3 ms·

I'm not even sure what this means for a language to punch through in a way the author or reader might find desirable. Do you have an example?

giraffe_lady 1y ago
I'm not the original commenter but I think some of the personal epithets in homer just smack you with your distance from the original. "White armed andromache," "mouse god apollo", "ox-eyed hera" and of course the famous polytropos odysseus etc. These have as much to do with ancient greek culture and maybe mindset as language per se. But even still, the choice is to elide them or let them be strange. There's no real way to carry the meaning through to english without it being striking, calling attention to the original.
- NoTeslaThrow 1y ago
  I'm as big fan of "rose-fingered dawn" (forgive my lack of imagination) as the next nerd, but that always struck me as less about greek itself and more about the evolution of western language before the widespread use of writing. Little of the rhythm and rhyme can translate directly; it's more of a conceptual translation, which could just as easily be done with Mandarin or Yoruba, if one gave them a greatly reduced diction compared to contemporary speakers. English is simply poorly suited to convey how nice these epithets roll off the tongue and why they're leaned into so heavily. Granted, the languages I speak have so little overlap in text it's actually quite difficult to imagine translating between them without a great loss of meaning and tone. And if you look at something like Tang chinese poetry (let alone something truly ancient) translation becomes a game of "which aspect of the linguistic dynamics here are worth communicating to english speakers?" So, I'm not sure the "language" punches through so much as you see innovation in the use of english to convey virtually-impossible-to-translate tone and rhythm and wordplay—but it's still relatively contemporary and idiomatic english, or it would simply not reach most readers. Though somehow superlative translators manage more than I thought was possible.... sometimes it feels like reading shakespeare at great effort and difficulty is the closest english-only-speakers will come to understanding how constraining a language modern english is for formal poetry. Prose is much easier.
  - jbjbjbjb 1y ago
    It is down to the judgement of the translator to choose what to preserve, I'm not suggesting they should carry everything over. Some things will be too difficult for the reader and not worth the effort. However, there will be cases where the original text will have lines that shaped the language and literature it came from and it would be remiss not to let the reader feel that texture, even if it is a challenge to read. It's difficult to pick examples but an influential line like 'all that glisters is not gold' could be translated to the equivalent of 'don't be fooled by appearances' but that would just kill the imagery and poetic quality. I would want the equivalent of 'glister', I'd want it to express the shine and glow, I'd want the word to be archaic and I'd want the rhythm of the line to be there.
makeitdouble 1y ago
We see this a lot in the manga/anime communities. Readers usually get used to the Japanese honorifics, name suffixes etc. and have a pretty good understanding of them. An adaptator getting rid of them to have more natural English will come up with way worse phrasing, while losing a lot of the nuance and meaning of the original text. In a way, the reader undertands that it all happens in a non-English country, so getting unnatural English phrasing isn't much of an issue.

giraffe_lady 1y ago

I'm not the original commenter but I think some of the personal epithets in homer just smack you with your distance from the original. "White armed andromache," "mouse god apollo", "ox-eyed hera" and of course the famous polytropos odysseus etc. These have as much to do with ancient greek culture and maybe mindset as language per se. But even still, the choice is to elide them or let them be strange. There's no real way to carry the meaning through to english without it being striking, calling attention to the original.

NoTeslaThrow 1y ago
I'm as big fan of "rose-fingered dawn" (forgive my lack of imagination) as the next nerd, but that always struck me as less about greek itself and more about the evolution of western language before the widespread use of writing. Little of the rhythm and rhyme can translate directly; it's more of a conceptual translation, which could just as easily be done with Mandarin or Yoruba, if one gave them a greatly reduced diction compared to contemporary speakers. English is simply poorly suited to convey how nice these epithets roll off the tongue and why they're leaned into so heavily. Granted, the languages I speak have so little overlap in text it's actually quite difficult to imagine translating between them without a great loss of meaning and tone. And if you look at something like Tang chinese poetry (let alone something truly ancient) translation becomes a game of "which aspect of the linguistic dynamics here are worth communicating to english speakers?" So, I'm not sure the "language" punches through so much as you see innovation in the use of english to convey virtually-impossible-to-translate tone and rhythm and wordplay—but it's still relatively contemporary and idiomatic english, or it would simply not reach most readers. Though somehow superlative translators manage more than I thought was possible.... sometimes it feels like reading shakespeare at great effort and difficulty is the closest english-only-speakers will come to understanding how constraining a language modern english is for formal poetry. Prose is much easier.
- jbjbjbjb 1y ago
  It is down to the judgement of the translator to choose what to preserve, I'm not suggesting they should carry everything over. Some things will be too difficult for the reader and not worth the effort. However, there will be cases where the original text will have lines that shaped the language and literature it came from and it would be remiss not to let the reader feel that texture, even if it is a challenge to read. It's difficult to pick examples but an influential line like 'all that glisters is not gold' could be translated to the equivalent of 'don't be fooled by appearances' but that would just kill the imagery and poetic quality. I would want the equivalent of 'glister', I'd want it to express the shine and glow, I'd want the word to be archaic and I'd want the rhythm of the line to be there.

makeitdouble 1y ago

We see this a lot in the manga/anime communities. Readers usually get used to the Japanese honorifics, name suffixes etc. and have a pretty good understanding of them. An adaptator getting rid of them to have more natural English will come up with way worse phrasing, while losing a lot of the nuance and meaning of the original text. In a way, the reader undertands that it all happens in a non-English country, so getting unnatural English phrasing isn't much of an issue.