Duck and Cover

unless you have been raised in the cultural framework of a particular language group you have to spend a horrifying amount of time memorizing even their most common metaphors, because they wont come naturally to you. i would say thats probably true for every language, though learning a language in the same family as your native tongue probably eases things

transliteration can be another big problem when certain words have no direct equivalents in the language into which they are being translated. spiritus in latin, for example, literally means breath, but in certain contexts could be taken to mean life, as in the final stanza of the aeneid:

he sank his blade in fury in turnus' chest
then all the body slackened in death's chill
and with a groan for that indignity
his spirit fled into the gloom below

but when latin works were initially translated into english, the translators now lost to history thought it would be a better idea to instead transliterate it improperly and invent the english word spirit, which does not carry the same meaning. dumb cunts

i started reading some catullus in english not long ago and it was utter garbage. i had to shelf it because its almost pointless to read poetry in translation, unless your goal is simply to be familiar with the basic content

I don't think it's a matter of memorizing metaphhors as such, but about how accustomed you are to the language that you are dealing with in a literary context, which takes it to another level.
I.e. I am natively Estonian and my mother' tongue is Estonian. However, most of my adult life and growing up period I've spent learning different languages (I speak about 5 fluently about have basic groundings in another 5 or so). I am a person that learns very much by the book rather than through conversation, so most of my foreign languages have been acquired from classics. What I have definately gained through that is whenever I am learning a language, I don't ever really translate across but I am able to understand the true meaning of what a word means, rather than going with a strict dictionary definition. However, because I've never really studied Estonian from a literary perspective, I try to avoid books written in Estonian and end up reading in French or English most of the time. Same language groups help a lot though, I made extremely fast progress in Italian because I already spoke French and Spanish and was learning Latin at the same time.
In the near future, I want to study ancient Greek because it will definately help me understand languages and vocabulary more. I always thought that people were overestimating Greek and Latin, but when you feel comfortable with those two languages, you can definately see their influence on basically every language out there. Not to mention professional context, i.e. legalese, etc.

Johnny, I guess what I was really trying to tell you is that when you learn a language, don't go over the top trying to find the exact cross-definition in your mother tongue because it doesn't always mean the same thing. On the other hand, try to be as comfortable as possible with your target language by reading a lot in it, even if you don't understand 90% of the stuff that you are reading. You get a feel for the style and prose, after which it is way easier to fill in the blanks for yourself.

Frater Perdurabo wrote:Johnny, I guess what I was really trying to tell you is that when you learn a language, don't go over the top trying to find the exact cross-definition in your mother tongue because it doesn't always mean the same thing. On the other hand, try to be as comfortable as possible with your target language by reading a lot in it, even if you don't understand 90% of the stuff that you are reading. You get a feel for the style and prose, after which it is way easier to fill in the blanks for yourself.

perhaps you could phrase this a little better, because im quite confused about what youre trying to tell me?

clearly one should be as faithful as humanly possible to the original work, and so an exact cross-definition is desirable. when no equivalent is possible then borrowing is acceptable, as long as an effective definition is provided. my complaint was that a new word with a different meaning was substituted, im not sure if you understood that, because i imagined you would agree that is an immensely dumb way to do things

also the memorization of metaphors was primarily in reference to latin, which is no longer spoken and so incredibly difficult to gain fluency in. when it was recorded it was from the perspective of an ancient civilization with an entirely different worldview and so a different approach to wordplay

ie you would not read the word 'sun' as a synonym for a particular god because you have not been raised in a cultural framework that regards the two as one and the same. you can often figure out what is really being referenced through context, but sometimes you cant, and when you are a perfectionist like me it can become incredibly irritating

edit: i guess i should clarify something, and i apologize because it was probably very unclear. by metaphor i meant the whole spectrum of wordplay and the abnormal use of any word in any context which would be almost impossible for a non-native speaker to intuit

