‘Ponying the Slovos’ is the official blog of the A Clockwork Orange Parallel Translation Corpus Project. The aim of the project is to explore how invented languages function in translation, so as to reveal aspects of both language invention and the translation process. The project was initiated at Coventry University in 2015, and includes investigators from the University of Birmingham and Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
Nadsat is the language invented by Anthony Burgess for his famous novel A Clockwork Orange and further popularised by Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation. By examining how Nadsat is dealt with in translations, we hope to shed light upon the processes and challenges involved in literary translation. To date, the team has published articles in The Guardian, The Translator, and Babel magazine, with further articles forthcoming.
In 2016, Coventry University hosted the ‘Ponying the Slovos’ conference, which examined how invented languages function linguistically in literature. The symposium attracted speakers from three continents.
This blog aims to document the corpus project but also provide information on the fascinating world of invented languages generally.
