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Is that a fish in your ear?

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    Is that a fish in your ear?

    I'm half way through reading this book, subtitled "The amazing adventures of translation", and it is superb.

    I heartly recommend it to anyone interested in language in any way at all, but especially, obviously, for anyone who ever does any translation.

    (Apologies if it's been mentioned before, but i did a search and couldn't find it. if it was up to me that fucking stupid "current reading" thread would be disbanded and broken down into its constituent parts. It would certainly make the books forum more user friendly and worth visiting. /ends rant)

    #2
    Is that a fish in your ear?

    This is a very good review http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/books/review/is-that-a-fish-in-your-ear-translation-and-the-meaning-of-everything-by-david-bellos-book-review.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

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      #3
      Is that a fish in your ear?

      ad hoc wrote:
      (Apologies if it's been mentioned before, but i did a search and couldn't find it. if it was up to me that fucking stupid "current reading" thread would be disbanded and broken down into its constituent parts. It would certainly make the books forum more user friendly and worth visiting. /ends rant)
      Yes.

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        #4
        Is that a fish in your ear?

        I'm going to order this; it sounds great.

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          #5
          Is that a fish in your ear?

          Yes, it is an excellent read for anybody interested in words and language; I finished it the other week then moved on to Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher, which covers some similar ground; it also explores whether there are some languages that are more 'civilised' and complex than others, how some languages have words and meanings for concepts that others don't (there's a language that would not understand that we only have one word for 'we', rather than separate words/sentences meaning 'I and you', 'I and somebody else', 'a group of us and not you', a group of us and you') and whether language has an impact on how we think about things. Both books have kept me awake at night, thinking - which might be a good thing, I'm not sure...

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            #6
            Is that a fish in your ear?

            Whoah, wait. There are certainly languages that distinguish between inclusive and exclusive first person singular (such as Niugini Pisin, in which there are the words "yumi" and "wipela", if I remember rightly). But are you saying, or is Deutscher saying, or are you saying that Deutscher is saying, that speakers of those languages wouldn't understand that we use the same word for both?

            That's like claiming English speakers don't understand that German uses the same word for "under" and "among". Whereas in fact that's really easy to understand, isn't it? It just uses the same word for "under" and "among"; there.

            The question whether language influences how we think can be interpreted in various ways. In some of them, the answer is obviously "yes": if language couldn't influence thought, we wouldn't use language in an attempt to persuade. But there's another sense, broadly called "Whorfianism", in which it's claimed that the mere fact of speaking language A instead of language B can profoundly affect how one sees the world. The evidence for this is distinctly elusive.

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              #7
              Is that a fish in your ear?

              if it was up to me that fucking stupid "current reading" thread would be disbanded and broken down into its constituent parts.
              Amen, brother. It's like having a "current football news" thread on the football board, in which everything anyone wants to discuss goes into one huge, disparate thread, and it makes as much sense. The idea that you discuss the book you are currently reading is surely the whole point of the Books board - it doesn't need a special thread for the purpose - you start a new thread for a new book. Surely.

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                #8
                Is that a fish in your ear?

                It's a bit of a hefty book, with lots of ideas, but to illustrate one of them Deutscher is saying that in the first place the average user of any language thinks that all languages would have the same concepts, so he just uses that example as a way of demonstrating that it's a whole lot more complex and interesting than that.

                'the mere fact of speaking language A instead of language B can profoundly affect how one sees the world. The evidence for this is distinctly elusive.' is the bit I'm on now, fascinating stuff...

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                  #9
                  Is that a fish in your ear?

                  Fussbudget got me this for Christmas. And I didn't even drop many hints.

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                    #10
                    Is that a fish in your ear?

                    I bought it for myself for xmas. Overcoming a longstanding grudge against the author to do so:

                    he once interviewed me for a temporary lectureship in French at Manchester and started the interview by saying 'we aren't going to appoint' but then proceeded to quiz me, at interview length, about why I thought the range of French PhD students/candidates for the post wasn't as strong as he'd have liked at that time; what the trends for Phd topics were; who I'd met on the conference circuit etc.

                    I should've charged a fucking consultancy fee. Or walked out.

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                      #11
                      Is that a fish in your ear?

                      You guys probably know this already, but Eco's Mouse or Rat is a fantastic book on translation.

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                        #12
                        Is that a fish in your ear?

                        On a slightly tangential note, one wonders whether translation trends in the publishing industry follow public demand or depend on the number and quality of translators. Thus, in the nineteenth century, French, German and Russian authors were most converted into the vernacular, partly based on the standing of the author, but also as these were the most widely understood languages. A brief vogue for Italian authors that followed the breakthrough of Eco has faded, and one wonders how long the current Nordic wave will remain bestseller gold. By contrast, Coelho's ephemeral popularity had no knock-on effect for other Portuguese-language writers (except Saramango, perhaps?), and the general absence of Arabic and Chinese translations raises the debate over whether that is due to the difficulty of the languages, paucity of authors or thematic inaccessibility of their works.

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                          #13
                          Brilliant and fascinating article by Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach fame) on Google Translate

                          https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...nslate/551570/

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                            #14
                            Outstanding

                            The initial anecdote (two friends, one English, one Danish, each of whom are proficient in the other's native language, process their communications through Google Translate) is as baffling to me as it is to Hofstadter.
                            Last edited by ursus arctos; 02-02-2018, 15:07.

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