D. Searls, The Philosophy of Translation, Chapter 8: “CODA”
Searls uses this Robert Frost slogan to discuss the essence of poetry and translation.
“Poetry is what gets lost in translation”
Known for his The Delighted States, he coined the phrase “Every theory of literature has to incorporate a theory of the fluke.”
Adam Thirlwell
These six tools make up the translator's "toolbox" for rephrasing text. Name at least 3.
synonymy, expansion, contraction, topic shift, change of emphasis, and clarification
This term, often misused, refers to turning a play into a movie or a novel into a film, but should not be confused with translation.
Transcoding
Fill in the blanks, “In effect, ____ ____ is the same kind of tool as a bilingual dictionary.”
Google Translate
This catchphrase is "both an aspiration and a threat."
“Art has no borders.”
This historical misinterpretation of a German word in translation contributed significantly to France declaring war in 1870.
What is "Adjutant"?
Roman Jakobson categorized this type of translation as a switch between different media, like from text to performance, but the chapter critiques this as a red herring.
Transposition
This french word mentioned in the chapter can have multiple meanings, such as bread, chopsticks, and even drumsticks, but AI translating devices have a hard time translating it properly.
Baguettes
According to Mark Polizzotti,
"I prefer to consider translation a fine liqueur, not a medicine. But too often it comes bottled with a ______ ____."
prescriptive label
Bellos uses this French filmmaker's attempt to create an English version of his Oscar-winning film "Mon Oncle" to illustrate the futility of achieving "equivalent effect" in translation.
Who is Jacques Tati?
In medieval times, this word also referred to moving relics from one shrine to another, showing how its meaning has historically extended beyond language.
Translation
The chapter explains that Artificial Intelligence or AI lacks this essential human quality. This quality allows people to grasp certain contexts, tone, and emotional aspects when translating.
Intentionality
These suppressed verses in the Quran are known as The Satanic Verses.
These rejected lines are referred to as gharaniq, meaning “the cranes.”
According to Bellos, this fundamental problem with the "equivalent effect" doctrine is that there's no way to measure or verify it.
What is incommensurability (or the inability to extract and compare effects between languages)?
This metaphor, borrowed from Oxford college traditions, describes inspecting the limits of what translation really is.
Beating the bounds
To Searls, this is an important part of his process as a translator. When he’s translating he’s just ____?
Reading
He was the one who made a pun out of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and John Milton took it at face value.
Saint Jerome
In the chapter, Bellos describes the challenge he faced when translating this French author's unfinished "literary thriller" that contained a hidden diagonal clue in a twelve-word list. Name the author and bonus points if you can name the word.
Who is Georges Perec? + Chartreuse
This early linguist’s model of language as the “dress of thought” influenced ideas that all speech is mental translation, a notion the chapter pushes back against.
Ferdinand de Saussure