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invariance
Jun. 24th, 2025 09:40 pmTranslation is something that both fascinates me and.. in a way.. I find repulsive in the same sense that considering the vastness of the unknown ocean does. It's, quite literally, unfathomable.
*smiles* Someone use to call me that. I'd ask if they knew how much I loved them, and they'd stroke me and say no, I was so deep, they could not fathom me.
Translation is like that to me. I think one of the canonical examples of this is "hiraeth" being untranslatable from Welsh to English. It's not really, it's just not a one-to-one translation. It means longing, something akin to nostalgia, or even homesickness. It's used in banal language, though it's often prescribed very poetic undertones.
There are words with less literary aspirations that still carry a lot of cultural information with them - "tiddies" for example. Sure, we can translate that to breasts, but would one use the two words interchangeably? No, because some additional nuance is there. I was reading something recently that made the claim that "tiddies" and "titties" even carry slightly different connotations, and where you might use tiddies to refer to an anime character, you'd use titties for an actual human pair. What about 'tit'? Other slang, are they analogous? Is there any difference in use between age, class, sex, sexuality, etc... demographics?
Whenever we translate something, we run the risk of missing out on some nuance. Some richness is, inevitably, lost. It cannot be helped. The human experience as a whole is a set of untranslatable qualia.
Does this mean that we should never seek to be known? Are we even knowable? And if not, does that mean we shouldn't try?
*smiles* Someone use to call me that. I'd ask if they knew how much I loved them, and they'd stroke me and say no, I was so deep, they could not fathom me.
Translation is like that to me. I think one of the canonical examples of this is "hiraeth" being untranslatable from Welsh to English. It's not really, it's just not a one-to-one translation. It means longing, something akin to nostalgia, or even homesickness. It's used in banal language, though it's often prescribed very poetic undertones.
There are words with less literary aspirations that still carry a lot of cultural information with them - "tiddies" for example. Sure, we can translate that to breasts, but would one use the two words interchangeably? No, because some additional nuance is there. I was reading something recently that made the claim that "tiddies" and "titties" even carry slightly different connotations, and where you might use tiddies to refer to an anime character, you'd use titties for an actual human pair. What about 'tit'? Other slang, are they analogous? Is there any difference in use between age, class, sex, sexuality, etc... demographics?
Whenever we translate something, we run the risk of missing out on some nuance. Some richness is, inevitably, lost. It cannot be helped. The human experience as a whole is a set of untranslatable qualia.
Does this mean that we should never seek to be known? Are we even knowable? And if not, does that mean we shouldn't try?
