Additional translations for “Space Elevator” have been added to the Translation Project tab.

First, we now have the pronounciation for the Hindi translation, ‘Anthariksh elevator’.  This was sent to me by Ravi Shankar (he of KC Space Pirates fame, not the Sitar player 🙂 )

Next, we now have a Latin translation; Ascensor ad astra.  This was sent to me by Martin Lades, an organizer of the recent Space Elevator Conference and also a member of the KC Space Pirates team).

We now also have a Hebrew translation (ma’alit Khalal) courtesy of Ben Shelef (he of the Spaceward Foundation).

Finally, Ben introduced me to “Leet speak” – something which I was unfamiliar with.  There are several possible versions of Space Elevator in “Leet”, but the one from the Brenz.net Speak Converter gives us 5P4(3 3L3\/470R

This makes 31 translations – only about a million more to go 🙂

I’ve added three more translations on my Translation Project page; Estonian, Esperanto and Pig Latin 🙂

The Estonian translation (and it’s English pronunciation) was kindly sent to me by Marko Mänd – thanks Marko!

The Esperanto and Pig Latin translations came from some translator programs on the web…

Tom Nugent, of LaserMotive fame, suggested that I get a Klingon translation – what a great idea!  I visited all of the web-based Klingon translators I could find and they either a) did not work or b) did not provide me a translation.  So, all of you Trekkies out there, if you can provide me with a Klingon (or Vulcan or Romulan) translation of “Space Elevator”, that would be uber-cool…

Incidentally, I’ve added a new “Post Category”, that of “Translation Project”.  This way readers can see the evolution of this project over time.

Two other notes:

First, AA (who sent me the Greek translation and also the incredibly detailed English pronunciation guide), also pointed me towards a Greek-language article on the Space Elevator.  You can find it here.

Second, one of the presenters at the conference, Dr. Karen Ghazaryan, was Armenian.  He gave a talk (“Stability of Superconducting Cable Used for Transportation of Electrical Current from Space“).  While perfectly understandable, it was obvious that English was not his first language.  At the end of his talk, someone from the audience asked him a question.  This person, I believe, was Russian.  They quickly switched into Russian for their dialogue while the rest of us looked on.  However, I was able to understand one phrase he used, “Cosmeecheski Leeft”, as that is Russian for “Space Elevator”.  So this project has already produced a tangible benefit for me 🙂

22JUL08 – Correction:  Tom Nugent of LaserMotive suggested Latin while I thought of Pig Latin.  And it was Martin Lades, one of the Conference organizers, who thought of the Klingon idea…

As most of my readers know, I have started a project to translate the phrase ‘Space Elevator’ into as many languages as possible.  You can see where this project is at by selecting the ‘Translation Project’ tab at the top of this blog.

Two of the languages this phrase has already been translated into are Norwegian and Greek.  However, in the last few days, I’ve received emails from readers telling me that my Norwegian and Greek translations really should be different.  Below are their comments:

Reader Nils Egli Lie lets me know about the Norwegian translation that “Just wanted to let you know that “romelevator” is not the most used word in Norwegian. Although it’s the technically correct word, the more popular “romheis” is the most commonly used one, specially in media. Checking google, “romheis” gives about 26.000 hits, while “romelevator” gives you 426. Maybe you should put up both? The word “romelevator” comes from the direct translation of Tsiolkovskij project. “Elevator” was a term more commonly used before WW2, however, the Norwegian language has changed, and we’re using “heis” instead of  “elevator” now. “Heis” is “lift” in english, and I see a lot of the other languages is using lift as the translation as well.  Best regards…”

Thank you Nils – I will take your suggestion and put up both of them.

And, regarding the Greek translation, reader AA (who maintains this blog) tells me that “I am sending this email regarding the Greek “Space Elevator” translation you cite at your website as being “?????????? ???????”.  Coming originally from Greece ? must say that “???????” is not a Greek word. It is a “greekification” of the French word “ascenseur” which means of course elevator. We do use it in every day Greek but “foreign” terms should be avoided when translating terminology from another language to Greek.  The Greek word for “ascenseur” is ??????????” (anelkistir) or as we would say it today (modern Greek) “????????????” (anelkistiras).   It is literally translated as “a device that is used to pull items upwards” and i think that it is a perfect fit for the Space Elevator 🙂  The complete term now reads: Space Elevator -> ??????????? ????????????.  (By the way Space -> ???????? (diastima) is literally translated as “The space between” 🙂 )”

