Sunday, November 13, 2022

Deutscher and Schleiermacher Comments - Kadin

Schleiermacher suggests that a translated piece of work should produce a result that should either please the author or the reader, and not to mix the two perspectives. I am not quite sure what to think about this statement. When I thought about it some more, this just seems like another way to phrase whether you value faithfulness more or clarity more. As I had mentioned before, I think that invoking emotions towards readers take precedence over the original author. After how the last two readings talked about the financial importance of selling books. I think that a book that has an intended audience is more likely to succeed in the market than one that is truly faithful to the original.

In Deutscher's article, I've found something he said in the beginning particularly intriguing. "The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time." There have been an uncountable number of times where I try to find a word without a linguistical equivalent in another language. Of the languages I know, from English to Japanese to Mandarin to Cantonese. There are slangs, words and phrases where I know the sentiment can never be fully understood by someone who doesn't speak the language often, and hence a part of the meaning will always get lost when you attempt to translate it literally. I think that the only way for a reader to grasp the meaning fully is by exposure to the culture of the language itself. I also wonder whether foreigners learning a language perceive the same meaning behind certain words like a native speaker would.

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