There are no words: An interlinguistic foray into artificial languages and translation

Kelly Washbourne

doi:10.4312/stridon.4.2.29-54

Authors

Kelly Washbourne Kent State University, United States of America

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4312/stridon.4.2.29-54

Keywords:

invented languages, interlinguistics, cryptography, glyptolalia, asemia

Abstract

This study partially remedies the neglect in current Translation Studies research on artistic or invented languages, and interlinguistics more broadly. The work investigates the drama of translatorial sense-making, and how radical difference is encoded as (mis)translation phenomena in many literary works. I consider limit cases (asemia, glyptolalia, pataphilology) and scrutinize the apparent untranslatability posed by others (musical or pictographic languages), and even entertain works translated into diagrammatic images or “ekphrastic translations”. However, the “cryptographic-translation idea” of languages as mutually decodable makes for pseudo-invented languages in those cases in which a posteriori constructed languages are in fact existing natural languages in disguise. At bottom, the study is a meditation on how invented languages are used in transfiction. To name but four functions: 1) as a poetics of defamiliarization of the everyday, 2) as a vehicle of ideological ends (e.g. preventing understanding), 3) as parody (for example, of academic discourse), and 4) as metacommentary on translation. Embracing translation as multi-sensorial, multimodal, and interrelational between form, sound, and text, and works actively or ostensibly defying or transcending translation, I utilize illustrative microcases from linguistic fantasies (linguistic fiction), parables, poetry, concrete poetry, and text-based art.

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