Foreignizing translation

 This would seem to result from two processes. 

If I translate grammatical structures literally, then the translation will seem foreign or unfamiliar. 

An example is if we decided to translate a reflexive verb as a reflexive in English, even if the reflexive is not used that way.  We could say "Spanish speaks itself here' to say "se habla español."  I would argue that this has nothing to do with the foreignness of Spanish, but with a simple grammatical difference in the way a language divides up its tasks and functions. There is an example from John McWhorter's critique of a translation from the Russian, where the translators use reflexive in English simply because the Russian is reflexive, but it is a simply translation error, in McWhorter's view: 

"Russian, like many European languages, often uses self in ways that don’t make literal sense. English only does this a bit: in behave yourself, you might ask just who else you would exert this behaving upon if not yourself. Perjure yourself and repeat yourself are similar. Russian fairly drips with verbs like these, though – you don’t get angry, you anger yourself; you don’t smile – you smile yourself, and so on."

Often Spanish acts that way. We might say "levántate" means "stand up," not "stand yourself up." We use the reflexive to say we eat or drink all of something.  "He ate up all the cake." "Se la comió entera." We use a preposition instead of a reflexive for this: eating something up rather than "eating myself it." Falling asleep is dormirse, rather than simply sleeping (dormir.) We don't literally "sleep ourselves." Sometimes the reflexive is just there to make a verb intransitive, or just makes no difference at all, like the difference between morir and morirse. The only real difference is that we tend to say "me muero" when we are speaking hyperbolically: "me muero de aburrimiento." "I'm dying of boredom." We wouldn't say "muero de aburrimiento."  

A second way of being "foreign" is by using different registers of the target language. But here an odd thing happens. The foreign elements have nothing to do with the source language at all. Like when a Victorian British translator tries to make Homer sound like Medieval English, because Homer is "old" in a similar way. Here the analogy is forced. 

A third way might be from the use of loan words. We can keep a word in Spanish rather than translating it.  "Hey, compadre, let's get going." That's fine, but it doesn't take us very far. 

In short, I don't really believe that "foreignizing" translation ought to be a thing enjoying a huge privilege over supposedly "domesticating" modes. 

Wooden

 "We should instead examine the cultural and social conditions of the translation, considering whether its interpretants initiate an event, creating new knowledges and values by supplying a lack that they indicate in those that are currently dominant in the receiving situation. The lack may be an interpretant that a poet’s version can or cannot supply, for instance, a concept of equivalence that involves a semantic correspondence or even close adherence to the source text. The most authoritative and widely circulated translations may themselves not apply such an interpretant, or, if they do, a new edition of the source text or a new, independently articulated interpretation of it may require that the concept of equivalence applied in previous translations be revised in a retranslation (cf. chapter 5). Nonetheless, no interpretant can be regarded as inherently valuable, apart from its situation in a specific culture at a specific historical moment."

Venuti, Lawrence. Translation Changes Everything : Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ku/detail.action?docID=1101392.
Created from ku on 2025-08-25 21:11:33.

 

What is it about this writing style?  It aims to be careful in definitions, but it ends up being confusing and a bit wooden. I guess what he's saying is that a translation should alter the target language / culture by supplying something previously missing. The one example he supplies is confusing, since "semantic correspondence" is the definition of translation itself. 

The style can alert the reader that something is amiss in the thinking itself. Why be so ponderous if your point is actually a valid one? 

Vocabulary peaks

Vocabulary can peak in one's 40s or even 70s. There are different studies. I've found recently that words are coming more quickly to my brain as I write. It has to be le mot juste. I was just thinking about how I was complaining about someone's effort to complete a Lorca play, and I used the word confection,   "an elaborately constructed thing, especially a frivolous one." I don't know if I could have come up with that 20 years ago.  

I also think about my critique of Venuti. I can use words like querulous, plaintive, and lachrymose to describe his tone. His book has been cited 19,000 times, according to Google Scholar, but he can still present his field as marginalized and stigmatized.  

Adjectives are wonderful and spicy. You can have a petulant dogmatism, for example. The prejudice against adjectives is rather silly. Their use doesn't produce wordiness. Wordiness, rather, results from a lack of discipline in constructing well formed sentences and paragraphs.  

Hanzi

 There are about 77 characters introduced in the first 7 lessons, so if that pace is valid there will be 770 in the 70 lessons. Basic adult literacy is 3.000, I'm told. I've studied for 11 days and one 7 lessons, but am slowing down on purpose. I review what I've learned for at least a day, and don't finish a lesson in one day. 

Sometimes when I am reading I just look at the meaning of the character and don't vocalize the Chinese word. This is a bad habit. 

Syntax

  I haven't noticed anything difficult about Chinese grammar yet. I've yet to make a word order mistake.

Subject verb object.  

Subject adverb (not / often ) / verb object. 

Possessor / possessive particle / thing possessed 

Adjective or adjectival noun / noun 

My son does not eat Korean food. 

You would have the word for I, then the particle de, then the word for son, a negating particle bu, then the verb, and then Korea food.  Nouns can modify other nouns like "music class," the way we do in English. 

We have a word and the works like English and, connecting two things.  It made me wonder whether all languages have and.  

Nouns don't inflect for case or number. Verbs do not conjugate.  I'm guessing there will be a particle before the verb to indicate a time marker. 

I wrote this poem in my head in bed before I got up; entirely fictional and maybe the worst poem I've ever written

Here in the suburbs

where the meaninglessness of life

becomes more evident 

with every sit com we watch

every police procedural

I fell in love

with my daughter's middle school teacher

(It was ok

we were both divorced

and my daughter didn't go

to that school any more)

We met by chance

at a Starbucks

She was overweight  but attractive

So was I 

We exchanged numbers

By the third date

we were watching tv

Her kisses were like honey

She liked Law & Order

Special Victims Unit

But why call the police

into people's sex lives?

I thought to myself

Sure, leave the minors alone

But between consenting adults

most things are ok

We had to break up eventually 

I didn't like her shows

I preferred other forms of banality 

The Dream

 I had to drive my dad to his new job. It turned out to be in some kind of warehouse, not really set up for a desk job, and there was woman there yelling at us, at me particularly.  My dad was vague about what the job actually was supposed to be, something related to academic administration (my dad's actual profession.)  

My dad looked about 40, and I was the age I am now (64).  The dream went on for a long time, and then I had to realize that it was, in fact, a dream, and that my dad had been dead for 24 years.  I began to accuse him of being dead, as I usually do in these dreams, which I've been having for 24 fucking years. I used as evidence the fact that I looked older than he did. 

I am nearing the age my dad was when he died, a day before he turned 65, May 14 2000. That will happen in 10 days for me.  Turning 65, hopefully not dying.