THE FAMOUS CONLANG TRANSLATION RELAY OF THE SUMMER OF 1999

This exercise, engaged in by over twenty people on the listserv Conlang, was thought up by Irina Rempt, who appointed me the gamemaster. What she did was to send me a short poem in her language Valdyan with grammatical and lexical instructions, which I translated into Teonaht. I sent my Teonaht version to Steg Belsky (along with grammatical and lexical instructions), who translated that version into Rokbeigalmki. He sent his version (with grammatical and lexical instructions) to Patrick Dunn, and so forth and so on. No one translator ever saw anything but the previous translator's version, the point being that just like a kind of "conlang Telephone game," the poem would change a little with each transmission. My role in the relay was to keep it moving. No one was allowed to have more than forty-eight hours, and in three and a half weeks we had eighteen translations in different invented languages, all posted by Irina on her website. Visit it and see what we did! It was one of the first exercises that got us actively engaged in reading and translating each others' languages, and I hope the tradition continues. It has even inspired a number of songs that have been put on audio files, and I will have links to those eventually. I have a song in the works that made from Teonaht translations of the Valdyan and Demuan versions.