Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Against Translation

libertiesjournal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 55 posts

Re: Against Translation

#31

Post by noduerme »

porknubbins wrote: post #24

Having read Murakami first in English then in Japanese then years later again in Japanese after living in the culture each was a different but worthwhile experience. The last was in some ways least exciting because I realized that characters I had thought of as fascinatingly original or quirky just referred to tropes or stereotypes in the broader culture. I don’t think any literature really gives an accurate sense of…

Murakami's a really interesting one when it comes to translation. He wrote his first novel in English, despite not speaking English very well, and then translated it back to Japanese for publication.

I really enjoyed the linked essay, but I think the playfulness with which e.g. Murakami can pick up English as a brush in a toolbox raises a lot of interesting questions about whether translation guilt is warranted. Doesn't appropriation work both ways? Would a bakery attack make any sense in a Japanese culture without European bread? And speaking of the idea of denatured business English... so many of Murakami's images, sounds and references get their charge by playing with the mixing of western and Japanese culture, both the corporate and the artistic/literary/musical sides of each. I see it as similar to what French impressionism and cuisine did with their Japanese counterparts, an expansion and exchange of culture without one necessarily eroding the other.

Re: Against Translation

#32

Post by VeninVidiaVicii »

yosito wrote: post #7

I love reading books in their native language, especially when there is no translation available. It's like having a key to an exclusive world that others can't access. It is, however, quite a bit of work to learn a new language simply to be able to read works in that language and I'm not sure if it provides much value aside from a smug sense of being educated and multilingual.

Yes and if you like that, try listening to audiobooks in a different language. I’ve been struggling to learn Russian for a while now, and listening to Brothers Karamazov in the native language is fascinating in a way I can’t describe. I consistently feel like I’m being put under a spell.

Re: Against Translation

#33

Post by zozbot234 »

girzel wrote: post #26

It's odd that in the whole course of this very long article, Moser doesn't use the word "power" in describing the relationship of English and its literature to the rest of the world, or the relationship of the language and literature to its own speakers. Most of his laments and descriptions of decline, the fraught and tricky questions of bringing books and authors into English, boil down to a question of power -- eco…

> Most of his laments and descriptions of decline, the fraught and tricky questions of bringing books and authors into English, boil down to a question of power

In my view, "power" is simply not the kind of stuff that these complex and nuanced concerns could possibly "boil down to", even in principle. It's a rather ambiguous word that could easily point to a wide, even unlimited variety of social dynamics, featuring very different sorts of affordance (in the sense of "power to achieve X"), influence or perhaps the effect of physical, material constraints. These more detailed dynamics are what should be inquired upon and interrogated to try and figure out what, if anything, they're "boiling down" to. I suspect that this might boil down to a simple change in the material structure of society, like "communication used to be hard and this forced cultures apart from each other; the exact opposite is going on today, where people are actively seeking to disregard these former boundaries, even at some cost in cohesion and social/cultural development at the smaller scale."

People might argue either way whether or not the word "power" can usefully summarize these developments. Ultimately, it just seems to obscure more than it clarifies.

Re: Against Translation

#35

Post by rex_gallorum2 »

infruset wrote: post #28

I'm seeing many dismissive comments, and as this seems to be due to the length of the piece, I would warmly recommend anyone interested in languages, literature (and especially their cross-cultural implications) to set it aside to read when they have the time. It is a very beautiful article, whose form is inescapably related to its content. It voices an unease which I suspect will feel familiar to many international,…

Agree 100%. My own biography parallels that of the author, and his insights make perfect sense to me.

Re: Against Translation

#36

Post by mathgame »

As a native speaker of Russian, I often see lamentations from native Russian speakers how "real cool" phrases in print and movies when translated from Russian into English become ugly and simplistic as if rendered by a caveman.

That's because a lot of Russian speakers are under the impression English is just a linear calque of Russian with English vocabulary[0]. But natural languages are not isomorphic to each other. I was just watching Family Guy and remembered this scene where Peter responds "I know my way around a joke or two" to a question "who's the funniest dude in the house?" or something to that effect[1]. The phrase "to know one's way around something" doesn't exist in Russian in its literal form. Speaking of "ways", the phrase "I fought my way to the top" is another one that doesn't have a direct Russian counterpart. These phrases are the product of English speaking mind. Russian has its own unique phraseology that usually gets butchered when ported into English. The point is what one thinks sounds cool in one's native tongue doesn't have to sound just as cool in the target language as natural languages never sat down at a round table to agree to have 100% linear correspondence between each other. By the way, in one Russian translation of that Family Guy episode they make up their own (I should say funny) joke instead of translating "I know my way around a joke".

[0] Obviously, you can replace "Russian" with any other ethnicity/nationality and "English" with any other language.

[1] "To that effect" or "along those lines" are yet other English phrases that do not stand in one-to-one correspondence with any idioms in Russian.

Re: Against Translation

#37

Post by eyelidlessness »

jonas21 wrote: post #4

I don't generally have a problem with long-form, but if your article has a title that implies there's an argument in there, I feel like you owe it to the reader to at least give some idea of what that argument is within the first 5 paragraphs.

I mean, maybe I prepared myself because the title itself suggests a complexity, but I felt the length was both warranted and necessary to make its case.

Re: Against Translation

#38

Post by rex_gallorum2 »

Causality1 wrote: post #18
charcircuit wrote: post #3

This was too long for me to understand. The author should just get to the point they want to make.

The bigger issue is there's like five entirely separate theses that he kind of tries to ramble through in a single article that should've been split up. Some of his points are excellent but some of them are silly and childish, the products of someone who lives in academia and not the real world.

It's a narrative, not a technical manual. I found it beautifully written and filled with insight.

Re: Against Translation

#39

Post by bombcar »

mathgame wrote: post #36

As a native speaker of Russian, I often see lamentations from native Russian speakers how "real cool" phrases in print and movies when translated from Russian into English become ugly and simplistic as if rendered by a caveman. That's because a lot of Russian speakers are under the impression English is just a linear calque of Russian with English vocabulary[0]. But natural languages are not isomorphic to each other.…

A good example of this is the translations of Asterix and Obelix - so much of the humor is puns which don’t translate, so they have to rework the jokes to make new puns - and it works surprisingly well.

Re: Against Translation

#40

Post by jrexilius »

infruset wrote: post #28

I'm seeing many dismissive comments, and as this seems to be due to the length of the piece, I would warmly recommend anyone interested in languages, literature (and especially their cross-cultural implications) to set it aside to read when they have the time. It is a very beautiful article, whose form is inescapably related to its content. It voices an unease which I suspect will feel familiar to many international,…

The piece was beautiful, and very much worth the long read. I think if it had some kind of reading time estimate at the top of the article, the random-click-throughs may be less put off. I've been maning to do that for pieces I plan on writing. When picking up a book you can feel how long a read it is, flipping through a magazine you can see how many pages an article is. A single scrolling web page that you click to, blindly, can ambush you from a time cost..
Post reply on HN