Studying studying studying...

[beboots]

My final exams: Introduction to Translation, Art History (1848-1914), and an American Women's History course.  A few thoughts I've had over the course of studying for them...

I learned a new word while studying for translation - "Aphorism", meaning "an original laconic phrase conveying some principle or concept of thought." Also, "laconic: "using as

Comments

[kuiskata]

At least you bothered to look up "aphorism." I let it go in one ear and out the other. (Let's hope History of Translation is more interesting?)

[beboots]

I only did because I was like "aphorism = translation is transmission?" That doesn't make any sense! And then I saw the "an" in front of "aphorism" and had to look it up. :P

Also: of COURSE history of translation will be more interesting! Less theory, more stories, I should hope. I wonder if we'll have to write a research paper... if so, I definitely want to write one on the Metis translators during the creation of the Numbered Treaties in Western Canada. Some were... better than others, to put it lightly, and mistranslations and cultural misunderstandings can cause a LOT of problems, over generations. D: That's what I'd do research on if this were an actual history course, but I'm not sure what will be different in the MLCS portion...

[kuiskata]

That sounds fascinating. (Actually, in my Linguistic Anthropology class last year, my prof was talking about some rather more recent court proceedings regarding various treaties, where it was crazy what they had to do with the language. They would have elders speaking in their language of choice (so you'd have to have multiple translators for various languages), which would be then interpreted in the courtroom, BUT that wasn't the version you took as fact. Oh no, at the end of the day, the transcripts would go to a roomful of translators who would then pour over them and carefully translate them - and these translations were what people had to use - not what the interpreters said. It all sounded very confusing. If any of that made sense...)

[beboots]

No, it totally makes sense! Because a translation done on the fly, sometimes even as the other person is speaking, won't have the exact nuances as something that's been thought over and such.

...I wanted to use the word "dictionary" as a verb just then - dictionaried over. ;)

But yeah, it does sound totally cool! I was thinking - now, what translators do I actually know about in history? I remember that apparently in the Russo-Japanese war around 1900 the peace treaty they made almost didn't come into effect because of a translation error... but the Metis are so cool I thought of them almost immediately. Have you heard of Michif, a patois language between French and Cree? It's intense. "Primarily it follows the grammatical rules of Cree (an Algonkian language), while adopting a large vocabulary of words from the French language."