
On Translation - lermontov
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/09/29/on-translation-tolstoy/
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lubujackson
Not exactly sure why this is a Hacker News thing but...

I wholeheartedly disagree with: "I would argue that the translator serves the
author and the original text. Period." I think it should be pretty obvious
that a translator servers primarily their readers, specifically non-native
speakers who want to read a work without learning a new language.

Which then creates the problem of what do you leave out in a translation?
Because you can go nuts trying to keep every syntactic nuance, but then you
lose the forest for the trees - the text has no flow for the reader, it
becomes hard work where it wasn't originally and the overall experience is
flawed. Or you can be faithful to the broad strokes of the work, the essence
of it, while changing many of the finer details to achieve it. I think both
methods can serve a purpose, but they need to do so clearly and consistently.

It's a little like trying to draw a 3D object in 2D - you can only show a
slice at a time and no matter what you do, you are forced to make serious
omissions. So a translator should do this mindfully. Discounting other
approaches feels a little smarmy and pointless.

~~~
Chinjut
> Not exactly sure why this is a Hacker News thing but...

This sort of comment pops up anytime an article on anything other than
straight-up apps/coding/business/whatnot is posted, but the answer is always
the same: Anything of interest to Hacker News readers belongs on Hacker News.
And this sort of thing is of interest to many Hacker News readers.

~~~
derefr
No, this is not the criterion. US politics, for an example, is "of interest to
Hacker News readers", but makes for awful (and mostly pointless) discussion,
so it's discouraged as a topic.

In fact, "anything of interest to [the people who form the community]" is an
inherently meaningless rule: as things are posted that "go beyond" the
interests of the community, the site will begin to attract a new audience that
_is_ interested in those things, leading to a community shift or dilution.
Such a setup can make sense in a _closed_ community, but not in an open one.

The real spirit at the core of the HN content guidelines, I think, is
something like this: we want posts where reading them _evokes the hacker
mindset in people_. AI? Cryptography? Engineering? Great. "Lean startup"
entrepreneuralist exploration? Sure. Cat photos, gender-studies rants, brand
movements? Not really.

It's actually a rather strict guideline; a large number of things on the front
page at any given moment aren't really "HN material", as can be seen from the
low quality of the discussions they provoke. The guidelines are enforced with
a rather light hand, though. It's hard to convince a person currently in
possession of An Opinion that they'll probably regret the five hours they
wasted in that thread picking apart e.g. the pros and cons of iPhones lacking
headphone jacks. Easy enough to convince them _afterward_ , but very hard at
the time.

(I've always found that the best forums have "benevolent dictators" who are
willing to kill these conversational vortexes and then take the heat for them.
pg _was_ this person at HN's start; but now HN is far more of a standard "just
moderation, no emceeing" forum.)

~~~
jnbiche
For the record, this is what the guidelines say:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters,
or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-
topic."

So while most mundane political stories (ie, the election cycle, politician
gaffs, etc.) are pretty clearly off-topic, there are some stories with
political, social and economic ramifications that I'd count as being highly
on-topic, such as stories relating to universal basic income. As evidence, I'd
submit the fact that YCombinator itself is sponsoring research into basic
income.

More to the point for this particular post, the topic of translation, both
human and machine, is intellectually gratifying to many hackers, including
ones as illustrious as Douglas Hofstadter. Are you prepared to argue
otherwise?

~~~
derefr
Re: your last paragraph, I thought I was arguing for this post being a good
example of something that _does_ fit the spirit of the guidelines. Apparently
my point didn't get through.

~~~
jnbiche
> Apparently my point didn't get through.

You seemed to be complaining about the kinds of posts that are getting upvoted
these days on HN. Although you didn't specifically address this particular
post, others here did. I thought you might be chiming in to support these
complaints, but it wasn't clear to me, which was why I asked.

I'm glad I was wrong.

------
B1FF_PSUVM
There's no translation, only betraying.

The translator is a spy of dubious allegiance, reporting the sayings of an
alien tribe.

(Ridendo dicere verum.)

~~~
jnbiche
> There's no translation, only betraying.

Sounds much better in the original Italian: "Traduttore, traditore".

Translator, a traitor (to the original text).

~~~
slazaro
Nice! It also works in at least a few other romance languages, I'm going to
use it in the future.

