3 ms·
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
by 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 agoThat’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 agoI 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.