Translations

[wolven7]

Was talking to a friend of mine, the other day, and we got on the subject of translations of things (the Gita, the Tao Te Ching, etc), and learning languages. I brought up the idea that I learned in full, in grad school: that there is always a problem in reading any work translated by another person. Their learning of a language, and the interpretations they use are coloured by their experiences, both in life and of the particular work under their consideration. That gets expressed in how they present said work: Translation Problem. But then I started thinking, "Well that's true of learning languges, too, then, isn't it?" Any person who's learned a language has done so from some particular set of sources or teachers, each with biases, focuses, styles, and so on, and each of these changes how they learn that language.

Learning from a native speaker is different from learning from a second-order speaker, because one has a more closely-learned fluency. It is the language in which they think, and it is the mechanism by which they order the world, therefore it will be easier for them to express each individual piece of that, if they have learned to do so (See English as a Second-Order Language teachers). They know the structure from an intuitive and a learned perspective. The only real analogy I can come up with, here, is the division between sorcerous/shamanic practices and hermetic rituals, but that's... not quite right. Anyway, the point is that what you learn from each of these types of speakers will be different; you will have a translation problem. How you think about that language will forever be coloured by how you initially learned that language. It will simply be more engrained, and thus more insidiously difficult to combat.

But it goes even further than language. It goes into all theory, all action, and we recognise it, subtly, even if we can't put it to words. Dance, magic, philosophies, martial arts, math, coding, anything that is taught goes thought a process of intake, absorbtion, deconstruction, reconstruction, and output. In that process, we are completely affected by the manner in which something is presented to us, as well as our own internal inclinations toward or against our lessons.

Let's take martial arts, for example (on my mind; thinking about starting Hapkido classes). Depending on the people from whom you take a martial art, you may learn practical integration of movement into your every day life, or you may learn the philososphy of self-discipline, or you may learn that pain is simply weakness leaving the body, or you may learn that mercy is for the weak and only the strong survive, or you may learn that mercy and elegance are the true markers of mastery, or you may learn all of the above. Depending on your teacher, you may be told either to Crane Stance or Sweep the Leg, and that is a translation problem.

We need to be aware of the context in which and from which we learn the things we learn, so that we are better able to recognise our biases and our habits, in case they start to fuck us over. Not just in making academic assumptions, but in making any assumptions, ever, about anything.

Even that.

Night.

Comments

[unknownbinaries.livejournal.com]

. They know the structure from an intuitive and a learned perspective.

I disagree that this would necessarily it easier to teach or to learn from, at least without any kind of lesson in how to break it down to teach it in the first place. A native language is instinctive. You don't think about it anymore, it's just There.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

True, but that's what I meant by the analogy with the ESOL teachers: They've been trained to dissect it, and break it down and, as such they (hopefully) understand it better than the simple instinct that another native speaker might have.

Hm. That sentence should have read, "They know the structure from BOTH an intuitive and a learned perspective."

My bad.