Schleiermacher and Deutscher

 It is difficult to decide between staying faithful to the original or localizing as best as possible and I found Schleiermacher’s advice regarding this helpful: “Whatever, therefore, strikes the judicious reader of the original in this respect as characteristic, as intentional, as having an influence on tone and feeling, as decisive for the mimetic or musical accompaniment of speech: all these things our translator must render.” Basically, translate whatever makes an impression and translate it in a way that gives readers the same effect as it did for readers of the original text. This is something we see across all the articles on translation, and I think it highlights the importance of the translator reading though the text beforehand first, as the translator is, first and foremost, a reader.

Schleiermacher mentioned how you can decide to be faithful to the rhythm and melody of the text or be faithful to dialectic and grammar, and how some sort of sacrifice will always have to be made. He talked about how what sacrifice is made depends on the translator and what aspect of the original they like  – and this is interesting because it is completely possible for different translators to have different impressions of a text or like different aspects of it and thus produce different translations, so how do we know if what we’re sacrificing or focusing on is the right one?

I have heard of the phenomenon of different languages influencing the way we think, and how people act differently and have different personalities/mindsets when speaking or thinking in a different language. It makes sense that it is because of the vocabulary used and the focus of the  language, and I also think it’s because of the culture the language is a part of that affects the way people think and act. There’s also the phenomenon of sounding different/speaking in a different tone or pitch in different languages.

Interestingly, despite not assigning gender to inanimate objects in English, it is common for English speakers to refer to their cars or boats as she, and home countries as motherland. It expresses emotional attachment and endearment but unlike other languages, the association isn’t made naturally in the language. I can see how this distances the relationship between English speakers and the objects around us. And while European languages and English’s she/he makes it very specific who the speaker is referring to, the minimal use of pronouns in Japanese and the pronunciation of pronouns in Chinese makes it hard to figure out who the speaker is talking about – the narrator, someone else, a boy, a girl, an item? I found that interesting because that allows for more chances at misunderstandings in Chinese and Japanese. 

Tiffany