Philosophy of language

 I'm thinking that the foreignizing fallacy comes from a kind of misapprehension about the differences between language. I remember a student, Oscar, who was really into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and he would argue by using examples from various languages, rather than using principled arguments. There are cool examples, but we can't really say that, because Spanish uses reflexive constructions for many uses, that Spanish people think more of people doing things to themselves. Studying Chinese is helpful here, because I'm seeing the principle that languages choose what to do and not do, and it creates differences, but then that does not mean that the speaker of the language has a different mental structure. There are just different ways of doing things, and most of those won't come through in a translation, and they shouldn't either. It creates a sort of Whorfian illusion. And foreignizing can only be partial, anyway. You have to choose which parts of the source language / text are relevant or meaningful, and which parts can just be glossed over. 

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Well, I think of a year as going around a circle, counter-clockwise. January is at the top of the wheel, and July at the bottom. I have no idea why, but that is how I think of it, starting when I was a child. I have no idea why it is counter-clockwise, since my conception of a day is, in fact, clockwise. I'm told that Mandarin speakers think of time as vertical rather than horizontal.