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What makes a translation great?

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Re: What makes a translation great?

#71

Post by troad »

Detrytus wrote: post #63
cafard wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who translated the Iliad and Odyssey into (English) hexameters?

Is there even such a thing as "English hexameters"? From what I remember from high school hexameter is based on the feature of the Greek language having both "short" and "long" vowels, which is then used to create a particular rhythm. My mother's tongue does not have such feature which makes it impossible to make real hexameters in it. Translations do not even try to imitate it.

Hexameter just means that the lines have six feet. What counts as a foot in a language will differ, e.g. English feet are based on stress, whereas Ancient Greek feet are based on length. For example, in Ancient Greek, an iamb would be a short syllable followed by a long one (e.g. 'Δάφνη' - Daphne, which in A.G. was pronounced something like 'daph-neh', with the 'neh' held long), whereas in English it's an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (e.g. 'become').

Re: What makes a translation great?

#72

Post by dri_ft »

soundnote wrote: post #68
082349872349872 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I put my comment poorly because what I wrote 4 years ago is still in my head. I had had a working hypothesis that xenophilia is antifascistic. (how about comedy? Fascism produced "Lili Marleen", but did it produce any comedians?) My big Q was: if Pound was such a xenophile (as I had thought) when young, why did he turn to Fascism when older? TIL that he wasn't ever xenophilic; he only dealt with the other once…

I don't know if that works out: A lot of people on the right I know are quite xenophilic in the sense of having a deep interest in other cultures etc, though not indiscriminately so. The difference between them and much of the left is that they've come to reject oikophobia as wrong and are consciously oikophilic when it comes to their own culture and ethnicity, while the leftist configuration is oikophobic/xenophilic…

I was just working on a comment featuring the word oikophilic when I had to go to bed, so it's nice to see that one managed to get written anyway.

Re: What makes a translation great?

#73

Post by aebtebeten »

dri_ft wrote: post #72
soundnote wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if that works out: A lot of people on the right I know are quite xenophilic in the sense of having a deep interest in other cultures etc, though not indiscriminately so. The difference between them and much of the left is that they've come to reject oikophobia as wrong and are consciously oikophilic when it comes to their own culture and ethnicity, while the leftist configuration is oikophobic/xenophilic…

I was just working on a comment featuring the word oikophilic when I had to go to bed, so it's nice to see that one managed to get written anyway.

Sleep well; happy to hear from you tomorrow!

(note that it's not always easy being parochially oikophilic if your sympatriots[0] sometimes say things like "no, where are you really from?". Oἶκος strictly speaking referred to the family[1]; some people consider their οἶκος[2] to be less, others, more, inclusive)

[0] did latin pick up patria from greek or are they cognate?

[1] so pedantically "home ec" should be unmarked and "national economy" the marked term.

[2] presumably "kith and kin" is not redundant; which class is larger?

> Men are cruel, but man is kind —RT

Lagniappe: https://xkcd.com/2608/

Re: What makes a translation great?

#74

Post by nataliste »

wolverine876 wrote: post #42
nataliste wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stumbled upon War Music after discarding (almost) every other translation of the Iliad because the translators cleary didn't get it. Sure, they could talk about Homeric epithets for days and knowingly reference the "wine dark sea," but the actual ethic and humanity of the Iliad eluded them. And when you do get those aspects (as Logue did), the actual choice of idiom by the translator becomes irrelevant, whereas if…

> I stumbled upon War Music after discarding (almost) every other translation of the Iliad because the translators cleary didn't get it Homer's world is very alien to ours. I realized at one point, reading the Odyssey, that it is myself who didn't get it . There was a chasm between me and Homer, and if I wanted read and understand Homer in a meaningful way, I was going to have to cross it. Unless I have personal expe…

>ours

Re: What makes a translation great?

#75

Post by djeastm »

soundnote wrote: post #68
082349872349872 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I put my comment poorly because what I wrote 4 years ago is still in my head. I had had a working hypothesis that xenophilia is antifascistic. (how about comedy? Fascism produced "Lili Marleen", but did it produce any comedians?) My big Q was: if Pound was such a xenophile (as I had thought) when young, why did he turn to Fascism when older? TIL that he wasn't ever xenophilic; he only dealt with the other once…

I don't know if that works out: A lot of people on the right I know are quite xenophilic in the sense of having a deep interest in other cultures etc, though not indiscriminately so. The difference between them and much of the left is that they've come to reject oikophobia as wrong and are consciously oikophilic when it comes to their own culture and ethnicity, while the leftist configuration is oikophobic/xenophilic…

I think there's a distinction to be made between having an interest in other cultures and being accepting of other cultures. Not sure if oikophilia is defined that precisely or not.

Seeing other cultures as something to be studied or understood is something even the xenophobic can be drawn to, if nothing else to size up the enemy (see all of the "studies" done by the Nazis on the "untermenschen")

Re: What makes a translation great?

#76

Post by 082349872349872 »

djeastm wrote: post #75
soundnote wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if that works out: A lot of people on the right I know are quite xenophilic in the sense of having a deep interest in other cultures etc, though not indiscriminately so. The difference between them and much of the left is that they've come to reject oikophobia as wrong and are consciously oikophilic when it comes to their own culture and ethnicity, while the leftist configuration is oikophobic/xenophilic…

I think there's a distinction to be made between having an interest in other cultures and being accepting of other cultures. Not sure if oikophilia is defined that precisely or not. Seeing other cultures as something to be studied or understood is something even the xenophobic can be drawn to, if nothing else to size up the enemy (see all of the "studies" done by the Nazis on the "untermenschen")

At least JBS Haldane, and his less famous colleagues, did their physiologic limit experimenting on themselves.

