Blog 4
- After reading Illiana’s Reaction paper to Translation as a Practice Appearance, I agreed with her thoughts. At first she mentioned how it was important for the translator to fully understand the text before translating i. I agree that this is an essential part to translation because if something has been misinterpreted, then the translation will be entirely wrong. I found the portion of her reaction interesting where she talks about how although anything can be translated, it can be difficult to keep the context of the text sometimes. I agree with what Iliana is saying here because dialect easily gets lost in translation, especially in English because our language does not hold the same amount of dialects. I found the last part of her reaction paper to be the most interesting because she left us with a takeaway. Iliana mentioned that she believes that the beauty of translation is that it is not perfect. I agree with that statement because since translations are not perfect, it allows everyone to come up with their own which also means that no one can be wrong in translation. There can be some that are better than others, but since each translator has their own interpretation of the text, the translations will always be different.
- Liliana’s post about a Translation in Spirit talks about a text losing its faithfulness. I agree to some extent. I think sometimes it is better for a text to stick closely to the original, but I also think that there should also be some communicative translations in there, so that way the reader can interpret things however they would like as well. I understand the importance of keeping texts literally, but it is also just as important to allow the reader to have the fun of understanding the texts themselves too. I think it should depend on the type of text when deciding when to translate literally and when to allow the communicative translations to shine through. Although I believe that it is important to add in communicative translations, I agree with Liliana when she says that there should not be a bias translation. By the translator adding in words that could change the meaning of the text, that does not keep the same story. When translating, the translator should always keep the same story, but if deciding to add communicative translations then it should only help the translation to allow the readers to understand the text more easily.
- In Nicole’s experience in translations post she talks about the idea of modernizing the language or foreignizing it. She mentions that it is almost essential that translators modernize the language. I agree with her when it comes to talking about old language that can be difficult to read. I think that it is important to make the language easier for the readers to understand, but if it takes away from the original meaning of the text or how the text is supposed to be read, then I believe that modernizing the text can take away from the meaning behind the story. It is important that the readers can easily understand the translation, but if the original is trying to convey an ‘old language’ feel, then it should be kept to some extent to allow the same meaning to be kept in tact. I also agree with Nicole when she talks about changing the language to allow readers to understand the translation instead of keeping it foreignized. She talks about how language can be foriegnized through the rough translations, which could also be considered to be literal translations. It may not sound right if the text is translated very literally because in the target language they could use a different term to mean the same thing therefore it would be better to change the text to allow the readers to have a better understanding by using something more communicative.