How does one say "enough already of this thread" in French, German,
Russian, Finnish and COBOL ?
Furthermore, I've never needed (nor wanted) to look up a UCB. Lucky, I
guess.
On 11/20/2012 10:36 AM, John Gilmore wrote:
One of the translators of Tolkien into Italian is an old friend, and I
have discussed with him some of the problems he encountered in doing
so. Between two Indo-European languages translation that conveys
substance is always possible, but words must often be replaced by
phrases, and this can be highly problematic.
Consider the character Strider. Italian has no equivalent of the verb
'to stride'. Fine, camminare a gran passi, walk in large steps,
conveys the sense accurately. Unfortunately, however, a character
named Camminatore-a-gran-passi has the same connotation for an Italian
as Walker-in-large-steps has for an American: It strongly suggests an
American-Indian character. (Italians know all about 'cowboys e
indiani'.) In the end 'Strider' was left untranslated in the Italian
text.
Similar problems abound in translations of Pushkin from Russian into
other European languages. Pushkin's texts are full of puns,
deliberately contrived ambiguities, connotation-laden names, and the
like too; and finding equivalents for them in another language is very
difficult. In the upshot, people who, since they cannot read Russian,
must depend upon inadequate translations, may wonder why Russians
regard Pushkin as the equal of Shakespeare and Dante.
Chomsky has maintained that there is little reason to suppose that
translation is possible in general, and this is not because he does
not know that it has been done brilliantly. (Unfortunately, the
canonical examples are Catullus's Latin translations of some short
Greek lyrics of Sappho, which somehow manage to be at once literal and
perfect. It would be agreeable if they were still accessible to
non-specialists, but they are not.)
Text translation and the translation of, say, FORTRAN into sequences
of machine instructions have some things in common, but they are also
very different. Semantic ambiguity has been largely banished from
procedural languages, and their translation is thus very much simpler
than the translation of, for example, arbitrary Russian text into
English.
John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
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