I enjoyed Deutscher's writing a lot. It was interesting to hear him talk about how language affects cognition, because I have studied that concept thoroughly in my classes as a psychology major. Specifically, perception psychology and cognitive psychology focus a lot on language and the mind. It's fascinating, because while our native language doesn't limit what abstract concepts we can comprehend, it does play a huge role in how we perceive the world. For instance, some languages have many more words for certain things than we do in English. In class once, we talked about how Russian has specific, separate words for different kinds of blue. In a study, English speakers failed to differentiate these shades as quickly as Russian speakers, likely because our brains are not wired to distinguish them as well as the Russian speakers. We can perceive them if we try, but it comes much less naturally to us.
Schleiermacher also captures a dilemma that I'm sure we're all very familiar with at this point—do we as translators prioritize faithfulness? Or how it sounds? When we focus on one, we risk losing the other. I think, as we progress through the semester and I reflect on it more, I realized that there probably isn't one solution. The best outcome is trying to balance both, and it greatly depends on the situation.
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