1. Translating into and out of a planned
language: what does it mean?
The case of Esperanto as a translation tool
Federico Gobbo
University of Insubria
Varese Italy
Les mardis à l'ETI, 20 Avril 2010

2. Outline
1. What is a planned language?
2. Esperanto as a planned language
3. The role of translation in the history of Esperanto
4. Some specific problem of a planned language
5. Esperanto and Machine Translation
6. Final remarks
7. Reading. Specimens of good literary translations

3. What is a planned language?
A planned language is a human language whose langue is
planned before its parole is established.
Planned languages can be constructed for various purposes,
literature, fiction, playing...
In particular, during the XIX-XX centuries the quest for an
International Auxiliary Language (IAL) raised interests in the
élite of European intellectuals.

4. More than a thousand were proposed...
...during a century (from 1850 until 1950). Some names:
● Langue Bleu,
● Idiom Neutral,
● Spokil,
● Weltsprache...
Mostly were based on Hindo-European languages.
More recently, other proposals were made through the internet
(e.g., Lingua Franca Nova)

5. The most successful IALs
Most of them had no success (i.e., no one ever used it save the
proponent, see at least Eco 1993). In other words, only a few of
them were used by a community - establishing a parole, in
particular:
● Volapük
● Esperanto
● Latino Sine Flexione/Interlingua
● Ido
● Occidental/Interlingue
● IALA's Interlingua

6. The IAL speech communities
During the XX century only 6 IALs succeeded to establish a
proper speech community in spite of two World Wars:
● Volapük (since 1879 until 1892)
● Esperanto (since 1887)
● Latino Sine Flexione/Interlingua (since 1903 until 1932?)
● Ido (since 1908)
● Occidental/Interlingue (since 1922 until 1951?)
● IALA's Interlingua (since 1951)
Nowadays only 3 IALs (in bold) have a speech community.

7. Esperanto as a planned language
Among IALs, Esperanto is the most successful in terms of
adoption by enthusiasts (time: longest period; quantity:
numbers of active speakers; quality: diversification of texts).
Active speakers nowadays:
Esperanto: +50,000 worldwide
Ido: approx. 1,000 worldwide (mainly Europe)
IALA's Interlingua: approx 1,000 worldwide (mainly Europe)
For this reason, Esperanto is the most interesting IAL from the
point of view of linguistic research.

8. Translation in the history of Esperanto
● The Zero period: L.L. Zamenhof composes the langue of Esperanto
(1863-1887)
● The First Period: primitive Romanticism (1887-1920)
● The Second Period: Literary flowering (1921-1930)
● The Third Period: Parnassism and the dangerous language (1931-
1951)
● The Fourth Period: Modernism (1952-1974)
● The Fifth Period: popularization of the novel (1975-1990)
● The Sixth Period: Postmodernism, Post-sovietism and the Web era
(1991-)

9. The Zero period: L.L. Zamenhof
composes the langue of Esperanto
(1863-1887)
At first Zamenhof writes a grammar of Yiddish, in a Zionist
context ("one people, one language").
After the falling of the American Option and the approval
of the Palestine Option, Zamenhof leaves Zionism and
composes Esperanto under a different ideological perspective
("second language for all").

10. Zamenhof's linguistic "theory"
Principle of optimization: balance between productivity (active
competence) and immediate readability (passive competence).
Source languages:
Yiddish and (Bielo?)Russian (L1),
Polish, German (full L2),
French and English (mainly reading/writing),
Latin, Greek and Hebrew (classic languages).
Note: Ferdinand de Saussurre in his famous Cours talks about
Esperanto, and his brother René was an Esperantist.

11. The First Period: primitive Romanticism
(1887-1920)
Translations always important to establish the style, since the
first book (1887).
L.L. Zamenhof's translations: parts of the Bible, poems by
Heinrich Heine, Hamlet by Sheakespeare, and other
masterpieces (Dickens, Schiller, Gogol, Goethe, Andersen).
Polish pioneers' translations (Gabrowski, Kazimir Bein): The
Pharaon by Bolesław Prus, The Brothers by Goethe, and other
masterpieces (Pushkin, Molière).

