Lost and found in translation

[beccaelizabeth]

I just watched a couple of hours of BBC4 about Islam and the contribution of medieval Islamic civilisation to our culture and to science. It made me feel there's a really big gap in my picture of the world. Actually come to think it's mostly gap. Embarrassing. But I mean I hadn't realised how long or how much of the map they covered. I think it comes from having maps that make Britain look quite big and sort of in the middle. But these scholars were connecting up Greek, Indian and Chinese scholarship and translating it all into Arabic. And the bloke on the second program said that arabic hasn't changed, that it's still understandable even in lots of different places across lots of time. He mentioned English as being quite the contrary case, how Chaucer is almost unintelligible.
I was all *nods* and thinking on it then.
So the end of the science show was about the invention of algebra, and how it's different than earlier math. The earlier versions would take a whole series of specific examples and work them all out, like times tables. Algebra and algorithms figure out the pattern that specific numbers can plug into. You end up knowing that x=3 but you also know how to figure out x when it isn't 3.
And this lead me to a set of realisations about translation and why we spent all that time on it in class that are still making me feel very stupid, because it's really obvious now I've thought of it.

What I'd read an essay on about Greek and what I've observed with Chaucer English is that some words don't translate directly because they can mean things that are very far apart in modern English words, sometimes even opposites. Other words have ambiguities that are a bugger to preserve in translation. And yet others are precise in the original but you have to plump for ambiguous or partial words once they're translated.

Any specific translation says x=3.
Figuring out the framework, the rules and issues involved in translating, tells you how to figure out x in general.

That in itself is worth knowing. But the really *valuable* bit, the part that I can take into every other unit in my degree, is the increased awareness of the way words are and aren't equivalent, can and cannot be swapped for each other. It's a pig and a pain to preserve the denotative meanings, it's damn near impossible to preserve the connotations, and the more you poke different translations and read glossaries that tell you one simple word can be translated with a dozen others that none of them quite capture it, the more you poke around at the workings of language, the more you become aware of how it works in ordinary everyday modern English.

So, yeah, I can only understand what the story is about in Chaucer or Euripides once someone has done the work and it's all sitting there in modern English.

But understanding how *difficult* that work is, seeing how you have to pick and choose between translations, lose or gain puns or sexual connotations, connect or disconnect different parts of the text, even end up with words becoming gendered or neutral because the precise distinctions aren't available in modern English, that's incredibly valuable for seeing how words work every day.

It's all about the process of making meaning. And that's what we're studying, and planning to make careers on.

And now I feel incredibly stupid for getting in such a strop about it.

It would have been nice if the teacher had asked questions that highlighted this side of it, sometimes, rather than asking questions about the story or how women were treated or other macro stuff that made the micro word poking really sodding frustrating.

Comments

[msp-hacker.livejournal.com]

*makes agreeing sounds* Plus, Arabic is kinda awesome, and it's morphology is really elegant.

And the bloke on the second program said that arabic hasn't changed, that it's still understandable even in lots of different places across lots of time.

It sorta is? A certain form of Arabic has stayed exactly the same since it's conception - Classical Arabic - because it's a goal for Muslims to read the Qur'an exactly how Muhammad wrote in in the 8th century. But there's also colloquial Arabic, and while I'm not entirely sure how different colloquials compare to each other, Moroccan Arabic isn't going to be easily understood by a Saudi. When I was learning Arabic they shot for teaching a standard Arabic and he Egyptian dialect, because Egyptian media is popular in the Arabic speaking world.

arabic

[khanybaba.livejournal.com]

hello.
as a student of arabic i have learned the following.
classical arabic has in deed changed very little over the centuries. it is very much a living language. for example, newspapers and other formal communications across the arab world use classical arabic. however, when arabs speak to one another they speak their local dialect (moroccan, egyptian, saudi, syrian, etc.). my jordanian roommate could barely understand the egyptian dialect.

prophet muhammad (peace be upon him) actually lived at the beginning of the 7th century (570-632). he could neither read nor write. (in fact, the arab culture at that time was mostly an oral culture and very few individuals could read and write). muslims believe that muhammad is not the author of the qur'an. he would receive revelation from god and would later recite it to his companions who committed it to memory and others who acted as scribes.

peace =)

Re: arabic

[beccaelizabeth]

interesting :)

Re: arabic

[msp-hacker.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the exact mechanics of the classical/local distinctions. I was going from some things I learned in Arabic class and in a few linguistics courses, and I didn't mesh well as I though. *facepalm*

And I didn't know that Muhammad wasn't able to read/write. I thought he wrote his revelations in addition to reciting them to others.

[beccaelizabeth]

cool. that makes sense.