This apropos of arguing that English 'courage' isn't quite the same as Latin's fortis or virtus, or Greek's ἀνδρεία (or any other number of similarly translatable words), despite the fact that in a translation you will, of course, read 'courage' for those words. 2/8
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So you end up arguing in circles because the retort comes back, "but these are all forms of courage." But they're not! The Greeks didn't have modern English 'courage' in mind forming ἀνδρεία and senses of courage are non-overlapping. 3/8
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I give some concrete examples of this in last week's post, here: https://acoup.blog/2021/02/05/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iia-the-many-faces-of-battle/ … Noting how different forms of bravery/courage required literally opposite actions (and the emotional predicates to those actions). 4/8
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All of which is to say, in a way, the very act of translating a text can create a misleading impression of its universality - some of the cultural specificity is erased unless you remember that the translation isn't the text, but merely a flat representation of it. 5/8
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Just the very act of rendering a text into English makes it seem more Anglophone - more friendly to the broad complex of primarily English-speaking cultures - than it may actually be (and the same of course for any other language). 6/8
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Now retired, Richard Minear (whose classes I took at
@UMassHistory ) his phrase for this was 'translation is treason' and in a class setting he brought that home by exposing some of the compromises in the translation of a Japanese novel...that, as I recall, he translated. 7/8Näytä tämä ketju -
Glad that I had that lesson so early - beware of translations, especially of abstract concepts! Chances are there are a lot of shades of meaning (perhaps important ones) which won't quite match up! end/8
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See also American 'English', English 'English' and Scots. Similar, but in no way the same.
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Yes. A sentence as simple as "I drank cider and ate some chips while I watched football" means something quite different on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
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I feel this. I add a _lot_ of translation notes to my own texts for this very reason.
Kiitos. Käytämme tätä aikajanasi parantamiseen. KumoaKumoa
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