[shagie]

Back in college, I recall a professor saying that German students of philosophy would learn English to be able to read Nietzsche in translation rather than as it was written. (Upon reflection, it might have been Kant - https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/28743 )

My latin was too rusty to be able to read Meditations on First Philosophy as it was written. ( https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23306 ).

A translation from Latin to English ( https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosop... ) necessarily changes those intents/concepts/ideas into those that the reader is more familiar with.

A translation from English of 1000 AD to 2000 AD has the same necessary changes http://www.hieronymus.us.com/latinweb/Mediaevum/Beowulf.htm

Is it ok to read Liu Cixin's work 三体 as Ken Liu's translation known to the English speaking word as The Three-Body Problem? Or should I learn Chinese and immerse myself in the culture of China in order to read it with those intents / concepts / ideas as things frozen on paper?

There are two problems - the book captured at its time may not be accessible anymore. Secondly, even if you can read the words it may be that the words those concepts map to in today's language are not the concepts that the author intended.

So... how short of a time frame is not not acceptable to read the work in translation?

I hold that a translation across time is not really any different than a translation of a modern work across languages and cultures.

[djoldman]

This isn't a problem.

The translation is a new work.

The original work in the original language stays frozen.

Incidentally, the translation is treated the same and is frozen in the same manner.

[evilduck]

Individual beliefs aside, the Christian Bible makes for a fascinating case study in book translations. Some translations are modern takes on an existing language translation like translating the King James Bible into modern English as literally as possible, while some take their own liberties with interpreting the original text as it was written and come up with somewhat dramatically different results. Translations between languages with dramatically different language syntax and grammars exists, as well as abridged snippets and (probably) millions of derivative texts used for lessons and teaching. And it's been going on for over a millennium, so we get perspectives on the cultures and languages themselves dramatically changing over time too.

[shagie]

> Individual beliefs aside, the Christian Bible makes for a fascinating case study in book translations.

The start of the gospel of John is one that is particularly thought provoking for me because we can more easily grasp the meaning of the original words.

https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/jhn/1/1/t_conc_998001

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.

en archē ēn ho logos kai ho logos ēn pros theos kai ho logos ēn theos.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

And you'll note in that λόγος has been translated to "Word". But logos means such more than just "word" (the word for word is λέξις léxis). Logos, as understood in Greek philosophy was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos

> Ancient Greek philosophers used the term in different ways. The sophists used the term to mean "discourse". Aristotle applied the term to refer to "reasoned discourse" or "the argument" in the field of rhetoric, and considered it one of the three modes of persuasion alongside ethos and pathos. Pyrrhonist philosophers used the term to refer to dogmatic accounts of non-evident matters. The Stoics spoke of the logos spermatikos (the generative principle of the Universe) which foreshadows related concepts in Neoplatonism.

This was relating the philosophy of the Greeks (even then a couple of hundred of years old) to that of the early forms of Christianity.

I would contend that "In the beginning was the [ability to reason, link the rational nature of the universe to rational discourse]" ... but that doesn't fit well in translation or even liner notes. And so, we're left with the word "Word".

---

One of the late night Bay Area public TV programs (not sure if it was KQED or KTEH) had a once a week program back in the late 90s / early 00s that was a verse by verse bible study looking at the oldest forms of the text and looking at specific word meanings like rāṣaḥ https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h7523/kjv/wlc/0-1/ and hāraḡ https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h2026/kjv/wlc/0-1/ - where they are used (you'll note the contexts are different while one is killing in general, the other is a specific type of killing).

Anyways... it was an interesting program that had a lot of linguistic study of ancient languages with the Bible as the text being translated.

[47282847]

Why not translate it as “consciousness“? Seems quite obvious to me?

[shagie]

It likely came that way via the Vulgate ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgate ) which was a translation of Greek into Latin in the fourth century. It was the official Catholic version in 1545 - 1563 (the KJV was translated in 1611).

in principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum

Though going back to logos - even that word changed meaning over the the centuries from Heraclitus (5th century BC) ( https://chs.harvard.edu/chapter/17-the-heraclitean-logos/ https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/12/logos-of-hera... https://modernstoicism.com/heraclitus-and-the-birth-of-the-l... ) to the neoplatonist school (3rd century AD)

The early Christian church traditions were a battlefield of dueling scriptures and philosophies.

Some books that I'd recommend on that area. Note that my approach to the Bible isn't one of a believer but rather as another work of ancient philosophy (which was my favorite philosophy class of my almost not getting a CS degree) and stoicism is the branch within there that I've read the most of.

https://www.amazon.com/Stoicism-Early-Christianity-Tuomas-Ra...

https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Christianities-Battles-Scripture...

https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Scriptures-Books-that-Testament/...

[cxr]

It's a lot more complicated than that.

> some take their own liberties with interpreting the original text as it was written

The "original text" in many cases is simply not known; there are multiple "sources" to translate from, so part of the job of those who are putting together a new edition is to discern between the variant texts and work out which one should be treated as canonical. This can obviously have a major impact on the result, and it's all before any translation ever occurs.

[bombcar]

Exactly. And each offers its own perspective and has its own value.

Sure, if you could only have one you'd want the original work in the original language, but that isn't as accessible as translations and other enhancements/improvements.

For example, Euclid's Elements in the original language has no diagrams; almost every translation and even reprints with the original have diagrams added. And those diagrams haven't been without controversy, either.

[dhosek]

I’ve often wondered if Greeks were at a disadvantage in reading Homer since they would have the choice of reading either the essentially foreign original text or what would feel like a bowdlerization as a modernized text, while translations to other languages wouldn’t have that same negative association connected to them.

[alexey-salmin]

Funny thing is the original _text_ probably didn't even exist. Mainstream theory is that Iliad was a purely oral tradition at first and was written down (not written) a few decades or centuries later. The sack of Troy happened shortly before the Late Bronze Age Collapse which among other things destroyed the Greek writing system now known as the Linear Script B. The Greek Alphabet had only appeared 3 centuries later and the period in between is often referred as the "Greek Dark Ages", since there was no writing system for the Greek language at that time.

One way to see Iliad is as a bard's song about lost good time before the apocalypse -- when Greek cities were mighty, trade flourishing, armies big etc.

[mcguire]

Don't forget that you're not reading the text as it was originally written; the surviving texts are copies of copies. Reconstructing, partially, the original text is possible if you have many downstream copies from different sources but never perfect.

[scarmig]

Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach fame) has written a whole lot about this and related questions. Translator, Trader is a great essay (my favorite work of his) that anyone who thinks about translation and its implications a lot should check out.