|
|
Ruud Harmsen wrote:
> 30 Aug 2006 15:48:01 -0700: "Peter T. Daniels"
> <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:
>
> >The evidence that a text has been translated is the translation.
>
> So if a word or expression happens to be exactly the same in source
> and target language, you use something else anyway, just to show you
> did translate it?
I have found over the years that an "exactly the same" word in the two
languages is almost always not the best word to use in a translation.
For instance, in this piece I'm doing now, (syntactic) "Relation"
occurs frequently in the German, but the appropriate English is not
"relation," but "relationship." This holds for both German and French.
However, a translation that's as much as a paragraph long will not look
exactly the same in the two languages. Mario Pei published a _tour de
force_ poem that could be read in either Latin or Italian, precisely
because it's a _tour de force_; and my late teacher Erica Reiner and
her late schoolmate Paul Garelli (they died six months apart,
tremendous losses to the world of Assyriology), when at university in
Paris, composed a poem that could be read in either Akkadian or Elamite
-- and translated it into perfect alexandrines. (She would never show
it to anybody, though.) Of course that was cheating, since it was
written mostly with logograms ...
|
|