Re: What makes a translation great?

#77

Post by lucb1e »

lampiaio wrote: post #64
adelie wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'translationese' is a pretty common term for it. when you translate, it's really easy to mirror the source structure/syntax even when there's more idiomatic ways to say it in the target language.

Exactly. One simple example that I see all the time comes to mind: In English, "dozens of ____s" is a very common expression, particularly in news articles. In my local language, even though we do have a word for "dozen", it's much more common to say that in the form of "tens of ____s". Most of the "dozens of ____s" I see written in my language are from news articles that were (badly) translated from English.

English uses "dozens" in more situations than Dutch uses "tens", also because "tens" in Dutch is a three-syllable word. It's often just not idiomatic

I often find myself having started a sentence in Dutch that I can't finish without borrowing something from English, and I remember a recent example actually involved the word "dozens" (although I forgot what the sentence was about so I can't reproduce it here). That sentence should have been constructed entirely differently, but I now use English in my day-to-day communications at work, at home, and also most online ones so some stuff slips through.

It blew my mind some months ago when I used an English saying, perfectly translated (no loan words, good sentence structure), but entirely nonexistent in Dutch. I can't ever have heard anyone said it but it came out without any thought. The person I was talking to is also proficient in English and understood what I meant, but whether or not their face gave something away, it took me five seconds to realize what I had said. I guess the brain stores words in a form of meaning that transcends language, and just calls upon the language neural net to convert that into muscle movements for speech? Actually, no, then you'd have gotten the word-for-word translation; it must be storing more than single words in some sort of language lookup center, or maybe something that converts between the two structures if you do enough translating between a given language pair? Either way, mind-boggling stuff

Re: What makes a translation great?

#78

Post by soundnote »

082349872349872 wrote: post #69
soundnote wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if that works out: A lot of people on the right I know are quite xenophilic in the sense of having a deep interest in other cultures etc, though not indiscriminately so. The difference between them and much of the left is that they've come to reject oikophobia as wrong and are consciously oikophilic when it comes to their own culture and ethnicity, while the leftist configuration is oikophobic/xenophilic…

That's an interesting hypothesis; what would be some examples of oikophobia?

Sorry to have taken so long:

There's a lot - all the "Death to America" rhetoric, white liberals being okay with other ethnicities openly advocating for their interests but whites doing so being gigabad. Generally refusing to act in the best interests of existing citizens vs. even illegal immigrants, or refusing to uphold laws out of care for the supposedly downtrodden with the result that cities turn into shitholes. celebrating old achievements of their own civilization being cringe, while celebrating those of other cultures' being lauded.

This does not mean the white liberals don't act in their own interest - their policies wrt eg. black schooling are some of the most heinous works of sabotage you could imagine, but the cloak it as compassion. More graduations and admissions, but less people able to actually read or do math.

Re: What makes a translation great?

#79

Post by soundnote »

djeastm wrote: post #75
soundnote wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if that works out: A lot of people on the right I know are quite xenophilic in the sense of having a deep interest in other cultures etc, though not indiscriminately so. The difference between them and much of the left is that they've come to reject oikophobia as wrong and are consciously oikophilic when it comes to their own culture and ethnicity, while the leftist configuration is oikophobic/xenophilic…

I think there's a distinction to be made between having an interest in other cultures and being accepting of other cultures. Not sure if oikophilia is defined that precisely or not. Seeing other cultures as something to be studied or understood is something even the xenophobic can be drawn to, if nothing else to size up the enemy (see all of the "studies" done by the Nazis on the "untermenschen")

That is sort of what I mean: They care first and foremost for their own, but do not really hate different people: They just want their own place, for themselves, and used to have that but mass immigration policies in effect destroy that, and the rhetoric to justify them in effect say they don't have a right to their own place.

So they are self-first, but interested in and appreciative of those who are different. They just wish to stay themselves, as well. You can see it in eg. the architecture accounts on Twitter: They'll readily post Islamic architecture, Asian architecture and those people's local solutions to their environmental issues, but they also insist European solutions and culture be accorded at least equal value. And a lot of the people running them certainly don't want millions of Islamists on their shores, their appreciation is less for modern Islam and more for the old golden ages when they were a center of high civilization.

The left doesn't think the first desire of their own place as it used to be is valid, of caring for themselves first is valid, but they do like other cultures (or at least the injection of foreign influences into their own, which they have a dim view of). The left, while it accords primacy to the other over what's traditionally their people's, don't really look up to foreign cultures in some ways - they do try to change them to be western woke leftist in character in their interactions, even if they hold them in higher regard than the culture of the leftists' native countries.

Re: What makes a translation great?

#80

Post by 082349872349872 »

soundnote wrote: post #78
082349872349872 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting hypothesis; what would be some examples of oikophobia?

Sorry to have taken so long: There's a lot - all the "Death to America" rhetoric, white liberals being okay with other ethnicities openly advocating for their interests but whites doing so being gigabad. Generally refusing to act in the best interests of existing citizens vs. even illegal immigrants, or refusing to uphold laws out of care for the supposedly downtrodden with the result that cities turn into shitholes.…

Do you have any examples that are not strawmen? (I mean, they may not be strawmen to you, but they're not at all credible to me; surely we can find something which we both agree is an actual thing?)
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