. Some translations have néoparler or néoparle. These sound weird, but the biggest handicap is that novlangue is firmly established in French now, just like newspeak in English.)
Re: Translations of 1984
Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2023 7:10 am
by Raphael
alice wrote: ↑Fri Apr 07, 2023 3:52 am
What do they do with the Newspeak, given that it's essentially based on English? Do they leave it in the original, or render it in some translated form?
The German translation - well, the one I've read - does the same as what Ares Land reports for the French version: it uses calques:
Neusprech,
doppelplusgut.
And, given that Newspeak was a parody of Esperanto,
I'd say it was more a parody of Basic English. This reminds me of an excerpt from a column Orwell published on January 28th, 1944:
I wish now I had read Basic English versus the Artificial Languages before and not after reviewing the interesting little book in which Professor Lancelot Hogben sets forth his own artificial language, Interglossa. For in that case I should have realised how comparatively chivalrous Professor Hogben had been towards the inventors of rival international languages. Controversies on serious subjects are often far from polite. Followers of the Stalinist-Trotskyist controversy will have observed that an unfriendly note tends to creep into it, and when the Tablet and the Church Times are having a go at one another the blows are not always above the belt. But for sheer dirtiness of fighting the feuds between the inventors of various of the international languages would take a lot of beating.
The more things change...
Re: Translations of 1984
Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2023 3:25 pm
by zompist
Orwell wrote:Followers of the Stalinist-Trotskyist controversy will have observed that an unfriendly note tends to creep into it, and when the Tablet and the Church Times are having a go at one another the blows are not always above the belt. But for sheer dirtiness of fighting the feuds between the inventors of various of the international languages would take a lot of beating.
Nice find!
Of course this is Orwell at his dryest— the Stalinists and Trotskyites were far more than unfriendly. And just to gloss the next bit, the
Tablet was (and is) a Catholic newspaper, while the
Church Times is Anglican.