I then emailed AA back to ask him how to pronounce this and he sent me this long and detailed explanation:

Now…Two words:

Diastimikos pronounced as:

THEE-A-SSTEEM-EEK-OSS

*I refrain from using DEE because the sound of Delta (the first letter of Diastimikos) is much closer to what your mouth does to pronounce THE

**Double S means, pronounce it as a clear S as in Super, Stimulating, Science (!!! I did not mean this it just happened) rather than S as in “The Blues” or “Barrows”

Anelkistiras pronounced as:

AN-ELK-EESS-TEER-ASS

Again try to focus to the primary sounds of the letters rather than letting accent take over.

AN as in “ANarchy”, ELK like the animal but a simple raw E…like “Ebony”, double S as above, TEER as in “LanTIRn”, ASS as in “Carcass”

Altogether now 🙂

?? (THEE)
?? (ASS)
??? (TEEM)
?? (EEK)
?? (OSS)

?? (AN)
??? (ELK)
?? (EESS)
??? (TEER)
?? (ASS)

You might not want to put it like this on your post, i can see this “An Elk Is Teer Ass” ending up all wrong in some readers minds 🙂

I tried to record it but i think it’s better explained in the text :-/

You might notice some letters above being accented in one word and not in the other. The accent is practically used in the Greek language. It tells the reader where to emphasise the word and is always put on a vowel. To understand the concept, consider the word spAce. It is emphasised on A. Elevator is emphasised on the first E.

Therefore, ??????????? sounds different than ??????????? exactly as “Elevator” would sound different if it was emphasised on O, in which case it would sound like elevatOr.

The language used to have many different decorations over the letters with rules on how you use them, all of them helping the reader to read the words as they were supposed to be sounding. We only use one accent now though (and call this system monotonic, rather than the “older” one which was the polytonic one).

This guy is amazing – I wish my college professors were as painstakingly clear as he is.  As my original translation was from the Google translator, I’m sure that AA’s is a bit more accurate 🙂 and am so going to use it instead of the one I originally had, and, I’ve put an abbreviated version of his ‘Pronounciation Guide’ up with it.

Thanks everyone!

With the addition of the Hungarian version of ‘Space Elevator’ (?rfelvonó), sent in by reader Tony Wright, we’re now up to 25 translations for it.

Thanks Tony!

The Translation Project is now beginning to get a bit respectable.  I have hopes of getting at least 100 different translations for the phrase “Space Elevator” and we’re now a quarter of the way there.

Thanks to all of you who have helped me on this project, and, if anyone has a translation of “Space Elevator” in another language, please email it to me at Ted [AT] SpaceElevatorBlog.com (along with a pronunciation guide, if possible).

Update – I think I’ve been remiss in not previously thanking Dan Leafblad (of the KC Space Pirates) for providing translations in Hindi, Korean, Finnish, Czech, Greek and Romanian.  Thanks Danny!

A recent post I put up had as it’s title “Weltraumaufzug” – the German translation of “Space Elevator”.  I recently discovered a website that had the Croation translation: “Nebesko Dizalo“.

It occurs to me that a worthwhile exercise would be to translate “Space Elevator” (or perhaps “Elevator to Space”?) into as many different languages as possible.  I think that doing so might help us to internationalize the concept and broaden it’s appeal.

To that end, I am making a request of all of my readers:  If you know how (or can find out how) to say/write “Space Elevator” in a language other than English (or German or Croation), can you please email it to me at:

(Ted [AT] SpaceElevatorBlog.com)

When I get a respectable number of these (at least 30 to start, I would think) I’ll put up a web page with them and link to it in my sidebar.

Please, only send me something that you’re fairly sure of – I don’t want the page to become a subject of ridicule.  We all know and love Babelfish to be able to give us a quick and dirty translation of something, but it’s not anything that we would use for serious work.

Thanks everyone!

(Beautiful picture of the earth from here – click on it for a larger version)

(Update: I decided to not wait until I have 30 translations before I put them up on the blog – by the time I have that many, it will be a big project and I’ll find an excuse to put it off. 🙂  Also, rather than make it an entry on the sidebar (which is getting pretty crowded), I added it as a page to the top of the blog – you can now click on “Translation Project” and see where we stand with this.)