Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Spivak and Appiah

    Spivak writes, “In my view, language may be one of many elements that allow us to make sense of things, of ourselves.” This ability to further express one’s thoughts allows for the individual’s creation of an identity. The act of stringing meaningless terms together to form something more complex can be additionally shaped based on…

  • 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…

  • Thick Translation

    Appiah seems to expand on the notion of bringing the reader to the author in order to engage with the actual source text and culture. Appiah explains that “literal translation”, or “gloss”, lacks the ability to bring forth the concepts or features that originally made the text important. Thus, it inevitably becomes the responsibility of…

  • Small Oversight…

    Chan’s article examines the affects of colonialism* on the Chinese language and the influx of ‘Europeanization’ on literature. It spends very little time actually looking at the period of time when China was actually under colonialism*, and instead most of its focus is instead placed on modern-day scholars who are attempting to resurrect some kind…

  • Damrosh

    What is the art? How you differentiate what is art and what not? Is it “art for art” or it needs to be professional and have fans? Another question is how should we translate the world literature? And why living in a 21st century, the century of globalization, we still need to translate/adopt the world…

  • Adaptation

    Late homework for the Thursday class. 1. What is your understanding of local and global adaptation?As far as I understood from the article the local adaptation is caused by problems of source text itself and limited to certain part of it (for instance, it might be factors like cross-code breakdown or  situational inadequacy). And a…

  • Translation and World Literature

    Damrosch begins with an example of one of the oldest lyrics to survived. He notes that “whereas many works of world literature come to us already shaped by complex dynamics of transmission, further shadowed by vexed relations between the originating culture and our own, this text has almost no history at all intervening between us…

  • World Literature

    During the reign of Ramses V, a scribe documented a variety of literary texts on a papyrus roll. These preserved lyrics are some of the oldest in the world. Damrosch selects the piece for its simplicity to further analyze the complex problems that derive from the task of translation. He mentions the obstacles of which…

  • Translation and World Literature

    When discussing the necessity of translating “mss,” David Damrosche argues that it is not very important to deliver the accurate meaning of “mss” since the important message here is the action of getting undressed. Readers are aware that they are reading an ancient Egyptian poem so they will not relate modern cloths with what the…

  • 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…

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