4 ms·

"most difficult to translate" always rubs me the wrong way. It's as bad as "impossible to translate". It atrributes some mysticism, some alien property way of t

"most difficult to translate" always rubs me the wrong way. It's as bad as "impossible to translate". It atrributes some mysticism, some alien property way of thinking to people who speak another language. They are just like you and me in almost every imaginable way.

psychoslave 4y ago
There is no mysticism in translation loss. A sentence has a meaning in a given cultural frame, and any attempt to transpose it in an other frame will face hard or even unachievable constraints. Just like, if you don't have the background to understand an adhoc private joke, having later some full length explanation will not necessarily make you laugh as you might have if you had these information upstream. In case of translation, your lake of information might be the whole cultural frame that encompasses the language.
- fwlr 4y ago
  That’s like saying you can’t translate gohan/meshi as “rice” because of the deep cultural importance Japan places on rice. Sure, you can’t transmit to me the experience of growing up in a culture that has evolved for thousands of years with the ubiquitous presence of rice, you can’t download into my brain what it’s like to exist in a culture that is deeply and consciously reliant on rice, fine. But you absolutely can tell me the English word (or words) that points at the same thing they’re pointing at when they say their word (or words) for rice.
  - beowulfey 4y ago
    I think it’s more like trying to translate the word “petrichor” (that particular smell that occurs after a rain) into a language of a culture that has not experienced rain before. Without the context of rain, how can you translate the word for its smell? The translation is dependent on a something that is not present. This word is akin to that, maybe not entirely the same, but in that culture clearly there was a context that enabled a word to be created for it.
    - fwlr 4y ago
      Presumably they have some kind of experience with water and how it feels when things get wet. Tell them after it rains, the air smells wet.
      - beowulfey 4y ago
        That is a perfect example for why these sorts of translations are difficult!
defrost 4y ago
That's full blown anti Benjamin Lee Whorf stance .. semi justified in the sense that Whorf went well past the end of the wharf. There is a middle ground, people with other languages can and do think in other ways habitually. “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” ~ Roman Jakobson In the natural ebb and flow of day to day conversation gendered languages (French, German, etc) impel people to convey the gender of neighbours that they discuss, English doesn't. if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about. [1] The more extreme example is: a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.” In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.htm...
- libraryatnight 4y ago
  That was interesting, I read 'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes' a few years back and it left me thinking about all kinds of things, linguistic/cultural etc. Excerpt: https://www.npr.org/2009/12/23/121515579/excerpt-dont-sleep-there-are-snakes https://www.npr.org/2009/12/23/121515579/excerpt-dont-sleep-...
  - defrost 4y ago
    It's a good book and the questions that lie between Everett and Chomsky are deep and still contentious. I was born in the early 1960s and spent much of my childhood in areas around the Wallace Line in and out of Australia with a family running logistic support for Western scientists ( US, French, British, Dutch, et al ) all wanting a piece of the last remnants of the Noble Savage (heavy ironic quotes about an over abused notion of yore) .. I played a lot with kids my age that spoke what are now very nearly dead languages. People are people in some deep universal sense, at the same time people with very different cultures and languages can and do think and see the world in very different ways. The greatest difference that's perhaps most relevant today is that people who live directly from the land have a much better eye for the health and wellbeing of that land and a deeper sense of stewardship for the benefit of all and those to come.
yodon 4y ago
>people who speak another language. They are just like you and me in almost every imaginable way. And then the Orange fruit is introduced, and the language gains the word orange, and all those who speak that language begin to perceive color differently because now they have a word for a hue that they didn't previously have a word for, and that causes them to perceive that hue as a distinct color for the first time.
version_five 4y ago
Words that have some historical or cultural connotation can be difficult to translate because for people without the shared experience. I don't think that's mysticism, it's just the way shared understanding lets you pack more into a word. A word it never a self contained payload that conveys a whole concept, it's more like a dictionary key. And so to translate it for people that don't have the same underlying dictionary is way harder.

psychoslave 4y ago

There is no mysticism in translation loss. A sentence has a meaning in a given cultural frame, and any attempt to transpose it in an other frame will face hard or even unachievable constraints. Just like, if you don't have the background to understand an adhoc private joke, having later some full length explanation will not necessarily make you laugh as you might have if you had these information upstream. In case of translation, your lake of information might be the whole cultural frame that encompasses the language.

fwlr 4y ago
That’s like saying you can’t translate gohan/meshi as “rice” because of the deep cultural importance Japan places on rice. Sure, you can’t transmit to me the experience of growing up in a culture that has evolved for thousands of years with the ubiquitous presence of rice, you can’t download into my brain what it’s like to exist in a culture that is deeply and consciously reliant on rice, fine. But you absolutely can tell me the English word (or words) that points at the same thing they’re pointing at when they say their word (or words) for rice.
- beowulfey 4y ago
  I think it’s more like trying to translate the word “petrichor” (that particular smell that occurs after a rain) into a language of a culture that has not experienced rain before. Without the context of rain, how can you translate the word for its smell? The translation is dependent on a something that is not present. This word is akin to that, maybe not entirely the same, but in that culture clearly there was a context that enabled a word to be created for it.
  - fwlr 4y ago
    Presumably they have some kind of experience with water and how it feels when things get wet. Tell them after it rains, the air smells wet.
    - beowulfey 4y ago
      That is a perfect example for why these sorts of translations are difficult!

defrost 4y ago

That's full blown anti Benjamin Lee Whorf stance .. semi justified in the sense that Whorf went well past the end of the wharf. There is a middle ground, people with other languages can and do think in other ways habitually. “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” ~ Roman Jakobson In the natural ebb and flow of day to day conversation gendered languages (French, German, etc) impel people to convey the gender of neighbours that they discuss, English doesn't. if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about. [1] The more extreme example is: a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.” In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.htm...

libraryatnight 4y ago
That was interesting, I read 'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes' a few years back and it left me thinking about all kinds of things, linguistic/cultural etc. Excerpt: https://www.npr.org/2009/12/23/121515579/excerpt-dont-sleep-there-are-snakes https://www.npr.org/2009/12/23/121515579/excerpt-dont-sleep-...
- defrost 4y ago
  It's a good book and the questions that lie between Everett and Chomsky are deep and still contentious. I was born in the early 1960s and spent much of my childhood in areas around the Wallace Line in and out of Australia with a family running logistic support for Western scientists ( US, French, British, Dutch, et al ) all wanting a piece of the last remnants of the Noble Savage (heavy ironic quotes about an over abused notion of yore) .. I played a lot with kids my age that spoke what are now very nearly dead languages. People are people in some deep universal sense, at the same time people with very different cultures and languages can and do think and see the world in very different ways. The greatest difference that's perhaps most relevant today is that people who live directly from the land have a much better eye for the health and wellbeing of that land and a deeper sense of stewardship for the benefit of all and those to come.

yodon 4y ago

>people who speak another language. They are just like you and me in almost every imaginable way. And then the Orange fruit is introduced, and the language gains the word orange, and all those who speak that language begin to perceive color differently because now they have a word for a hue that they didn't previously have a word for, and that causes them to perceive that hue as a distinct color for the first time.

version_five 4y ago

Words that have some historical or cultural connotation can be difficult to translate because for people without the shared experience. I don't think that's mysticism, it's just the way shared understanding lets you pack more into a word. A word it never a self contained payload that conveys a whole concept, it's more like a dictionary key. And so to translate it for people that don't have the same underlying dictionary is way harder.