Why are some fags entirely against translations? Is it pseudo intellectual faggotry? That's my intuition. I'd be more likely to take that opinion seriously if all of the people who espoused it weren't pompous fags.
>Is it pseudo intellectual faggotry Yes, and a very easy thing to say since of course if you can you should read it in the language it was written. That being said you're not going to learn every language of every great piece of literature so reading translations is the only option. No one who is serious will tell you to never read translations.
It's a ridiculous position that ignores that we all interpret everything diferently, even in our own language.Learning a language to read the equivalent sentence>A man raped his wifeMeans nothing if you're from a country that treats women like property, for example. You can read the words fluently but not interpret the intent.
>>24721112Yeah, I think about this a lot. Perception itself is inescapably individualistic, even when you are in a collectivist culture your perception is unique to your specific experiences and genetics. Are we actually communicating anything when we use language or art to express ourselves or are we deluding ourselves into thinking we're communicating something? Yeah, okay clearly there's some things we can communicate effectively, things that rely on logic, stuff like 2 + 2 but when an author describes the wind rustling through the leaves of a tree or the filthy streets of an urban center, how are we sure our perception of the text is identical to or similar to what the author perceives? Maybe we can assume for the sake of pragmatism that all humans have similar experiences of nature and of cities but when we start getting around to interactions between characters the diversity of possible interpretations of events are vast.
>>24721155That's why people generally dislike movie adaptations of books - it ruins the images the reader had in his head.
>>24721089Have you ever read a work in both original and translation, being fluent in both languages? What did you think? I feel like an absolute anti-translation stance is very sympathetic
for me it's listening to Mozart on a banjo
>>24721502what's the point of that? rednecks play violin, don't they
>>24721089I used to say the same, then I learned other languages and experiencing literature I loved in its original language blew my mind.
>>24721089The feel of an author‘s original words is irreplaceable; any serious reader should have at least one non-native language whose literary culture has become a point of immersion and influence for them. Having said which I‘ve backed off the absolutist stance and am now more inclined to think that the problem is our translations are not done by authors and poets in their own right who have a specific way of shaping the work to their own vision. Just a bunch of academic eggheads who see churning out deep cuts and re-revisions with increasingly sterile precision as a jobs program.
>>24721502Horrible equivalent. When you perform Mozart on a banjo, what are you left with? An excellent banjo performance.
>>24721089mostly pseuddery, yeah. They kinda-sorta have a point in that translation matters a fair deal (depending on the text) and a shit translation can lead to bad misreadings, but they're wrong in being against translation entirely. It's almost entirely English monolinguals who say this, and they say it because they feel intimidated by the vast scope of world literature and want some excuse to ignore as much as they can
>>24721754Nope, if the power of the work lies solely within specific word choice it's hollow.
>>24721089The bible is a great example of how the meaning of a book can be changed without really changing the words. All christians should be required to learn greek
>>24721736no, they only play fiddles
>>24721089It's an intense kind of reading autism, the idea that you have to perfectly understand every single word and sentence of a 300+ page novel. This is itself really stupid because the beauty of literature is generally from getting into someone else's head and experiencing a different experience, if you were totally in control and understanding of every single theme and little detail of a work it wouldn't be of any interest. Autists are literally incapable of this surrender of control.Translated works do this and further, because for starters you have an author who's grown up in a completely different culture and context to what you understand, then you're also forced to place your trust in a translator's abilities and understanding of a work.Translated fiction is actually one of my favourite genres for this reason, it's got so many cross-cultural and dynamic layers to it, you can go through an entire book and know that you didn't understand all of it, wonder over certain passages and their meaning, even question whether they were improperly translated. All of which, of course, scares the FUCK out of those autistically inclined.
>>24721089It's just an excuse not to read things. No one who says stuff like that is actually going to learn Latin so they can read the Aeneid or whatever. They just want to feel better about not reading stuff.
monolingual yet speaks it, thinks in it, and reads it at a retard level. grim af fr fr
>>24721089Only area where this counts is poetry. I’m suspicious of all translated poetry, especially when the translator tries to make it fit a rhyme scheme
>>24724171True, like 90% of poetry is about the flow and rhythm of the language it's spoken in
>>24724171So why does that apply for poetry when prose can be written and is written just as carefully and artfully?
>>24721089I don't know if I'd say I'm "against" them, I recognize that they're necessary because no one can learn every language, but I also recognize that a translation can never fully substitute for the original, that it's always one person's subjective interpretation and that even if it's by the natively-bilingual author it's still imperfect as a translation if not as an expression of their thoughts (relative to the original) because of the ways that languages differ.
>>24721112That's why linguistic understanding has to be paired with cultural knowledge. This applies even between different countries that speak the same language; there are aspects of some British works that an American may misunderstand the implications of because of different cultural assumptions and vice versa.
>>24721480I've read a few translations that gave very much the same feel, but even then the exact mental images they evoked were often different.
>>24724171Prose translations of poetry are to poetry as marmalade is to fresh oranges, to paraphrase one critic.
Agreed. I think one loses much more not reading a great work in translation than whatever is lost in such translation.
