Dear All,
The conversation on translation has interesting points. I’ll add a few comments on translation in general, as contrasted with the attempt to translate one specific word.
Lubomir Popov quoted a famous Italian proverb, “traduttori traditori.” This proverb literally means “translators traitors.” The effort to bring a word from one language to another carries many challenges. One set of meanings often contradicts another, and using one set of meanings may betray the other set of meanings even though both sets of meanings may touch on one another in the original language and culture. A word may convey rich cultural freight in its original language to those who understand that language in its original context. Taken out of cultural context through translation, it leaves much of the original freight behind.
When translators attempt to bring a classic text from an ancient language and culture into the modern world, these challenges become paramount. There are many translations of the Theban trilogy of Sophocles — Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. To understand these plays as they once were requires learning about the worlds in which they were rooted and born. To understand what these plays meant at different times in history is something yet again — translators even convey the title of the first play in different terms: Oedipus, Oedipus the King, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus Tyrannus. As scholarship reveals more about the world of a play, we revise what we understood and we review what we thought and even how we heard the play. Sarah Nooter’s brilliant 2012 book When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy sheds light on plays that gain new depth after we read Nooter.
Many classics give rise to competing and often complementary translations. Chinese classics by Sun Tzu and Han Shan or Japanese classics by Musashi Miyamoto or Dogen exist for English speakers in multiple versions.
Some translations reshape the language and even the cultures into which they arrive. The Tyndale Bible changed the way that the English read the Bible even though William Tyndale was executed for what was then the heresy of translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into English. Tyndale’s heretical translation became the core of the Great Bible, and then the King James Bible. These helped to reshape the English language. Adam Nicolson’s 2005 book God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible and Melvyn Bragg’s 2011 book The Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible 1611-2011 give nice accounts.
Another case in point is William Shakespeare. Shakespeare drew extensively on history, the classics, and the Bible to shape a body of work that changed the English language. He raided the past, translating ideas and texts, shaping language, transforming words and even the way that words took meaning and gave meaning. The English language today probably owes more to Shakespeare than to any other single person.
Language and translation are always unstable, yet they endure as a living archeology of embedded ideas and forms. The closing words of Anonymous, the imaginative Shakespeare film, say it well. The 2011 film was an invention, but the words are as real as can be:
“Though our story is at an end, our poet's is not:
for his monument is ever living ...
not of stone but of verse.
And it shall be remembered,
as long as words are made of breath
and breath ... of life.”
Dick Higgins — the Fluxus artist — once decided to learn Swedish. He acquired a Swedish textbook and learned to speak the language quite well. It seems that the textbook was several decades old. At a time when major changes were under way in Swedish culture, these changes were reflected in new approaches to a spoken language that had changed significantly since the time when Dick’s textbook had been written. Bengt af Klintberg, another friend and Fluxus artist, told me that Dick’s travels in Sweden were followed by a trail of astonished and amused comments. Higgins, a major figure in the 20th century avant-garde, startled people with his rather stiff and formal way of speaking Swedish: “He speaks very well,” they’d say, “but he’s a little old fashioned.”
That is why Don Norman and his colleagues used translators living in the nations that speak current versions of the target language.
Up to a few decades ago, it was possible to live one’s daily life speaking immigrant languages in some American small towns and urban districts with heavy immigrant populations. Some of these communities had newspapers in languages such as Norwegian, Yiddish, Danish, or Italian. The American midwest even had colleges where one could study entirely in Swedish or Norwegian. But the languages they spoke and wrote were time capsules of languages no longer spoken in the “old country.” The original languages had been fossilised, something like bugs trapped in amber, reflecting a time that the old folks — or their immigrant parents — had lived as children.
To hope for perfect translation is never possible. Whatever one captures in a translation that is true to a culture and its meanings — its “affordances” ? — that translation inevitably fails to capture something else.
“… as long as words are made of breath
and breath ... of life.”
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Visiting Professor | Faculty of Engineering | Lund University ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia https://tongji.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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