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Re: OT: Defining words and how they are used

From:Antonielly Garcia Rodrigues <antonielly@...>
Date:Wednesday, June 28, 2006, 14:50
A comment about the two following messages:

1)
> From: "Gary Shannon" <fiziwig@...> > To: <CONLANG@...> > Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2006 5:16 PM > Subject: Re: Defining words and how they are used > > > > One really can't understand Shakespeare properly > > unless one reads it in the original Klingon. > > > > --gary > >
2)
> On 6/23/06, Michael Adams <abrigon@...> wrote: > Does raise a wierd question, how translating something from one > to another language, does it change things? I know for the most > part there is minor changes, but not to major, but over time, > does things really change that much? > > Mike >
I speculate that it strongly depends on the text you are translating. If the purpose of the text is to clearly explaing something (e.g. how to install a DVD player, or how a research was performed), then you do not lose much meaning. The other extreme is a profetical text: how could you translate Nostradamus without losing the subtleties of the text? In this case you lose so much semantical information that the translation would be very unreliable. (Of course, such intentionally vague texts do not have much useful information anyway, at least for agnostic people like me, so you would not lose anything at all :P. I apologize if I offended someone's beliefs with my intended-to-be-funny comment. ). In between, there are literary texts, which contain a lot of nuances that explore particularities and idioms of the language, but usually are not filled with so many misterious messages as profetical texts are (it depends on the author's intentions, of course). Translations of literary texts have been proved to be formidable challenges, but professional translators have been doing it with moderate-to-high success. Antonielly Garcia Rodrigues