[Xmca-l] Re: on translation

Mon Jan 15 15:35:16 PST 2018

Hi David,

thanks for the extended reflections on the issue.

Can you tell us who the publisher is of the Voloshinov text? I have a
French translation--published as Bakhtine...

And to the whole is more than the parts. I really came to understand
Heidegger after reading him in English, the different versions ... but this
better understand also may have to do that in the meantime I did a PhD and
became an academic.

Michael

Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Professor

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Applied Cognitive Science
MacLaurin Building A567
University of Victoria
Victoria, BC, V8P 5C2
http://web.uvic.ca/~mroth <http://education2.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/>

On Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 1:21 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> My wife read the Vegetarian and liked it. But I would say that when she
> reads Korean she inadvertantly mistranslates everything, because Korean has
> a stock of older, pure Korean words which cluster around every day usage
> and then a much larger stock of words borrowed from Chinese and adapted in
> various ways, rather the way that English has a stock of Germanic words
> like "table" and a much larger stock of words borrowed from Latin and Greek
> and adapted in various ways for scientific use. To me, Korean words are sui
> generis, and this means I am a lot slower than she is: I don't look at a
> Korean word and try to discern a historically distant Chinese soul. On the
> other hand, I do use a much more "top down" strategy: so for example when I
> read the Vegetarian I quickly realized it was a kind of rewrite of Kafka's
> "Metamorphosis" but the heroine is turning into a plant rather than an
> insect: "You are what you eat". So then the details didn't matter, but the
> result was that she finished the book and I didn't.
>
> The argument we sometimes hear that this or that text is untranslatable is
> either simply stating the obvious or else it is a claim of linguistic
> exceptionalism based on national exceptionalism. Obviouisly, all languages
> are ineffable, because all words are; language evolves to fill semantic
> niches as efficiently as possible. But precisely because this is true,
> translation from a semantic niche in one language to a semantic niche in
> another is not only possible, it's an inevitable part of communication even
> within the language. So I think that there isn't really any such thing
> as "mistranslation," there are only more or less successful types of
> translation for different purposes. The translator has the right to take
> all kinds of liberties, so long as the translation is replicable and the
> liberties are undoable. That's why what Alexander Pope and George Chapman
> did to the Iliad is perfectly valid, and it's also why what the Soviet
> editors did to Vygotsky, even though they were actually changing Russian to
> Russian, was not. There is a wonderful French translation of Voloshinov's
> "Marxism and the Philosophy of Language" which is bilingual--Russian on one
> page and French on the facing one. When I read it, I find it non-redundant:
> the whole is more than the multiplication of the part.
>
> When we translated "Thinking and Speech" into Korean we read it in French,
> Italian, two English versions, and Japanese as well as the original
> Russian. What struck me then--what still strikes me today--is that the key
> problems have absolutely nothing to do with translation, and with all the
> kerfuffle over mistranslation they remain entirely unaddressed. Chapter
> Five, for example, says that true concepts emerge in adolescence and not
> until; Chapter Six has the tension between the everyday and scientific
> concept right there in elementary school. Why does Vygotsky treat
> adolescence before elementary school, and complexes like
> pseudoconcepts after everyday concepts? You might say--well, he changed his
> mind, and in the preface he does say that he changed his mind and had to
> discard a lot of work. But neither chapter was discarded, ergo they must
> fit together in some way.
>
> One way to resolve it does bring us back to issues of translation by a
> slightly different route. There are two very different models of concept
> formation being presented. One is based on binaries, like "tall/short",
> "narrow/wide", and it is a laboratory abstraction. The other is based on
> what is usually called "expanding horizons" (the measure of generality),
> and it's a generalization of everyday life. The binary based model is
> self-contained and "sui generis", the way that I read Korean texts (and it
> is why I have no trouble with pairs of words like "Gemeinschaft" and
> "Gesellschaft", "coherence and cohesion", "societal and social"). The
> "expanding horizons" version is more like the way my wife reads (and it is
> why every word she reads undergoes a slight mistranslation, but she always
> manages to finish the book).
>
>
> David Kellogg
>
> Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
> Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
> Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'
>
> Free e-print available (for a short time only) at
>
> http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 2:21 AM, Wolff-Michael Roth <
> wolffmichael.roth@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > For those interested in the translation issues I raised earlier on this
> > list, you might be interested in this (and David K. might have a lot to
> say
> > to this point, too):
> >
> > Lost in (mis)translation? English take on Korean novel has critics up in
> > arms
> > https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/jan/15/
> > lost-in-mistranslation-english-take-on-korean-novel-
> has-critics-up-in-arms
> >
> > Michael
> >
> > Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Professor
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > --------------------
> > Applied Cognitive Science
> > MacLaurin Building A567
> > University of Victoria
> > Victoria, BC, V8P 5C2
> > http://web.uvic.ca/~mroth <http://education2.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/>
> >
> > New book: *The Mathematics of Mathematics
> > <https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/new-
> > directions-in-mathematics-and-science-education/the-
> > mathematics-of-mathematics/>*
> >
>