We started this project in March 2015 with a seedcorn grant from Coventry University.

Since then, we have been joined by colleagues from the University of Birmingham in our quest to discover how ‘untranslatable’ invented art language gets translated, by focusing on the ‘Nadsat’ slang embedded in Anthony Burgess’s cult novella, ‘A Clockwork Orange’.

We’ve already presented some preliminary findings at a conference in Nottingham, which can be viewed at the link below.

We’re looking forward to presenting some more of what we’ve discovered in March at the ‘Ponying the Slovos’ symposium.

Even moreso, we’re excited to hear from other researchers, translators and academics and linguists about what they’ve discovered when they’ve looked at such translation strategies, or when they’ve looked at art languages in literature.

If you’re one such researcher, please consider contributing a paper to the symposium. See the call for paper for details.

Nott poster draft 3

Call for Papers:

Ponying the Slovos – Art-languages and translation corpora in literary criticism

A team of researchers based at Coventry University and the University of Birmingham have been studying how invented languages are translated, using parallel corpus techniques and comparing translations of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

We now invite papers for a special one-day symposium event to be held at Coventry University on 18/3/2016, which will explore and expand upon all the various contexts of this interdisciplinary study.

Possible topics include:

• the use of parallel corpora in the exploration of translation strategies for creative uses of lexis and grammar
• the creation and translation of invented art-languages, including but not limited to, Burgess’s Nadsat, Tolkien’s languages of Middle Earth, Orwell’s Newspeak, Suzanne Haden Elgin’s Láadan, Dothraki and Valyrian from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones), Klingon and Vulcan from the Star Trek mythos, and Richard Adams’s Lapine.
• the use of language invention as a world-building component in fantastical and other literature.

We welcome submissions from scholars, academics and early career researchers in any of these areas, especially corpus linguistics, translation studies, fantastika studies and conlang studies.

There is no registration fee to attend or present at this symposium as it is funded by a seed-corn grant from Coventry University.

Abstracts of 300 words, accompanied by a brief professional bio, should be submitted as Word documents to jim.clarke@coventry.ac.uk by 29^th January 2016.