12. The Second Period: Literary flowering
(1921-1930)
The review Literatura Mondo [Literary World] in Budapest
establish literary style also through translation, e.g. Dante's
Inferno by Kalocsay.
Anthologies dedicated to national literature started to appear
(Hungarian, Italian, French, Japanese...)
Eugen Wüster, the Austrian engineer founder of modern
terminology, publishes the first part of his technical dictionary
and encyclopedia.
First technical and scientific translations (mainly electric
engineering).

13. The Third Period: Parnassism and the
dangerous language (1931-1951)
The Parnasa Gvidlibro [Guidebook to Parnassus] creates the
canon of 'classical' poetry, by the Budapest school;
The Nazi and the Soviet persecutes Esperantists
systematically.
Translations become less and less important: mostly
ideological literature is written (e.g., Esperantism & Socialism).

14. The Fourth Period: Modernism (1952-
1974)
Esperanto survives the IIWW. In 1956 William Auld publishes
La infana raso [the Child Race].
Modernism is characterized by calembours, word plays, irony,
meta-language, meta-literature...
The Esperanto style is come of age, and translations are no
more felt necessary as before.

15. The Fifth Period: popularization of the
novel (1975-1990)
Original novels - less pretentious in literary terms - appear:
crime, science-fiction, fantasy...
A youth movement emerges with different organizations,
congresses and organizational rules, and with some jargon (e.
g., mojose! is cool!).
Publications become less and less expensive, so a lot of "grey"
literature is produced (e.g., dazebaos, congress booklets),both
original and translated.
It's difficult to follow this "liquid" production.

16. The Sixth Period: Postmodernism,
Post-sovietism and the Web era (1991-
)
The Esperanto movement gets involved with the topic of
language rights and the paradigm of ecology of languages.
Some authors publish bilingual originals.
After Modernism the corpus of text is big enough to act as a
reference for a standard register of written language.

17. Two examples
Two best-sellers (among the Esperanto community...):
● Jorge Camacho (professional translator at UE) starts
postmodernism in poetry since 1991, both in Esperanto and
in Esperanto/Spanish.
● Anna Löwenstein in 1999 publish The Stone City / La Ŝtona
Urbo, a long, historical novel in Ancient Rome, both in
English and Esperanto (two different editions).
Their style is very different: Camacho is more
naturalistic, Löwenstein is more schemistic.

18. Esperanto as the Open Source Language
With the Web Era (1993-), translations of technical texts in
computer science becomes more and more important.
In particular, open source software is being translated (e.g.,
OpenOffice).
From an ideological point of view, the motto is "Esperanto =
Linux".
Most dictionaries are put in the web as free resources.

19. Wikipedia in Esperanto
The Wikipedia in Esperanto (Vikipedio) is one of the most
active (128,213 articles by 19 Avril 2010).
It is interesting because:
● it has translations of national Wikipedias...
● ...as well as original texts

20. How Esperanto was
established by translation
(s)?

21. Esperanto as a "translation language"
Under a certain point of view, Esperanto is a "translation
language" by definition, being the Target Language (TL) of
Zamenhof's Source Languages (SL).
In fact, L.L. Zamenhof translated parts of each langue he knew
into Esperanto, in a delicate mix. A simple example:
● personal pronouns are borrowed from English: mi, vi, li-ŝi-ĝi,
ni, vi, ili (exactly as "I, you, he-she-it, we, you, they").
● the unpersonal pronoun is borrowed from French: oni.
The same is true for the lexicon (Romance, German, Slavic).

22. Esperanto is made by interference
In other words, Esperanto was made by the results of good
linguistic interferences, with some degree of freedom. Example
● Bonvolu helpi min ('please help me', as in English)
with the Accusative
● Bonvolu helpi al mi (bitte helft mir, as in German)
with the Dative
They are equivalent in practice.

