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Showing posts from April, 2019

Colours perception

In the post about "double universe" of bilingual speakers, I mentioned that the differences in naming colours have consequences in the way that they're perceived. Today, I would like to develop this issue. Maybe you've already heared about some cultures that don't make distinction between blue and green. There was an experiment holded in Namibi where speakers of Himba language don't differenciate this two colours. They have been showed some green squares and one blue square. They didn't see the difference. Hard to believe? Source: in the link below What do you see above? 12 green squares, am I right? According to Himba speakers, there is one in different colour. Which one? Source: in the link below And now, can you see the difference? Neither do I. Although Himba speakers don't make distinction between "our" green and blue, they are far more sensitive when talking about various shades od green ( link ). But let's ta

Translation: possible or impossible?

I would like to start with a question: When did people start to translate? We know that the first form of language was the spoken form, so maybe it's better to ask: When did people start to interpret? The answer is simple: they started doing it when two societies that were using different languages met for the first time. A long time ago. Even though people have been interpreting for thousands of years, linguists ask all the time what translation actually is. So many questions without simple answers: Is the translated text all the time the same text as before translation? What is the position of translator? How much can translator change in a text? And many others. One of  the problems here is that tranforming text into another language is extremely difficult because of the differences between languages. Differences between languages might be less or more visible. When you compare Italian to Spanish, you may notice different pronounciation or idioms but it is nothing when