Question: How were different languages created, and how was it possible to translate them?

Joseph Devlin answered on 16 Mar 2010:

Assuming this is follow-up to an earlier question where I mentioned the creation of creoles, it may be useful to consider one of the examples in more detail.

In Nicaragua deaf children were inconsistently taught — many never even went to schools. In the 1970s, the government of Nicaragua set up a central school for deaf children to teach them lip reading. As has happened so many times in the past, this doesn’t work — there just isn’t enough information available on the lips to understand language. But what it did was bring a group of deaf children together in one place for the first time (in Nicaragua — this had happened elsewhere before). And once they got there, they couldn’t communicate with each other because they had no common language. So they started miming and gesturing and making up simple signs and eventually created a very simple language known as a pidgin. As new kids came to the school, they arrived where this pidgin already existed and they progressively improved it, turning it into a proper language called a creole. Throughout this time, there were teachers present (and eventually linguists who came to study this) and they learned it at the same time. Since the teachers spoke Spanish, they could translate it for outsiders. Visitors came and learned the language to study it and since then there have been tons of scholarly papers written about NSL (Nicaraguan Sign Language) — a language which was born in the last 30-40 years.