Deutscher & Schleiermacher Readings - Sydnee

 I thought the Deutscher article was an interesting read having read some of Whorf’s writing on the influence of language on people’s realities, and was especially amused to find the note included at the end. My understanding of Whorf’s actual interest and hypothesis leaned toward the ‘weak form’ of linguistic determinism or linguistic relativism, which is more or less what Deutscher supported and gave examples of in his piece. One example I recall from Whorf was from an Native American language in which there were different tenses than English’s past, present, and future, but that was not extended to imply that time was fundamentally experienced in a different way by different groups of people. Rather, it was just the idea that this difference in grammatical structure could indicate something about how people think about time, similarly to the example in our reading about the egocentric versus geographic directions. Speakers of languages that exclusively use geographic directions don’t literally have innate compasses that tell them which way is north, but rather learn and incorporate directions and positioning into their lives in different ways. 

In the Schleiermacher reading, much of the discussion comparing foreignizing and domesticating approaches to translation were useful and overlapped with what we have discussed in class. However, I thought it also seemed to imply that a translation should commit wholly to one approach or the other, and that some mix of the two approaches could not end but in failure and confusion. I’m sure it wasn’t a truly binary statement, but it made me wonder if there is any sort of consensus on that idea among translators. Are there texts that possibly could benefit from partial domestication and partial foreignization? I think so, and assuming that this text is not brand new, it seems to me that readers who are interested in translated literature are more culturally informed than before, especially with the rise in popularity of Japanese culture, for example. The amount of ‘global’ cultural knowledge that the average person has ought to have increased since the internet and such, but I suppose that exposes that I kind of subscribe to the idea that domestication inherently assumes an abysmal amount of prior knowledge, when really it can be a useful approach for many other reasons.