Author: rlw029

  • Luise von Flotow

    I was particularly interested at the section on elitist translation. What is the purpose of making the “already difficult source material even more obscure”- would this not alter the intended message and audience, thus changing the ‘identity politics’, ‘positionality’, and ‘historicity’ of the text? However Godard “responds to the ‘separatism and classificatory demarcation’ that she…

  • Angèle Kingué

    Angèle Kingué began by starting the reading in the text in the original French. She said that it is only in our mother tongues that we can truly be ourselves. Ngugi argues that English is not an african language. In this case, would Ngugi not consider French to be an African language as well?  If not, does that alter…

  • Tymoczko

    Tymoczko describes post-colonial and minority literature as  “converg[ing] on the shared limit defined by cultural interface” with the target language (p. 22). Through the act of translating, he argues that “judgement is inescapable in the process; ‘objectivity’ is impossible. And just as there can be no final translation, there can be no final interpretation of a…

  • Spivak and Appiah

    Appiah states that “if what language you speak determines what thoughts or intentions you have, translation … will always be impossible” (p. 334). Does our language influence our thoughts? For example, if two things are only described by one word in language A but given two separate words in language B, then can a speaker of language A fail…

  • Damrosch- World Literature

    How does world literature affect the hierarchy of languages? When we translate ancient Egyptian poems like in the reading, are we then privileging and raising up the Egyptian hieroglyphic language or the Egyptian ideas and culture? If by translating we lose much of the writing structure, inherent ambiguity, and specificity then are we really translating for the…

  • Venuti, Retranslations

    Retranslations “confront anew and more urgently the translator’s ethical responsibility to prevent the translating language and culture from effacing the linguistic and cultural differences of the source text” (p. 16). Retranslations offer new interpretations and reflect the current culture. How then does the “invisibility of the translator” that we discussed earlier differ between translations and retranslations-…

  • Benjamin

    Benjamin discusses the translator’s task as “[finding] the intention toward the language into which the work is to be translated, on the basis of which an echo of the original is awakened in it” (p.79). He thinks that the word rather than the sentence is translation’s original element. He explains the difference between the “spontaneous, primary,…

  • Derrida

    The title of Derrida’s essay “What is a ‘relevant’ translation?” first brings me back to Jakobson’s concept of the difference between what a language must express and what it may express. If you are translating from old Russian to English and come across the single noun meaning two brothers, is it “relevant” to write “two…

  • Jakobson

    Jakobson references a test from the Moscow Psychological Institute (1915) that shows how Russians are influenced by the gender of the nouns and this alters their mental representation of the word. In the study, they personified the days of the week according to the gender assigned to the word; they consistently represented Monday, Tuesday, and…

  • Juxta Commons- Les Miserables

    http://juxtacommons.org/shares/AqfdmX