Re: Linguistics journals LONGISH

[Thorild Selen <thorild@UPDATE.UU.SE>]

Logical Language Group writes:
 > Dr Seuss is precisely the kind of book that we can run into trouble
 > translating becuase it is copyrighted, and (I understand that) the author's
 > estate is pretty aggressively marketing it.

Maybe it's just me, but I've never ever heard of Dr Seuss other than in
discussions with (US) Americans. Is it the case that Dr Seuss is virtually
unheard of outside the USA? That sounds reasonable to me, and it makes me
wonder; do the writings of Dr Seuss really have any literary value?
If not, why bother about translating them?
Funny/witty rhyming is not considered as contributing to literary value
for this purpose, as such properties of a text are hardly translatable.

 > Grimm's and Andersen's fairy tales work well, but if you have ever seen the
 > texts, they are not "children's literature" in the same sense as is
 > Dr. Seuss.  Indeed, "See Spot run" is probably a loargely American English
 > folly.  Most other languages with more phonemic writing systems have
 > very few ultra-simple texts of the Seuss variety, but rather advance to
 > the next tier of difficulty rather early in the learning-to-read process.

There ought to be stories at varying degrees of difficulty available, so
that you/we, for any person willing to increase his/her/its skill in Lojban,
can provide a text that is reasonably interesting to read, and suitable for
his/her/its skill level. This goes for children as well as for other
persons.
I'm willing to try some translation, as soon as I've got my Lojban book and
read it through. I would start with something really simple, though :)

 > The priumary sign of kids stories in other languages seems not to be
 > simplicity of language, but rather brevity, and perhaps the use of anthro-
 > pomorphic animals as characters.  The language is often quite difficult.

I agree -- with the simplicity of Lojban, you should rather quickly be
able to advance to more complicated texts. For the benefit of the reader,
the stories should still be fun, though (especially if the intended reader
is a child).

 > (See the Lojban tranbslations of Aesop's fables for an example).

These are not quite beginner-level texts :)

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