Invented Languages and Translation: The Cases of Newspeak and Nadsat in Spanish

Abstract

Fictional worlds are often inhabited by peoples who speak completely invented languages which, according to Suvin’s nomenclature, act as a novum. Sometimes, however, the languages invented in science fiction are rooted in real ones, as is the case of George Orwell’s Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Anthony Burgess’s Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange. Both languages stem from English but are not immediately understandable in their source language. Examples are terms such as 'thoughtcrime,' 'blackwhite' or 'duckspeak' in Newspeak and 'moloko,' 'glazzy' or 'malenky' in Nadsat. Unlike uncomprehensible – and untranslatable – fictional languages, the task of translating originally English-rooted invented languages requires high doses of creativity and dedication. In this article, we analyse the translation and retranslation of Newspeak and Nadsat into Spanish with a quantitative-qualitative approach.