[Xmca-l] Re: on translation

Mon Jan 15 15:37:56 PST 2018

My dear Grouch:

I think what I actually said was that unlike you I have ALWAYS recognized
the distinction between "social" and "societal" as useful.

This seems to me completely consistent with what you said about having
studied Marx for forty years without recognizing it. It is most certainly
consistent with your earlier comment that when you first encountered the
distinction you considered it a meaningless bit of academic jargon.

My own professor, H.G. Widdowson, was particularly fond of fine
distinctions in language, such as "cohesion/coherence", "use/usage",
"text/discourse". I am currently using Halliday's work on intonation
analysis, and he distinguishes the systems of "tone", "tonality" and
"tonicity". Not to mention "sounding", "wording", and "meaning", or
"elaboration, extension, enhancement".

But now I see that the inevitable confusion is only a byproduct of being
able to show that the concepts named are not fully extricable from each
other, much less mutually exclusive. That was why I though
"societal/social" was actually better than the German original,
Gesellschaflicht/sozial, or even Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, to which it is
undoubtedly related.

It occurs to me that this is an instance of what Natalia would call
critical thinking--an instance when the translation is superior to the
original. It is said that when Kurt Koffka visited Moscow he was always
surprised that his interpreter--a young fellow by the name of
Vygotsky--produced very long translations for even his shortest comments.

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 8:24 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> I think David expresses the issue very well when he says
> (with qualifications): "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."
>
> I am not familiar with Ricardo, but I find it hard to
> believe that this fellow who advised the British government
> on monetary policy did not have the concept of a
> Gesellschaftsformation in mind when he gave that advice. I
> do see that Marx's gesellschaftlich is usually translated as
> "social" which is why, through reading Mar, we acquire the
> same concept of gesellschaftlich as the indexed by "social"
> in the English. That is also why German speakers are not
> misled by the German expression which Marx uses: "sozial
> Revolution" let alone the meaning of "Sozialismus." Marx
> rarely uses the word sozial, but when he does, he not
> suddenly transforming himself into a libertarian
> individualist social theorist.
>
> Contrary to what David said in his earlier message, I do
> recognise an important distinction between societal and
> social. I had never heard the word "societal" before reading
> it in a paper by Steve Billett in 2006 and someone on xmca
> explained the distinction to me. However, I still do not use
> the word. It is one thing to recognise a distinction, but
> quite another to embed in one's language the implication and
> the social and the societal form a *dichotomy*. Anyone want
> to draw up a list for me of the phenomena which are social
> or which are societal? The distinction exists, but there are
> not "two kinds of questions" here, "social and societal."
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 16/01/2018 8:21 AM, David Kellogg 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/>*
> >>
>
>