About the Translation Challenge category

Post and participate in translation challenges for your conlang!

This category hosts “translation challenges”, short sentences or paragraphs people post to have it translated into various conlangs. This is a good way to see if your conlang has a good way to say something, find new vocabulary, or simply learn more about the conlang!

Category rules

  • Keep the text to be translated up to a couple sentences in length. Long translation challenges could be too daunting.
  • Post only prose, not poetry or song lyrics.
  • Make sure your text follows the code of conduct as always.

Formatting the challenge

When formatting your translation challenge, put the text to be translated in a quote block.

A quote block looks like this.

> A quote block is made by putting a right angle bracket at the front of the text.
> Multiple lines can be added by adding an additional `>`
>
> Careful, if you want an empty line in the quote block, you have to put a `>` with no text, like above!

You should provide any context necessary if applicable, for especially context heavy languages like Toki Pona.

Responding

Put your response in a quote block too, and provide a literal translation and/or a gloss to help others understand how it was translated.

Example

This is a simple example sentence to translate.

I could easily win a debate against a baby.


My bad(?) Toaq translation:

Ea dana fûı jí pó sá be ꝡë raqsoı jí hóa tú raı.
POSB.SUBJ win.against easily 1P of some baby COMP debate 1P RSM every thing

3 Likes

Awesome. Translation challenges are a great way to find gaps in your design. I’m going to add some of my favorite loglang challenges.

2 Likes

Relatedly, I’ve made a “Loglang Tatoeba” spreadsheet collecting simple challenging sentences and translations thereof into several languages, mainly loglangs (but there’s also an Ithkuil and Toki Pona column):
Loglang Tatoeba sheet

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Should this be pinned?

Edit: Or is it already? It was at the bottom of the category for me...

Edit 2: Ok, nevermind. I just found out i can tap the pin symbol and it'll unpin (presumably only for myself).

Correct. je'u. juna da. Lon.

1 Like

(toki pona only capitalizes proper nouns, not the starts of sentences or any other words, if that's what you were trying to do! so it should be just "lon")
(or it could just have been your device's autocorrect i wouldn't know)