Re: CHAT: Hello

Irina Rempt wrote:
>
>On Sun, 29 Apr 2001, Frank George Valoczy wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 29 Apr 2001, taliesin the storyteller wrote:
>
> > > The UN declaration of human rights is translated to the languages of
>all
> > > the member nations, + quite a few minority languages so this might be
> > > the winner?
>
> > now there's a translation exercise...is the text on the web somewhere?
>
>Indubitably. I seem to remember that someone suggested doing it as a
>translation exercise, and some people (including me) didn't want to
>do it because it wasn't culturally neutral, but heavily biased in the
>direction of 20th century Western culture.
Culturally neutral? Well I guess I agree that the UN declaration isn't
culturally neutral (which's as it should be IMHO - in order to be acceptable
to all it would have to say nothing), but where to found a text that's
culturally neutral? It'd have to on something that can't possibly construed
as having any bearing whatsoever on any kind of "values".

But how does a lack of "cultural neutrality" make something bad as an
translation exercise? Translating, for example, the UN declaration of human
rights into some language surely doesn't mean you agree with its content.
You could even be translating it so that the poor speakers of language X can
see for themselves how vile it is ...

                                                      Andreas

PS I don't think "heavily biased" is the correct term. It's more of a
mission statement for the democratic-liberal wing of western culture.
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