language & translations & fever

[emei]

I've all sorts of vague thoughts on the power of language and the dilemmas of translation floating around - how deeply language and culture are connected, and how translation is always essentially a re-creation more than a simple transmission of the original message.

Related to fandom, how if we connect to a source in one language it's sometimes

Comments

[quietliban]

I think I get it...I mean, whenever I attempt to read* anything in Italian or Spanish I go through this thing where I read it to myself in the language and then switch to English and then switch back (which basically highlights the fact that I only think in English) and in the end I'm left a little bit bereft, partly because my vocab in those languages is tiny when compared to my vocab in English and partly because I don't have a intrinsic meaning of those words in my head.

(A v. simple example that has baffled me most recently is that for me pane = bread whereas I've come across translations of pane = loaf which you know makes sense...if I think about it, because to me loaf in English does not automatically equal "loaf of bread" and when someone says loaf to me, I think of sweet-cakey things. And yes it does depend on context, and the cultural use of the words...basically, I agree with you. Perhaps learning another language is more equivalent to relearning the world...)

And even when writing in English (which is my mother tongue even if it doesn't sound like it when I speak it...) I even get a bit precious about it because I find that there are so many words that mean the same thing but are subtly different and if you use the wrong one (or over emphasise a particular meaning) the whole sentence shifts and you end up in a completely different place from where you started (or at least intended to start from) and that's just in supposedly straight forward scientific writing (bane of my existence at the moment).

*And by read, I mean read the equivalent of a school reader. Basically, despite five years of learning, I am nowhere near fluent in either language and attempts to write in them leave me frustrated because I *know* that they're choppy and disjointed and basically, broken.

And I've finished rambling now. Sorry.

[emei]

Perhaps learning another language is more equivalent to relearning the world...
Very much this! And it's funny that you use bread as an example because I read something about just that recently - the English bread doesn't equal French pain doesn't equal Swedish bröd, even though it's such an simple straight-forward word and there aren't other words that would be more equivalent. Their exact meaning are so tied to cultural context, so if you don't spend a paragrahp on describing exactly what kind of bread it is, readers will leave with different ideas.

And oh, reading in foreign languages - I think classroom language teaching will never teach us to do that naturally/without translating back and forth. Because to do that on needs to start thinking in the other language, and that's sort of like taking a big jump and accepting that everything is less precise and more unsure and jumbled that you're used to. Learning by immersion, sort of? IDK, that's just what I've been doing.