Sounds like whatever you are dealing with is very interesting, in which context did you get involved with this? University? What degree?
What I was trying to say through the muddle was:
Don't think too much about translation and contextualization because like you said earlier, translation really butchers the language.
Instead of thinking of a way to translate the word, just accept that there is no accurate English equivalent (and I do understand that this is not an option if what you have to do is translate).
As an example, I took a crash course in Japanese last summer. The Japanese have extremely what appears to be basic and simplistic grammar system (nouns are not conjugated for example, they are only changed to show past or present, and oddly enough affirmation or negation. So:
shimasu - to go (I go, you go, we go, etc)
shimasen - not go
shimashta - went
shimasenshta - not went
These may not be 100% accurate)
But really the beauty in Japanese is their extremely wide array of synonyms, in which different ones are used in accordance with the class of the person that you are speaking to. So for example, take the word garden. The Japanese would have about 5 different ways of saying garden, depending on the person with whom they are speaking. You wouldn't use the same word when comparing your neighbour's garden to the Emperor's one. Yet in English, we use only one word, and there is no way whatsoever of expressing the meaning of these different synonyms as a single word, without going into elaborate detail. The Japanese have a craze for such things, they over a hundred different counthing systems, depending on what you are counting (small round things, large square things, people, liquid containers, the list goes on).
So in Japanese you would use two different digits for saying something like:
One bottle.
and
One person.
Yet in English, it's still just "one". No equivalent exists in the language.
Although this is very extreme, it's really the subtlties that make possessing languages fun and these are the first ones to be lost when translation things such as poems.
So what I was really trying to say was that don't waste your time translating stuff around, just accept two languages as different. Trying to draw threads between two languages that differ vastly only hinders your own comprehension.
As a tip, a good way of getting comfortable with a language quickly is thinking a lot in it. I try to think in different languages all the time, to try to avoid losing them due to lack of practice. When you think in a language, you don't associate back to your mother tongue and don't translate for youself. A very efficient way of getting comfortable with a language.

Frater Perdurabo wrote: ... a good way of getting comfortable with a language quickly is thinking a lot in it. I try to think in different languages all the time, to try to avoid losing them due to lack of practice. When you think in a language, you don't associate back to your mother tongue and don't translate for youself. A very efficient way of getting comfortable with a language.

Concepts get lumped together in semantic blocks.
Also the culture assigns networks of transparently embedded dichotomies to various words/word-groups.

Too bad google does a shit job of describing "Transparently Embedded Dichotomy"

It's like a Chutes and Ladders (in some places called "Snakes and Ladders"). You get preformatted logic cascades attached to words and phrases that cause an entire idea or set of ideas to be percieved as a sort of Hieroglyphic Macro-Chunk.

Different languages ... the hidden part of Orwellian Bullshit....

... cross - translation could be used on purpose


...

purpose...


... porpoise?

Dolphins?

Blargh?

all good thoughts frater, most especially trying to think in a language in order to disassociate it from the necessity of translating it

my interest is academic, since i am aiming to be an archaeologist. translating unfortunately does not allow me much wiggle room, so i must try to be faithful when selecting the correct english words. of course i could translate it roughly and then put it into the most pleasant sounding colloquial english, but that simply wont do. especially since word order is pragmatic in latin, and with a few exceptions you can place any part of speech anywhere in order to emphasize it - emphasis that must be carried over in translation

for the layman, latin is on the top, english on the bottom:

romani hispanum reverberabant
the romans were repelling the spaniard

hispanum romani reverberabant
the romans were repelling the spaniard

reverberabant romani hispanum
the romans were repelling the spaniard

each sentence has the same meaning but since latin word order is not strictly subject-verb-object, subject-object-verb, verb-object-subject or any other combination, one can put essentially any order they like in order to emphasize certain words. obviously the first sentence emphasizes "the romans" while the second one emphasizes "the spaniard," etc.

