Great thread on deverbalization! When I lecture my students on this, I describe it as stripping the J-words away, uploading the meaning they contain to a cloud of pure meaning above your head, and then downloading that meaning into English. I find the image of the cloud helps, like a stepping stone.
Reposted from
Katrina Leonoudakis
Translation is all about conveying meaning from one language to another. But what do we do when we’re struggling with how to render that meaning in our target language?
Let’s talk about deverbalization, functionalism, and examples from SUBREDDITNAME and the Beings from Strange Planet!
Let’s talk about deverbalization, functionalism, and examples from SUBREDDITNAME and the Beings from Strange Planet!
Comments
Language is inherently tied to the culture it comes from
Ignoring the words obscures the cultural context
Loss of cultural context = loss of diversity in perspectives
If we strip out their words, each of which was carefully chosen for precise reasons, does the resulting translation really give the reader/viewer an equivalent experience?
They’d replaced “namu amida butsu” with “amen”
Though the phrases may appear to be used similarly, they are not equivalent, and the specific words do matter