lost in translation

Even though the subject matter (artificial languages) is quite arcane, this piece about translating porpoise poetry is still amusing.

I received the following message which is purported to be poetry written by a porpoise. My assignment was to produce a translation of the meaning of the poem, with the understanding that the poetic nature of the original might be lost.

This task was considerably more difficult than the usual run-of-the-mill assignment translating geckos or cockroaches. Although non-standard transliterations are quite common, in this case the choice of transliteration scheme nearly rendered the task impossible. Representing porpoise speech entirely with the characters "E" and "e" meant that much of the nuance of the individual words was lost.

However, I believe I have accomplished the task. Standard representation of porpoise speech, which consists of a pitch/volume/duration triplet for each squeak. Of course, the original is lacking in all three of those values. However, we made the simplifying assumption that the number of "e" characters correspond to a duration, we also assumed that the capital "E" characters indicated a higher volume than the "e" characters. We created for each squeak an estimated *range* of possible values, based on our simplifying assumptions. Then, we ran a computer matching program that generated every possible word that the might be indicated. In several cases there was only one possible word. Based on these we could eliminate some of the possibilities for other words, in some cases due to grammatical impossibility and in others on consistency in meaning.

Here are the results of our efforts:

Glossary

• E - I-see-it [via echo-location] or seaweed or tentacle
• Ee - good-luck!
• EeEeEeEe - right [correct, exclamation of agreement]
• Eee - thermocline
• Eeee - behold or to-bite-the-flukes of
• EeeeEeeeE - underneath-and-to-the-right
• EeeeeEeeeeE - go-for-it [exhortation to strive, whatever the odds]
• Eeeeeeee - so-near-and-yet-so-far [exclamation of the unattainable], you've-almost-got-it, you're-almost-there
• Eeeeee look-out! [exhortation to take care]

> Eeee! Eee! EeeeEeeeE?
Behold! Look underneath that thermocline and to the right!

> EeEeEeEe.... E E E!
Right.... I see it! There's [seaweed or tentacle] there!

> Eeeeeeee. Eeeeeeee.
So near and yet so far!

> Eee! Eeee! EeEeEeEe! E!
At the thermocline! Look! You can get it! The [seaweed or tentacle]!

> EeeeeEeeeeE? Ee!
Go for it! Good luck!

> Eeeeeee. Eeeeee. E! E!
You're almost there! Look out! I see it! The [seaweed or tentacle]!

> E! E!
I see it! The [seaweed or tentacle]!

> E E E!
I see it! The [seaweed or tentacle]! I see it!

If you liked that, scroll down on the linked page to read the discussion of SUPERL.