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Showing posts from May, 2012

What happens when you just don't agree?

I realize I'm not married yet, and that I am asking for advice well in advance of my real needs. However, last week we experienced a situation that neither of us (my fiancé and I) knew how to handle. Since I do not want to get into the personal details of our lives (I promised Honey I would never do that), I will present the situation as an analogy... We happened to find ourselves, one day, without toothpaste at home. After all the normal bickering (Honey: How can you NOT notice that we are running out of toothpaste? You know all you have to do is ask for money and I will give it to you so that you can go buy toothpaste!  Me: How do YOU not notice? You brush your teeth daily, just as much as I do, and since you have the money YOU could have gone and bought it... ), we decided to go together to buy the toothpaste. We quickly kissed and made up because it is stupid to quarrel over toothpaste, and it was neither of our faults. I mean, nobody wants to wake up on a Monday morning and

Translation is transmission

Michel Foucault said that he who holds the language holds the power  -- and that is why translators are the people who are changing the world, and have been doing so for centuries. Millennia, even. It is not enough to posses knowledge, it is important to be able to transmit that knowledge, to share it, to teach it. The problem is that not everybody will be able to understand this knowledge, unless they, too, are in possession of the skills necessary to understand. Translation is not just a matter of identifying the word in the source language and replacing it with the equivalent in the target language. If that were so, we translators (and I dare now include interpreters as well) would have proven to be obsolete in the late 1980s. Our success, our importance to the world, even, is the task that we perform, the impossible that we achieve: we are able to find the perfect oxymoronic juxtaposition of faithfulness  and beauty  in a target language from a source language. Yes, we are geni