Re: new relay

On Wed, 30 May 2001 bjm10@CORNELL.EDU wrote:

>On Wed, 30 May 2001, Padraic Brown wrote:
>
>> Right. And there's no reason why a 100% correspondance
>> has to be made. The job of translator isn't to plug
>> words from Language A into words of Language B. It's
>> to take the ideas that are expressed in the words of
>> Langauge A and render them comprehensibly into ideas
>> expressed by words of Language B.
>
>Then why do some people have such a prissy hissy fit over using Biblical
>passages?  How are these any more tainted than some hunk of fiction?
[shrug] Doesn't matter to me whether we translate a creation myth from
Silmarillion, the Bible or the Edda. In the end, there _isn't_ a
"real" text that isn't tainted in some way by the humanity that
produced it. Cultural contamination is rampant everywhere, so what I
say is: deal with it. Or leave it be.

Take it as it comes like you're a real life translator from some world
that's just begun to tap into a galaxy spanning organisation of
worlds. While you're not about to give up hunting and ritually eating
the Plant Eating People who live in the equatorial regions, or gutting
the weakest pups of your mate's litter, this curious text "Thou shall
not murder"  is still quite interesting;  and can be understood as a
curious artifact from an alien and inscrutable culture.

>> alien language. A treatise on how to capture a mate can
>> get tricky.
>
>Or the nature of beauty in general, or of virtue, or of happiness.
Indeed. Flowers = beautiful? Give us the scent of fear driven graaknu
thundering across the wide open plains and the sensation of roilling
earth underfoot as you stand atop a small stone outcropping amidst the
stampeding herd, spear and atlatl singing the song of salty-sweet
death on any day of the fortnight!

Padraic.