Schleiermacher

In his work Schleiermacher raises many things. So for me the most important are the next parts of the work.

Schleiermacher talks about that the translation is a result of the culture where you grew up, so what if you’re bilingual and you have 2cultures background?

He also says that there are 2 ways of translation: foreignazition and domestication. But how it works on practice and does the translator realize that he uses these components? Are these 2 components work together or we should think about them separate?

Using the paraphrase and imitation we creat a new text or we simply translate the text? What is the right way to translate the realities of another society?

Then he mentions the significant of the translator’s presence in the text, so my question is do we really need to feel the translators presence, the “second voice” in the text? If yes, then it’s going to be something different. In my opinion, translator is a “bridge” between reader and author, he brigs the author to the reader and helps him to understand the text.

Susan Bernofsky: Pertinaciously Tergiversating for the nonce.

I couldn’t help but being interested in the translator of this work about translation, and wondering at some of her word choices. A quick Google revealed that Schleiermacher was older than America, old enough for his language to have been significantly different from modern English, if he’d even written in English. Ms. Bernofsky, however, is quite modern – she translated this in 2004.

Why, then, would she pick words like tergiversate? That word is underlined right now as misspelled, as the default dictionary does not include the term. It means equivocate, but she could have just as used ‘indecisive’ or some variation of the like. More annoying still was ‘for the nonce’, which just means ‘for the time being’. Why translate two hundred year old German into needlessly esoteric English?

I imagine to get the real answers to that I’d have to get fluent in German and then get academically proficient in romantic hermeneutics, but the actual material of today’s reading did provide me with some interesting notions. Was she trying to bring us to Schleiermacher to us, or are we going to him ?

Schleiermacher

To start, Schleiermacher suggests translation to be the transplantation of information from one language to another. Schleiermacher points out that the act of translating between languages, particularly linguistically, does not only involve semiotics, but more importantly it is a result of the culture in which the author or one translating grew up. Schleiermacher further explains that language is strongly influenced by various factors such as education, time, and emotion. Taking all this into account, it is evident that a distinct culture is interwoven within a specific language and is thus potentially impossible to untangle the two in translating one thing into the target culture. According to Schleiermacher, the translator is always left to choose from leaving the author undisturbed and bringing the readers towards him or leaving the reader undisturbed and moving the author towards him. This leads Schleiermacher to introduce the two components of translation: foreignization and domestication.

But, to what extent should the translator omit or include notions of foreignization when entering the target language? How does one even account for the constant change of language itself? Should foreignization and domestication be regarded as two separate entities in terms of translation or should it rather be a mixture of the two?