Reading Guy Deutscher’s “You Are What You Speak” and Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “On the Different Methods of Translating” made me reflect on how language not only describes the world but quietly builds it. In Deutscher’s essay, I was fascinated by his argument that our mother tongue does not limit what we can think, but rather what we must constantly pay attention to. His examples—like how some Aboriginal languages use cardinal directions instead of left or right—made me realize how language trains perception. It reminded me that speaking a language is not just communication; it is living inside a certain worldview.
Schleiermacher’s essay connected this idea to translation. His distinction between moving the reader toward the writer (foreignization) and the writer toward the reader (domestication) helped me see translation as a form of negotiation between minds shaped by different linguistic habits. I was particularly struck by how Gregory Rabassa’s translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude embodies Schleiermacher’s ideal: he lets English readers feel the rhythm and strangeness of the writer's world instead of smoothing it into something familiar. Reading the two texts together made me see that understanding across languages is always partial, but that partiality is what makes it human. Language both separates and connects us, shaping how we see, translate, and imagine one another.
No comments:
Post a Comment