If you enjoy this stuff, I would highly recommend reading "Le Ton Beu De Marot" by Hofstadter (of Gödel, Escher, Bach fame). It is a really interesting look at

If you enjoy this stuff, I would highly recommend reading "Le Ton Beu De Marot" by Hofstadter (of Gödel, Escher, Bach fame). It is a really interesting look at the issues of translating between languages. A lot of it is looking at the difficulty of separating form and content (which is especially obvious in poetry). For example, if you were translating my paragraph up above, would you know that I wanted to write "If you are interested in this stuff", but I didn't because I used the word "interesting" in the next sentence? If you were translating into a language which had two words which roughly meant "interesting", then would it be more or less faithful to use those two words, rather than translating "enjoy"?