BIG NEWS: L’Étranger by Camus in Sambahsa!

Recently the inventor of Sambahsa, Dr Oliver Simon, announced that for the first time an entire novel has been translated into the language.

That would be exciting enough in itself, but it gets even better: the chosen novel is L’Étranger by Albert Camus. This is one of the great novels of French literature, written by one of its greatest authors. In English the title is often translated as The Stranger but is perhaps better thought of as The Outsider. That Sambahsa is capable of translating such a classic bodes very well.

This is exactly the kind of thing I want to see in the new auxlangs of the twenty-first century, such as Sambahsa and Lingwa de Planeta. Serious, major literary translations which retain most of the literary expressiveness of the original but which are easier to read and which are thus, at least theoretically, more internationally accessible.

The title in Sambahsa is Is Gospoti.

For further details, please see the original announcement.

Bravo, bravo, bravissimo!

Thank you, Olivier!

P.S. This news is a major temptation for me to take time out of my Lingwa de Planeta studies to read Is Gospoti in Sambahsa, however due to being extremely short of time I will probably delay reading it until 2013. This could be good timing since there is now increasing interest in Sambahsa and new students are currently joining its small community; accordingly by 2013 there will probably be further improvements in resources and documentation, produced by the community, which will make reading easier. For example, an online Glossword-style dictionary would be very convenient; even better would be an online dictionary in which one could type the conjugated form of a verb, as read in the novel, and which would automatically retrieve the corresponding verbal stem and its meaning.