But never mind all those links. Just go directly to the link below to view and download a reference document which contains the translation plus an extensive introduction in English and a useful glossary:
Update: an audio recording of this translation
has now been released!
So what? Who cares? I hear you ask.
Ah, well, here's the thing: My translation is 4944 words of Occidental, translated from about 5088 words of the original French. So, in round figures, let's call it 5000 words. Now, first of all, this is a staggering achievement for me personally. There is no way I could translate 5000 words into French or German despite having spent years studying those languages; by comparison I've been studying Occidental for a few months at most. (It was only quite recently that I returned to Occidental after spending most of the year on other languages. Also, I have had professional instruction in French and German. I taught myself Occidental at home, with help from one or two kind folks on the internet.) This is sophisticated and literary writing we are talking about, not some basic translation. So what this means is that a constructed auxiliary language really can deliver results, and there really is a future for literature in a language like Occidental. More to the point, this means I have not wasted a year of my life after all; putting all this time into studying constructed languages has finally paid dividends.
So what? Who cares? I hear you ask again.
Okay, here's the second thing. For whatever reason, Occidental has been mostly a dead language for several decades, with very few people using it since the mid-20th century. There is currently only a tiny community of users, perhaps a few dozen people, and one or two small regular publications. Even back in the heyday of Occidental, just before the Second World War, when the language was relatively popular and had quite a few users and generated quite a bit of international interest, to the best of my knowledge it was rarely used for fiction, rarely used for prose literature. Accordingly it is possible that my 4944 words of Occidental, the complete first chapter of Stendhal's great novel, might be the longest piece of prose fiction ever publicly translated into the language! To the best of my knowledge, for example, there has never been a complete novel written in Occidental or translated into Occidental. At the very least I am probably one of very few people in the world who have written a long prose translation in the language in the past 50 years.
So, there you have it:
(1) a massive milestone for me personally: the first time in my life I have ever been able to translate a whole chapter of a novel into a language other than English; this proves auxlangs work
(2) perhaps even a significant milestone for the Occidental-language community, as this translation can serve as a reference work for other writers and hopefully as inspiration for others to continue writing literature in this language
In other words...
... my year has finally paid off.
By the way, this is not about trying to churn out massive amounts of content or get the most Wikipedia articles written or something along those lines. This is not about quantity. It is about quality. It is better to have one good chapter translated to a good standard than ten novels translated to a poor standard; the former helps the language to grow, the latter just causes confusion.
Many thanks to Dr Olivier Simon and Dave MacLeod who have provided invaluable assistance to me directly, and to Steve Rice and others who have indirectly assisted me by means of the dictionaries or other helpful documents which they have composed and which allowed me to get this far along the proverbial road. And I am still peddling furiously to get up this hill...
The view from here is good at last. I feel like I have ridden a somewhat dodgy bicycle laboriously to the top of a mountain and am now looking around at the landscape below, realising that there are so many new places I can explore. The bicycle that I have been peddling so laboriously (namely Occidental) will now easily glide down the mountain and pick up speed. Maybe we can get an international literary community going, using Occidental, making literature accessible to international readers with less study required than is the case with natural languages. This here bicycle isn't so dodgy, after all...
A note for writers interested in learning a European language: making this translation from French to Occidental has enormously improved my comprehension of written French. I strongly recommend that if you are struggling to improve your comprehension of any of the major Western European languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch...) that you consider making a translation into Occidental of a work in one of those languages. Making a translation really forces you to think. Making that translation into a third language instead of English really forces you to think even more, especially if you accept the challenge of dismantling the idiomatic expressions somehow into plain language which can be internationally understood. This has a synergistic effect on learning, because it really forces you to think about the true meaning of expressions. It really works.
I am now exhausted. I'm taking a break for a while to enjoy the view.
Onward? Not just yet. Time for a picnic.
P.S. Exciting footnote: this publication will shortly be followed by an audio-recording of the complete translation for your listening pleasure. This will allow readers to get a sense of what the language sounds like; it sounds good, and is very literary and expressive. It has a bright future, I think.
Update: the audio-recording has now been released!
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