Thread by @BretDevereaux

It is really tricky to explain and even trickier to prove to readers who have perhaps not so much experience with different languages that just because a word X in foreign language is translated to word Y in English does not mean they represent precisely the same concept. 1/8

This apropos of arguing that English 'courage' isn't quite the same as Latin's fortis or virtus, or Greek's ἀνδρεία (or any other number of similarly translatable words), despite the fact that in a translation you will, of course, read 'courage' for those words. 2/8

So you end up arguing in circles because the retort comes back, "but these are all forms of courage."

But they're not! The Greeks didn't have modern English 'courage' in mind forming ἀνδρεία and senses of courage are non-overlapping. 3/8

I give some concrete examples of this in last week's post, here: acoup.blog/2021/02/05/col…

Noting how different forms of bravery/courage required literally opposite actions (and the emotional predicates to those actions). 4/8

All of which is to say, in a way, the very act of translating a text can create a misleading impression of its universality - some of the cultural specificity is erased unless you remember that the translation isn't the text, but merely a flat representation of it. 5/8

Just the very act of rendering a text into English makes it seem more Anglophone - more friendly to the broad complex of primarily English-speaking cultures - than it may actually be (and the same of course for any other language). 6/8

Now retired, Richard Minear (whose classes I took at @UMassHistory ) his phrase for this was 'translation is treason' and in a class setting he brought that home by exposing some of the compromises in the translation of a Japanese novel...that, as I recall, he translated. 7/8

Glad that I had that lesson so early - beware of translations, especially of abstract concepts! Chances are there are a lot of shades of meaning (perhaps important ones) which won't quite match up! end/8