Subject: Re: waddayamean
AntiUtopia@aol.com
Date: Mon Mar 06 2000 - 21:26:01 EST
In a message dated 3/6/00 9:03:12 PM Eastern Standard Time,
invertedforest@angelfire.com writes:
<< I was once fortunate enough to attend a festival of writers from all over
the world whose works were translated into English for them, with varying
levels of success. There was a lot of difference between a scholarly and an
artistic translation, and several examplesof those words whose selection
irrevocably changed some aspect of the story or simply had no English
equivalents.
---
Louise Z. Brooks >>
Course not :) But it depends on what you want to communicate. There's
probably no precise equivalent to "buddy" in, say, Urdu or Bangla. But there
probably are soem names that may communicate familiarity with scorn. They
may do so with varying degrees of success, and they will do so in a way
completely alien to our culture, but they still communicate what is
essentially the same feeling.
I think it's as much of a mistake to exaggerate the impossibility of
translation as it is to have too much faith in language.
When we argue too much for the impossibility of translation, we need to
remember, say, things like Jungian archetypes, which are found in all
cultures (or most) even though these cultures speak different languages. We
can also keep in mind that the same basic types of stories are told across
the face of the earth and have been throughout all human history.
And it wouldn't kill us to remember the origins of our language. I'm not
talking origins in terms of Genesis, but origins in terms of Saussere and
other linguists. They still hold to a model that suggests all present
languages are descendents of the same one -- Proto Indo/European -- and
convincingly cite similarities between languages as divergent as Sanskrit,
Greek, and English. So we're not so much speaking different languages, but
different versions of the same language :)
If there's any one thing that's common to all humanity, that one thing is
language, and is communicate through all language. I'd like to think we're
more than just different species of dogs and wolves, more closely related
than that.
Jim
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