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reading the essay about metaphors...
If you don't believe me, or if you feel that I'm exaggerating the problem, go to a library and dig up some books on translation theory. You will quickly learn that you cannot have an international language and use it to literally translate metaphors from a natural language.Sorry, but that's life, and I don't like it either. :-(
unless we don't have only one language... what would make an i.a.l. superfluous, of course. ;)
Even worse, these islanders refuse to believe anything even slightly metaphoric. If this is true, then my guess is that the mother languages of the people among whom the pidgin developed were so different that metaphor from one language almost always sounded like gibberish to speakers of the other mother languages. As a result, they quickly learned never to use metaphor at all. And although this may be an isolated (exaggerated? hokey? untrue?) case, translators are well aware that some languages use metaphor more heavily than others. How much they can differ is unknown, and I doubt if anyone has ever done a cross-linguistic study.)
it's similar to esperanto. in esperanto we avoid using metaphors, because it is spoken by people of so many different native languages. but there are metaphors, for example, "to skip" (to leave out) is "transsalti", although leaving out a step (once more a metaphor) doesn't mean to jump.
[Postscript: In spite of all of the above, there may yet be another way that metaphor can work properly when used in an IAL. It can work if the metaphoric system of the AL is precisely defined. In effect, you must provide a "syntax and semantics" for the metaphors of your language in which you will precisely define how metaphors can be created and how they should be interpreted. However, since a comprehensive analysis of the metaphoric system of a natural language has never been done (to my knowledge), I doubt if providing such a system for an AL is technically feasible.]
once i noticed that on an mtv-like channel the moderator (speaking to the kids) in order to be cool used a lot of metaphors. that was the first time when i thought that it would be really cool to have a tool in order to translate from normal language into metaphoric language. i hope i don't mess up with the term "metaphor", but i think that we are using metaphors all the time, but when there is no "normal" equivivalent "non-metaphor", the metaphor becomes normal.
it must be really hard to translate shakespeare! stefo, sts.