I question the general assumption that a lot of people have that more foreignizing translations are better and more faithful to the original. Although ultimately, that’s a question that’s been debated for millennia and doesn’t have an objective answer.
The more recent Penguin translations were more “foreignizing” instead of “domesticating,” in line with the general trend that when the same work is translated multiple times, subsequent translations tend to be more foreignizing.
I really think we don’t give translators credit when their works are significant literary achievements in their own right. If Moncrieff takes something away but adds something new, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Proust himself has a very distinct writing style that relies on techniques that French (and I think other Romance languages) have that make long sentences still read well, that I don’t think really have good equivalents in English.
Haven’t read a ton of works in both the original and in translation, but IMO the Moncrieff translation of Proust is pretty incredible writing even though the tone and vibe does change a bit in translation.
Me, mirroring the formal register of French: “Paul and me went to the store. Him needed apples.”
I don’t speak Spanish, but that’s still just a feminine word like its counterparts in French, Portuguese, and classical Latin, no? “El” because it starts with a vowel? I mean, English articles change before vowels too. If you want truly messed up gender, look at the French word “gens”:
What is the point here, anyway? If durable goods are 7% of monthly per capita expenditures in both rural India and urban India, what are we supposed to take from that?
Sign reading “Welcome to East Los Angeles, County of Los Angeles”
Last thing you see as you’re leaving the West
Maybe professional translators will disagree, but I think this is just an area where people without that experience are unlikely to have good intuition about what’s easy and hard to translate.
What’s funny about this specific example (and to be clear, I am absolutely not taking the Telegraph’s side) is that “raining cats and dogs” is likely to be easier to translate than “river” or “owl” or “deer,” just to pick a few random examples of basic words that are not very one-to-one with French.
I agree with you, and I am not an anti-AI zealot, but if that (un-disableable, as far as I’m aware) “Try AI mode!” modal pops up one more time in front of my Google search results (despite having clicked “No thanks” approximately 36,363 times), I may be driven to insanity.
Heh, some of us (*ahem*) have been in international long-distance relationships and had a habit of cutting those flights quite close because there was reasonably frequent service between the city pair in question. Social media hates “It depends,” but this is very much a case where “It depends.”
This is anti-French discrimination, I’m reporting you to the Office québécois de la langue française. (Sorry, make that the “Office quebecois de la langue francaise.”)
think crash resistance can solve everything. Frankly, the results speak for themselves. (See the trends in deaths per 10,000 inhabitants or per billion vehicle-km.)
In general, I would say that Europeans have been taking a much more holistic approach to traffic safety that includes a lot of collision avoidance measures (road design, vehicle regs) and more enforcement of speed limits (well, very much varying by country), whereas we in the US tend to…
BTW, the stats that I’m aware of say the rate of seat belt use is about the same in the US and France (~90%). I would be surprised if it isn’t higher in Germany, the UK, and the Nordic countries.
been willing to stick their necks out for road safety even at the risk of populist revolts. (For example, when they tried to reduce limits on rural roads from 90km/h to 80 and then ended up partially backtracking.) It’s hard to imagine politicians in the US doing anything like that these days. (2/2)
I don’t know the European-wide statistics, but the real death traps in France that make up the bulk of its high mortality (compared to European peers, not the US) are rural roads, not its autoroutes (≈Interstates), which are very safe. Also, again speaking of France, politicians have at times (1/n)
Not a tension that’s unique to Alex Karp by any means, but this is a guy who’s cultivated a reputation as an intellectual. As far as I know, he’s done nothing to correct misconceptions that he studied under Jürgen Habermas, presumably because he wants the cultural capital to wear off on him.
Like, if you’re going to talk about “the West,” you’re kind of implying that you think what we owe to classical antiquity is central to modern culture in the US and Europe. You’ve kind of got to pick a lane between that view and a more modern “Europe of Nations” type view.
It’s flying a little under the radar, but his reference to “national cultures” in the next point is weird too. Like, nationalism is just one of many factors in cultural diffusion, and maybe not even that important of one until the Age of Nationalism in the 19th century.
Don’t get me started on the people who take a taxi from the airport in Roissy into Paris. Why? “But it’s too hard to learn a new transit system.” It is not remotely difficult to find your way to the RER. Get a grip, people!
I get why pilots and flight attendants are always rolling their luggage around. And if you’re going to have a car with you, that’s one thing. But even on sidewalks, it makes so much noise! Maybe that’s OK in the US, but it would make me so self-conscious in France, let alone, like, Denmark.
For some reason, it feels like train stations have the opposite effect. Someone can be totally incompetent and somehow still behave well in a train station. This is true both in good train countries (Switzerland) and bad train countries (US, Canada).
OK but why are airports full of people who seem totally confused about where they are, what a sign is, how to walk. The only other places I know with the same hordes of people apparently lacking basic life skills are the cruise ship terminal and the downtown retail area in December.
Yeah but that’s a function of frequency, not the national border. Plenty of direct flights between Seattle and Calgary or whatever. I’d be more hesitant to cut it close on a domestic to Missoula.
Also, why are so many people budgeting like an extra hour for international flights out of the US? It’s not like we have exit checks like Schengen or preclearance like Canada. Most of the time the airline just checks your passport at the gate.
The closest I’ve come to missing a flight is when someone tried to commit suicide by BART when I was taking BART to the airport. Not that common an occurrence, but not *that* uncommon either. But I’m not going to budget enough time to reduce my chances of missing my flight from 3% to 1%.
To read the comments here, a lot of people seem to think that if you’re late for your flight from Seattle to SF that you need to go onto Kayak and book an entirely new flight, which isn’t how any of this works.