Translation is seldom a straightforward exercise.1 One may be reminded of all those hypothetical but nonetheless disappointed British tourists who happily tried to visit a football match in the United States of America and left very confused. And such contemporary matters, like when the sport that the British call ‘football’ is known as ‘soccer’ in certain other parts of the world, are complicated enough.2 Imagine if a chasm of more than three millennia separates us from the language we aim to understand! And it is bridging such a chasm that we are attempting in today’s blog. As I shall show you the difficulty with understanding the lexicon of the ancient Levantine language that is today known as Ugaritic.
Category Archives: Translation Studies
Translation as Obfuscation: Is ‘The Second Sex’ by Simone de Beauvoir?
None of us can read all possible languages. For many of the important books that shaped our lives, from literary works that broadened our minds to philosophy treatises which opened new ways of thinking to us, we had thus to rely on translations. Which in turn meant trusting translators and the choices they made. And though there are many possible and valid ways to translate the written word from one language into another – on a spectrum that runs from ephemeral attempts to craft an equivalent text to complete re-imaginings – sometimes there are obvious mistakes.1 And none of these mistakes are perhaps as remarkable, or as instructive on the noble craft of translation itself, as those that can be found in the two attempts to translate Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe in English, both called The Second Sex.2
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A.I. and Assyriology
To study Assyriology is both an intellectual joy and an exercise in sadness. The latter may come as a surprise to those who have read my breezy blogs about the fascinating world of the ancient Near East. Because, while it is true that we possess many useful sources from which we have learned a lot over the decades, we still lack a lot of essential information.1 For example, to use the story-based methodologies that can be found within the environmental humanities, with which we aim to establish how the people back then used to think about and deal with nature, we do need some stories.2 When these specific sources have been lost to time, such as with respect to ancient Elam – roughly the southwest and east of modern Iran – applying such methodologies is quite impossible.3 But we should not abandon all hope! Not only are there probably still clay tablets and other documents preserved in undiscovered archeological find spots across the Near East, but there are also thousands of unread fragments of clay tablets, papyri, and the other media just waiting to be studied, which sometimes haven’t been read since they were taken out of the ground. Extensively celebrating the latter reassurance would be premature, though. Because, there are at the moment simply not enough experts to study all these documents – even if they can be read.4 Luckily, we came into some good news recently: A.I., an abbreviation of the term ‘artificial intelligence,’ can be of service! Or can it?