Friday, March 03, 2006

Artificial languages and language groups

The whole last week I was pursuing my little moonlighting affair, translating a loooong DVD player manual. Added to the university, sports, and extracurricular stuff at the uni, it took all my days and most of the nights, spiced up only by Dan Brown's first book (was terribly hard to put it down, so I had to read it on the run). I have just finished the translation and in the way of making up for the week of silence about my thrilling trip to Hainan here are some samples from the original of my translation. Red-hot right from the stove.

It did puzzle me at first and my linguistic guts were about to object:

But then I thought better of it. I guess it just lists the languages in a batch of programmed language sets, so English is sort of a default one everywhere. But anyhow, looks funny under that group name.

The next list is that of the languages available (possibly) on DVD discs as subtitles and audio tracks, and their abbreviations. Isn't it strange that there's an entry under the abbreviation of "VO"?

Well, I guess it's possible that there are still people around the globe who do speak Schleyer's Volapük, invented at the end of the 19th century. And even watch movies dubbed in it.

Wondrous art thy works, oh nature's wonder, a creator of hi-tech linguistic contents.
I am simply curious if there is a practical justification for this.

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