Translation & validation
HES Lingua
Bringing the Human Elements System into the world's languages — and testing that it holds there.
01 — What is HES Lingua
What is HES Lingua
╱╱ The translation programme
HES aims to work in every language. A framework that captures one culture's carving of human qualities and ignores the others has already failed. The HES Lingua initiative invites contributors — bilingual speakers, translators, and scholars of any language — to help render the 343 elements in ways that preserve meaning across languages rather than force one culture's categories on another. Where an element does not translate cleanly, the mismatch itself is useful data: it may reveal a genuine cultural divergence in how human qualities are carved.
02 — Beyond localization
Not a simple localization effort
Translating HES is not a matter of swapping words. Many elements sit differently inside different languages — carried by idioms with no direct equivalent, by semantic fields that divide experience along other lines, and by morphology that encodes distinctions English leaves implicit. HES Lingua adapts each element to those structures rather than forcing the English construct onto them — and validation studies in each language test whether the element still holds. The evidence is what shows HES describes something real beyond the English-speaking mind-space.
See the validation studies →- Idiomatic
- Expressions and connotations that carry an element in one language and vanish in a literal translation.
- Semantic
- How a language carves up experience — where its concepts overlap with, or diverge from, the HES definition.
- Morphologic
- Distinctions a language encodes in word-structure that English marks differently, or not at all.
03 — Founding contributors
We are looking for founding contributors for every language.
Every language · contributors welcome
HES Lingua has not started yet — deliberately. A translation programme for a framework of 343 precisely defined elements cannot begin with enthusiasm alone; it begins with the right people. We are looking for founding contributors for every language:
As the book puts it: seven thousand languages are not seven thousand ways of saying the same thing — they are seven thousand ways of seeing. Where an element does not translate cleanly, the mismatch itself is data. If you want your language to be one of the first, write to us.
- Translators
- with native or near-native command of the target language and excellent English — because every element definition must survive the crossing without losing the precision that justifies it.
- Psychologists and psycholinguists
- who work in the target language — because deciding whether an element still holds in a language is a research judgement, not a vocabulary exercise.
04 — Get involved
Two ways to help — and they are different roles.
╱╱ Localization
Volunteer as Translator
Render the 343 element names, definitions, and pole descriptions into your language. This is localization work: fluency and care with terminology matter more than research training.
Volunteer as translator →╱╱ Research
Volunteer as Linguist
Help adapt each element to the idiomatic, semantic, and morphologic structure of a language, and support its cross-cultural validation. This is research-oriented work for linguists and psycholinguists.
Volunteer as linguist →