![]() ![]() His favorite analogy seems to be a musical one, wherein he recounts how one piece of music which is performed in many different ways by different artists. ![]() In his translation of Francoise Sagan’s La Chamade, Douglas Hofstadter states the case for a certain leeway in the transmission of a novel in French to one in English, at least for HIS translation style. You have a clunky, misshapen, machine translation-like rendition of something – God knows what. And when you are finished, what do you have? A polished, faithful transmission of the thought, the ambience, the idea of the original? No. Almost anyone with a 20-pound dictionary and lots of patience can do it – you take a word or two in, say, Russian, then look them up, hope you don’t have to spend the weekend digging through verb conjugations, then put those down in, say, English. ![]() ![]() Translating is not transliteration, which is simple, if awkward – even ugly – word-for-word replacement. Translating a written work from one language to another is a tricky business or a tricky art or a Sisyphean task with a boulder weighing more than the universe. ![]()
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