----- Original Message -----
From: "michael poxon" <m.poxon@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2003 1:21 PM
Subject: Re: Opinions wanted: person of vocatives
> > Yeats, Poe and Tolkien are on a completely different plain to religion.
> > But at one stage, yes, they should be translated. That doesn't mean they
> > won't be available untranslated, or that people who want to read the
> > original shouldn't be able to (consider Chaucer or Beowulf), but having
> > it available in a way that more people will understand is only a good
> > thing.
> >
> Not sure I can go along with this - both Yeats and Tolkien, among many
> others, deal with themes which involve religious ideas. And why will
> something which will be understood by more people be necessarily a good
> thing? This will only be the case if the translation is excellent, and
these
> occasions are going to be very few and far between. Chaucer, Shakespeare
et
> al should be read as they were written, though I don't think this applies
to
> texts (say) in OE, which is no longer intelligible without lengthy
training.
> In these cases, if a translation is done, it should be at the hands of a
> sympathetic, skilled linguist - you only have to look at some of the
howlers
> that JRRT describes (the one I remember was the description of Heorot as a
> "genial saloon" which to my mind conjures up images of out-of-tune
tinkling
> pianos and cowboys saying "git me a sarsparilla")
And the Bible was written in Greek and Hebrew. Therefore updating the
translation from time to time is ptobably a good idea.