Metrical and rhymed translation makes paraphrase inevitable. You cannot re-write a sonnet as a sonnet in another language without paraphrasing ideas, expressing ideas differently. This, then, makes possible or even necessary a certain level of inventiveness. It is the heuristic power of meter. The constraint generates new ideas.
I'm not sure that is the right word: when doing something in a more constrained way generates new ideas.
Contemporaneous or (near contemporaneous) translation is interesting. Also, translation between epochs, neither of which is our own: so
same century
two different epochs (say Victorian era translations of the baroque or medieval).
With our time, we lack the perspective. We are translating for our selves, our own taste.
I don't experience my own language as a Whorfian. I don't see breakfast as a breaking of a fast, or disease as dis-ease or a lack of easiness or comfort. Languages do not embody world-views. Their metaphors are dead ones.
I don't think people think differently of breakfast as "des-ayuno" or unfasting or "petit dejeuner" (small lunch.) It is still just what you eat in the morning.
I had a Whorfian student, who would just give a lot of examples. "In Russian, blah blah." he was very smart, and had studied a lot of languages, hence the the examples.
A famous science fiction writer who should know better posts on Facebook about a better translation of the Lord's Prayer from the Aramaic. My spidey sense immediately pricked up. There is no Aramaic original, since the text appears in the Greek New Testament first. The claim is that the King James Bible was translated from Aramaic to Greek to Latin to English. But the best scholars of the King James era surely knew how to read Greek.
Then it starts out
"O cosmic Birther of all radiance and vibration."
It sounds like 1970s era American New Age philosophy! The first word in Greek is "pater," or father. We can look at Syriac versions too; they don't say "O cosmic Birther." For Christ's sake!
My University is verifying everyone's degrees through a third party vendor. People are suspicious of it for various reasons, because it could turn into a background check with privacy issues. Supposedly it is for accreditation, but wouldn't they have checked this when everyone was hired?
(It turns out I was already subject to this process in order to be appointed as Acting Chair.).
Anyway, if you don't want your credentials checked, you can get your own transcript and upload it to the university system. I went online, even though I didn't need to, and ordered my transcripts from Grad school and undergrad just for curiosity. The grades I remembered, more or less, because I had a single B in college and another one in grad school, but I wanted to see what courses I took and when. Anyway, the company that does this, parchment, did not charge me to get these documents, and the process only took a few minutes, with the transcripts delivered in less than 24 hours.
