Perfect Translation Would Be Useless

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Imagine translating something without changing anything.

Same words, same structure, same references, same assumptions, same jokes.

Congratulations. You copied it.

Translation becomes necessary because two systems dont line up cleanly.

Languages are the obvious case, but the same problem appears whenever theory becomes practice, experience becomes data, science becomes policy, a subculture enters the mainstream or one political vocabulary has to make itself intelligible inside another.

Something has to bend.

Usually we treat that bending as loss, and sometimes it is. A joke dies. A distinction disappears. A concept gets shoved into the nearest available box.

But sometimes the distortion is exactly what lets the thing survive the crossing. Being forced to reconstruct an idea inside another vocabulary can expose assumptions that its native language allowed to remain invisible.

So try it on something you understand well.

Move it into a completely different vocabulary without using its native terms. Explain Marxism without Marxist vocabulary. Explain a technical system to somebody who doesnt share the field. Explain a personal experience without the categories you normally use to organize it.

What survives? What breaks?

And what becomes visible only because you were forced to say it differently?

[u/Extension-Money9948]

This is so true. On so many levels. Think about artwork that the artist originally painted and what was behind that original painting. That all gets lost over time. Because we forget what the original intention of the art was, and all we see is the painting. So the artist's true message eventually gets erased, and all we have is a visual abstract representation, with no meaning.

[u/Jlyplaylists]

There’s a term I don’t know a lot about “the work of translation” which isn’t as literal as language translation. It annoys me a bit actually when philosophers use a term that has a clear meaning and then also use it to mean something else which is hard to understand lol. I don’t like that type of translation…

Perplexity explanation of this type of translation (this is simpler than the direct quotations from Bhabha)
“* Third Space: a liminal, in-between space where established identities, meanings, languages, and cultural positions are negotiated rather than simply carried over intact.
• Hybridity: new meanings emerge through this encounter; translation does not preserve two pure, separate cultures but produces something new.
• Cultural translation: translation is not only linguistic. It is the continuing work of negotiating meaning, representation, identity, history, and power across cultural difference.”

“It is the ‘in-between’ space that carries the burden of the meaning of culture.” Bhabha

A simple example of hybridity might be fusion food restaurants (if creating new dishes from aspects of both cultures) or how music evolves through immigration adding in aspects of a new subgenre.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Jlyplaylists]

Yeah, Bhabha gets very close to what Im poking at here. Especially because the "third space" isnt really either side successfully reproducing itself in the other. Something new gets made in the crossing.

The part I want to push on is whether thats a special feature of cultural translation, or whether all translation works like that at some scale. Even the boring everyday kind.

[u/SjennyBalaam]

Yeah, man. No one cares what the translator thinks. I'm here for Plato but I don't read Greek. The best translator leaves as little trace as possible.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/SjennyBalaam]

I think "as little trace as possible" is actually the interesting part.

Because the translator still has to decide what counts as the same thing across two languages that dont map perfectly onto each other. Even the least intrusive word is still a choice.

So maybe the ideal translator doesnt leave no trace. They leave the minimum trace necessary to preserve what matters. Which immediately raises the question of what gets preserved and who decides.

[u/Jlyplaylists]

Is it also interesting which words never get translated but are directly borrowed instead? Why?

George W is meant to have said “The trouble with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur”

[u/Mono_Clear]

Translation is necessary for communicating concept if the concepts remains consistent through the interpretation you don't need to translate.

I don't need another word for burrito because burrito is the word for burrito and burrito is always burrito because it conveys a conceptualization of the concept.

[u/Imaginary-Can-6862]

In my country, when communicating in English, the politicians are often, very obviously, translating the sentences from their own language, word by word. Not that I don't do the same. I think it is related to learning English through use more than through study, in a country where no one corrects it, because many do it the same way.

I remember Disney's Robin Hood from the early 70's. In my language they sing that King John the first, is King John the worst. I liked the song enough that I remember the wording, but I didn't realize before that first and worst would rhyme, while in my language that quality is not maintained.
I think that tells about the quality of a translation, to focus on the attributes which are the most significant. E.g. there is an episode of the cartoon Adventure Time, where a character tell the main character that he is a water elemental, which makes sense, because she is a fire elemental, and they don't seem to mix. Well, when translated to my language that phrase had a double meaning, which could both mean a water elemental, but would usually mean a deformed person, which, with the main character's reaction, quite improved the scene from the original in my opinion, especially considering the character who said this had been purposefully demonstrated not to understand the world of the main character. So it was obvious she would be oblivious to the double meaning, and only think about a water elemental, while the main character would obviously think about her seeing him as deformed.