Skip to main content

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 comparing to differences between Spanish and... Japanese, for example. If you want to translate a text, you'll need to use different vocabulary, different grammatical structures. And it's not the biggest problem.

Language is always immersed in a certain context. And this is the most tricky area: translator needs to know to what extent he or she can infuence the text so that it stayed clear to the lecturer but also was the closest to the original. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction

W hen you read the title of my blog, you conclude that language does influence the way we think. But it was not (and is still not) obvious for everyone. Some people believe that language is a reaction to the world around us; that our sourroundings shape the way we express. There is this well-know example of Eskimos who have invented different words to describe different types of snow. Why have they done it? Because they needed. Because, for somebody who lives in an igloo, it is crucial to make this disctincion. Does it mean that the topic of my blog doesn't make any sense? Not really. I would like to start with bringing you closer a very intereting linguistic hypothesis that encouraged me to start tinking about language as something more that an instrument of communication - sending our thoughts to others. According to Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , language influences the way we see the world far more than we think. There are two versions of this idea: The strong version ...
4 comments
Read more

Changes

In the last post, I told you that I'm sure that "The way that we use our language may help us to fight against discrimination and help to reach gender equality in the real world". I think that it will be interesting to develop a little bit this idea. If changes in the vocabulary of a language may be an element of the fight aginst negative phenomena, we can pose such a question: If we deleted all the words that express hate, would we get rid of it? Imagine that you open a dictionary and you can't see the following words: "hate", "to affront", "discrimination" and so on... if you can't find them, you can't use them, right? Sometimes we think about dictionary as a place where we can find all the words that exist in a language and that can be used be its spakers. But we need to remember that a dictionary is a result of linguits' work. They observe how speakers use the language and note it. So, if we "threw the bad words...
1 comment
Read more

Space perception

Imagine that you're spending a lovely afternoon with your friend in his home and you're starting to have a headache. You want to buy some drugs so you ask him where is the closest pharmacy. The friend tells you: "The pharmacy is north from you". Is it helpful? It is believed that human beings are not good in distinguishing the world directions without using some divices. Most of languages have an egocentric coordination system that refers to the human body (your "right side" might be someone else's "left side"; it depends on your positions). But there are some languages, for example Tseltal Mayan (spoken in one region of Mexico), where the world directions might be taken as reference. Across languages, there are also differences in describing relations between objects. It can be observed by comparing different preposition systems: English (as French and Polish) makes a distinction between the prepositions on and above . In the first case,...
Post a Comment
Read more