23. Esperanto was developed by sourciers
In the very beginning, an Esperantophone should always turn
to the source languages (SLs) to find how to translate into
Esperanto expressions.
In the translation arrow, the SLs were more important (the so-called
school of sourciers: "means matter!").
This fact is still true nowadays in certain domains.

24. Example: the train domain
Ne pas se pencher au dehors
Ne sin pendigu for
Nicht hinauslehnen
Neniam sin elklini
E' pericoloso sporgersi
Estas danĝere elkliniĝi
Do not lean out of the window
Ne sin apogi el la fenestro
This uncertainty happens because there are no writings in
Esperanto on trains!

25. The force of linguistic tradition...
Since its beginning, Esperanto started to evolve as any other
living language.
The more Esperanto grew up in use, the more a standard
register became to emerge.
So, nowadays, a good translator in Esperanto should turn to
the Esperanto use in that field whenever possible.
However, in most cases a form wins over the others, and
enters the standard register.

26. ...brings archaisms and idiomatic expressions!
As a proof, few archaisms can be found. Examples:
● 'postage stamp' is signo de poŝto (1887), poŝta marko
(1889), then poŝtmarko (since 1905, Sutton 2007).
● 'international language' was lingvo internacia, nowadays is
internacia lingvo (unmarked word order shift).
Some idiotisms emerged according to the forming of the
community:
● la verda stelo [the green star = Esperanto, following the flag]
● samideano [person who has one's same idea = Esperantist]
● interna ideo [internal idea = humanitarian internationalism
behind the language]

27. Example: having a shower in Esperanto
● Maria faras la duŝon (Maria fa la doccia, as in Italian)
● Maria duŝas (Maria duscht, as in German)
● Maria prenas duŝon (Maria takes a shower, as in English)
● Maria havas duŝon (Maria haves a shower, as in English)
The direct verbification (as in German) is preferred, especially
since the Fifth Period (since 1975), starting from the jargon
within the youth movement.

28. Evaluation
In its early period, Esperanto was completely dependent on the
language(s) Esperantophones know.
In particular Zamenhof's SLs were the most important.
Then, French became the Dachsprache of Esperanto since the
Second Period (Paris was the center of the world).
After the IIWW (Fourth Period) English started to become
more and more important even for Esperantophones
(mostly unaware of this fact). This is confirmed by the rhetorics
of Esperanto as an "Asian" language (Piron) and "Stop to the
Western/WASP Dialect (Corsetti, de Zilah).

29. Some specific problems

30. Ideological aspects
Esperanto is nobody's property but - potentially - belongs to
every human being. Look at this translation.
● English: it's Greek to me.
● Italian: Per me è turco/arabo [it's Turkish/Arabic to me].
● Esperanto: Estas volapukaĵo al mi [it's Volapük to me].
Note: Volapük influenced the pioneering epoch of the
Esperanto movement.
No one is harmed or offended!

31. Mitev's reflection: dialects and the
problem of the ancestor
Mitev (1991): it's difficult to simulate dialects and very old
language (there is no Ursprache, such as Latin for Italian or
Anglo-Saxon for English).
Some solutions proposed:
● Arkaika Esperanto (ad-hoc planned language with cases) for
the Ursprache;
● Ido used as a dialect.

32. Anyway, there is no diatopic difference!
You won't read cases such as Harry Potter:
in Britain it is Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone;
in the US it is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
By now, the Esperanto community is small in absolute numbers
and very compact to forbid such tendencies.

33. The debate about neologisms
In 1891, L.L. Zamenhof wrote in the first review La
Esperantisto an article intitled Pri la uzado de formoj
simplaj anstataŭ kunmetitaj [About the use of simple
instead of compound forms] (in De Diego 1979: 17,18, my
translation):
Above all we suggest always to use simple forms,
instead of compounds. Compounds are typical in the
German language, and for this language they actually
succeed to give a great richness of forms; but in our
language, words are more natural and sound good if
they are not compound, but used in isolation.