maybe the spaniards repelled the romans

Here's the current stack:



- Soldiers of Destruction is a pretty interesting book on 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf, which got a lot of its initial personnel from the concentration camps (guards, not prisoners obv). One thing that kinda sucks about Totenkopf is that first hand accounts are rather few and far between, what with pretty much everyone who survived the war ending up in Soviet prisons/camps (which is basically a death sentence). The division surrendered to the Americans at the end of the war, but they handed it over to the Soviets since the division had spent most of the war chillaxing on the eastern front. Owned, I guess.
- The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel - Just started on this one, but it seems to be pretty intense. It explores the mathematical concepts of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that you can read more about here if you haven't already read it (unlikely).
- Post Office - Being a mail man seems to suck pretty hard
- Teatro Grottesco by my man Ligotti. Keywords: short stories, horror, sort of Lovecraftesque.
- It Never Snows in September - Operation Market Garden seen from the German side. Pretty intense shit.
- Inside the Third Reich - Speer takes a look back at the good old days.

Am currently reading Niccolao Manucci's Storia do Mogor. Rocks.

Anyone into russian lit? I'm reading crime and punishment and I have the idiot around here somewhere.

Nicolai wrote:Here's the current stack:



- Soldiers of Destruction is a pretty interesting book on 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf, which got a lot of its initial personnel from the concentration camps (guards, not prisoners obv). One thing that kinda sucks about Totenkopf is that first hand accounts are rather few and far between, what with pretty much everyone who survived the war ending up in Soviet prisons/camps (which is basically a death sentence). The division surrendered to the Americans at the end of the war, but they handed it over to the Soviets since the division had spent most of the war chillaxing on the eastern front. Owned, I guess.
- The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel - Just started on this one, but it seems to be pretty intense. It explores the mathematical concepts of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that you can read more about here if you haven't already read it (unlikely).
- Post Office - Being a mail man seems to suck pretty hard
- Teatro Grottesco by my man Ligotti. Keywords: short stories, horror, sort of Lovecraftesque.
- It Never Snows in September - Operation Market Garden seen from the German side. Pretty intense shit.
- Inside the Third Reich - Speer takes a look back at the good old days.

how

Castille wrote:Anyone into russian lit? I'm reading crime and punishment and I have the idiot around here somewhere.

you already missed that bandwagon

He did, but incidentally, I read Crime and Punishment last holiday.
It's a bit of a dilemma, because as much as I dislike russians, I just have to admit that I love their literature.
Chekhov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Bulgakov, etc (yes, I know that they were not all russian, but they wrote in russian, didn't they? even Gogol) are all brilliant and I end up going back to them more to anything else. Absolutely fantastic.

Gogol is pretty good, but I can't finish any of Dostoyevsky's stuff

Just read 1984 can't beleive I waited so long to read it - classic.

and Neuromancer, still pretty current.

Back to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I've been reading on and off for years.

I just saw Solaris (the original),
Is the book still worth reading after that? I heard it's somewhat different.
What say ye pollacks?

I almost wish I hadn't read 1984, in the way that Neo probably wished he had swallowed the other pill sometimes..

Matrix reference bitches!

Reading Victroy was Beyond Their Grasp, great book about Volks-Grenadier divisions,

Read Men of Steel about 2nd SS Panzer Crops anyone interested in the SS i recommend this book.

I read 1984 a couple years ago and loved it. It hooks you in from page one and gets right under your skin. There are a lot of "classic" novels that aren't nearly as compelling or fun to read as that one, I wished I'd studied it in school instead of overblown crap like Snow Falling on Cedars.

Right now I'm reading The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland. I was preconceived to hate Coupland based on his status as a Gen-X spokesman, reviews of his past books, and the general wink-wink preciousness of his writing, but this one is actually pretty affecting and genuine. I haven't put it down since I bought it.

I also wish we had touched on 1984 in school. It was more memorable for me than all the books I read in school combined.