Latin translator3/29/2023 This is not just a problem if you are translating poetry, or some difficult literary text: everyday French has any number of colloquialisms that do not sound right if you put them literally into English.Ī gruff French bishop once asked me about my studies when I was completing my MA dissertation on some Renaissance translations of Pindar. Those of us who have studied French remember how tempting it can be to leave certain phrases in the original language, not only on the grounds that it allegedly looks sophisticated to do so, but because we either don’t know what they mean or else don’t have the imagination or linguistic resources to transform them into plain English. That’s exactly how translation feels sometimes, certainly where jokes are concerned. Students of Greek tragedy will remember that image from early in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: βοῦς ἐπὶ γλώσσῃ μέγας / βέβηκεν (“a great ox stands on my tongue”). This is painfully evident when I try to tell a Punjabi joke in English. But if you think a particular set of thoughts in one language, you cannot always figure out how to express it in another. Many members of my own family are multilingual, with varying degrees of Punjabi, Hindi and English, along with whatever languages they learnt at school, or picked up for various religious or professional reasons. If you speak more than one language fluently, you are not necessarily good at translating. Translation is simply the art of taking something in one language and expressing it accurately in another. Then again, translators who succeed at this task are rare in every age.Ī face that has seen things: “Cicero’s bust” (Capitoline Museum, Rome, Italy). He didn’t just provide mechanical, literal-minded translations: he wanted the Greek Classics to sound like themselves when rendered into his own language. Perhaps, though, his contemporaries were less conscientious than he was. He thought hard about the relationship between Latin and Greek. Or was there? Cicero himself was a brilliant translator, particularly of Plato. But there seems to have been no point in sticking up for most contemporary translations of Greek books. He defends Latin as a language, and has a few positive-sounding things to say about the Latin literary tradition, even though he seems tacitly to accept its inferiority to Greek literature. The discussion is interesting in part because Cicero frankly acknowledges just how bad a lot of translations were in his day. He describes intellectuals who scorn to read philosophy in their native language, yet have no problem with Greek literary texts translated word-for-word ( ad verbum e Graecis expressas) into Latin. Here Cicero discusses a few of the problems involved with writing a philosophical work in the Roman world one of these is the Romans’ inferiority complex when it came to Classical Greek. Yet if you are interested in translation, you probably want to read the first few pages of Book One at the very least. Cicero’s De Finibus Malorum et Bonorum (“On the Ends of Good and Evil”) is a true classic – a text that many people own but few ever bother to read.
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