34. Zamenhof let Esperantists free
In 1910, at the 6th World Congress (Washington, DC),
Zamenhof said (in Sutton 2007, 22, author's translation):
When I composed the language... I first intended to compose
the whole language, with all the detals, and I thought of
translating all the wrods in Schmidt's complete, multilingual
dictionary... but I soon realized that it would be better, in the
beginning, that the language have only its most essential
elements, and that I should live to life ... the job of completing
the task.

35. Naturalism and Schemism as two
tendencies
In its essence Esperanto behaves like the other natural languages
and, although it lacks a special national character, nonetheless it
has got a proper spirit, which arises from its grammar structure and
its Hindo-European word treasure, with its cultural and emotional
associations. But ... we need to strengthen that spirit and give a
great relief and coherence... Esperanto hesitates between two
tendencies, at the same time structural and stylistic, that results
into that provisional feeling, a sort of lack of a solid ground. It's a
double-face analytic and synthetic, or, if you want, naturalistic and
schemistic.
(De Diego 1979: 15, 17, my translation).

36. An example by Auld (1997)
"the old weak Lady slowly took short steps away"
Schemistic lexicon:
mal-jun-a mal-fort-a mal-jun-ul-in-o mal-rapid-e mal-long-a
mal-proksim-iĝ-i
Schemistic translation:
La malforta maljunulino malrapide malproksimiĝas per
mallongaj paŝoj

37. The standard register is an accurate
mix
Naturalistic lexicon: old-a febl-a dam-o lant-e kurt-a dist-iĝ-i
Naturalistic translation:
La febla olda damo lante distiĝas per kurtaj paŝoj
A more realistic translation is mixed:
La febla maljunulino foriĝas malrapide per kurtaj paŝoj

38. Schemism is also culturally
determinated!
Example:
● vort-aro borrows from Romance strategies
('vocabul-ary/diction-ary', in English)
instead of German ones. It could be possible to have
● ?vortlibro borrowing from German Wörterbuch.

39. Esperanto and Machine
Translation

40. The Charles Babbage of Machine
Translation
Petr Trojanskij used Esperanto in its electrical machine in a
Soviet Patent (1933). He structured the Russian lexicon into
80,000 roots thanks to 300 "logical connectors" to perform
grammar character transfers (then, Tesnière 1959).
Example:
O bicikl-o bicycle
I bicikl-i to bicycle
E bicikl-e with a bicycle, etc.
A bicikl-a cycling, cycle
The extreme regularity of Esperanto lets to reduce considerably
the lexicon to be encoded (see Hutchins-Lovtskii 2000).

41. The Distributed Language System
(DLT)
Started by Toon Witkam in 1982, it was developed for five
years with the support of the Esperanto community in a
marketing context (BSO enterprise), in particular by Klaus
Schubert, Dan Maxwell and Victor Sadler (2010 in Blanke-Lins
2010).
A multilingual dependency grammar was built. The
"transparent" morphology of Esperanto facilitates the parsing
and POS-tagging.
Esperanto was the interlingua (pivot language) between the SL
and the TL. Partial success: Esperanto had been modified to fit
the MT system.

42. Final remarks

43. A . In order to compose the language, it was natural to translate
into Esperanto; only from the Fourth Period it became
interesting to translate from Esperanto too.
B. The Esperanto lexicon privileges literary areas instead of
technical ones, because of the language use (there is a bias
against Esperanto in many people), so neologisms are often
needed to specific domains and purposes.
C. Nowadays, there is no substantial difference in translating in
or out Esperanto.
D. Paradoxically, as English became the Dachsprache of
Esperanto (in fact most Esperantophones also are proficient in
English), the naturalistic tendency will be more and more
important - substantially, Esperanto adopts a vacuum-cleaner
strategy (Crystal) for neologisms inasmuch English, regardless
of their utility.

44. Do we need oktopuso when we had for
decades polpo?

45. Reading
Specimens of good literary
translations