Games - Translation relay

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	Games - Translation relay

A translation relay is a version of the well-known telephone game. In this kind of relay, the first player produces a text in a given language, together with a basic guide to understanding, which includes a lexicon, an interlinear gloss, possibly a list of grammatical morphemes, comments on the meaning of difficult words, etc. (everything except an actual translation). The text is passed on to the following player, who tries to make sense of it and casts it into his/her language of choice, then repeating the procedure, and so on. Each player only knows the translation done by his immediate predecessor, but customarily the relay master or mistress collects all of them. The relay ends when the last player returns the translation to the beginning player.

The translation relay can be played with both natural and constructed languages. The latter is done about twice per year among members of the CONLANG e-mail list. Several of these have also been done on the , affiliated with Zompist.com. Experience in this list has shown that the text tends to undergo a drift in meaning, with the final version often being very different in meaning from the original one.

The mutations of the texts can provide interesting information about the culture behind the language (a fictional culture is often associated with a constructed language, or implicit within it), the problems rendering some syntactic constructs and some morphological treats of one language into another, the seemingly "untranslatable" concepts, and in general, the difficulties of translation.

In the CONLANG community, eleven "official" translation relays (and a few smaller ones) have been played so far; the results of these relays are published on the Web.

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