The

The
>translations
meme is probably my least favorite meme here. There are plenty of eben maymays on Veeky Forums and they're usually somewhat humorous, but this one is probably the only one that has a real, deleterious effect on the quality of this board, in that it actively seeks to mock and discourage people from ACTUALLY READING BOOKS. People should not be mocked for actually doing things that would likely improve the overall quality of the board.

Of course it's not a "sincere" meme in its origins, but I'm starting to suspect a great number of newfriends are taking this meme way too seriously and immediately posting >translations wherever and whenever they can.

And I say this as someone who has reading fluency in 7 languages and read as many things in the original as possible. I will never ever discourage someone from reading a translation if that's the only option available to them.

Pic related.

Sorry meant to say pic unrelated.

Its died down a lot lately at least.

I will say though, it does at least have a double edge sword of encouraging people to learn other languages

to be quite honest, translated prose is even better for me. I don't give a fuck about the original language if I can't understand 100% of what I read (100% means exactly like your mothertongue, and that's impossible even if you study a foreign language for decades). my favorite thing while reading is to enrich my own vocabulary and my own sensibility towards my language, which I love. fuck the originals. unless it's poetry, literally fuck them and god bless translators.

>fluency in 7 languages
Yeah
You aren't

Thats really nowhere as difficult as you seem to imagine

why don't you anglotards say "I amn't" for the first negative person?

Depends on accent. Irish people do

I think a meaningful contingent of the >translations shitposters, such as yourself, are only doing so out of a misplaced attempt to find some sort of superiority/satisfaction in your own "merits." You've settled on knowing 2 - 3 languages as something that makes you "better" than other anons and will incessantly bring it up in the form of the >translations meme to belittle others/inflate your own fragile ego. It's quite sad, really, and when you see someone who knows 7 languages (many more than you "know") who doesn't have the same kind of pathetic complex that makes you shitpost on an anonymous Mongolian throat singing imageboard, you feel the need to lash out.

holy fucking reddit man

Depends. A lot of poetry is really untranslatable, like Greek, Russian, and Classical Chinese poetry. But you can translate back and forth from Romantic to Germanic languages without that much loss of meaning, and you can always look at the original to look at wordplay and the original meter/rhyme and such

Alright, m8, what 7 languages do you know FLUENTLY. I know three, I'm sure we can cross over somewhere and test your amazing fluency

Given the choice of gleaning a fragment of meaning from translated poetry versus not reading it at all, I'd gladly choose the former.

Not to mention there's much to be said about translations imbuing the work with new meaning, arguably creating a new work of art in its own right. See Borges on the topic. And even if you don't hold with this view, then what is the alternative? Reading Wikipedia summaries so you can shitpost on Veeky Forums?

I'm not OP. I'm but a mere pleb who knows 2.5 languages. But I can spot an angry shitposting pseud when I see one. This is a literature board senpai, not /int/, go wave your polyglot dick there where they actually care. We're here to talk about books.

English, French, Mongolian, Python, Klingon, Swahili, 1337speak.

NOW EXPLAIN IN RESPONSIBLE PROSE WHAT THE FUCK HAS REDDIT TO DO WITH WHAT I FUCKING WROTE

>go wave your polyglot dick there

E P I C

Here's some russian Shakespeare. Even translations cannot agree with each other, and they all hardly feel anything like the original
>>>TRANSLATIONS

WTF I hate Shakespeare now...

>Even translations cannot agree with each other
that's the best part of translations desu

Solid post.
I agree, it also means no love on this board for the artistry and craft of the translations themselves.

trying too hard

Reading fluency user, not general fluency. Depending on the language that can take about a year to achieve, so if you stuck with easy languages that would only take seven years. If user was born into a family where he grew up with two or three languages then it's easy to see why it's so feasible.

Or you know, you could get better at the language.

>and that's impossible even if you study a foreign language for decades)

i could spend a year learning a language

or i could use that time and read a few hundred books

gladly picking the latter

Bloom loves translations though

>I failed at achieving something
>Therefore, it's impossible to achieve for everyone

>if I can't understand 100% of what I read
What if the book you want to read isn't available in your mother tongue? Then you just don't read it or read it in the closest language you understand the most?

What? It only takes people a few years to become more proficient in a language then it's native speakers. What are these ficking memes people delude themselves into believing.

I was learning latin but I quit in everything I do, all the declensions were so overwhelming I couldn't handle it mentally.

that's a few years i could be spending reading books instead

>Depending on the language that can take about a year to achieve
Try 2-3 at the very least, if we're talking about reading literary texts

You do know that choosing to learn a language isn't this monolithic decision that prevents you from doing anything else with your life. It's better to regularly do a little than sometimes do a lot. Asides from the very start when you need to go hard to learn the grammar and the necessary vocabulary for any sort of sentence construction you only need to do an hour a day if you want to. Hell you could do half an hour before work in the morning, half an hour during your lunch breaks and half an hour before bed. You can do it on the bus.
If both of you are on Veeky Forums I highly doubt either of you are so efficient with your time that you couldn't make a few tweaks to your life to give yourself the time without losing out on anything.

It really shouldn't take 2-3 years to learn French just for reading. You already passively know thousands and thousands of words without having done anything. It has have very, very simple grammar. It only takes a couple of weeks to gather all the notes you need for the grammar. Then you just practice by reading the news. Because of the kind of vocabulary used in the news it's a great way to apply your knowledge of grammar. At the same time do vocabulary training. Between some combination like using flashcards, duolingo, and looking up words you don't know in the news.

It really isn't hard. Sure a lot languages would take far longer than a language like French but there is no reason why French can't be learned well enough to read novels in one year.

thats 1.5 hours a day i could be spending reading instead

>If both of you are on Veeky Forums I highly doubt either of you are so efficient with your time that you couldn't make a few tweaks to your life to give yourself the time without losing out on anything.

i have two eyes idiot. i can shitpost and read at the same time. and shitposting is far more fun than learnign some cuck language so you can spam >translations memes on Veeky Forums

This happens once a month that some autistic retard with spaghetti hanging out of an undersized coat's pocket writes a long rant about the translation meme.

It's a meme, chill out. Nobody *actually* cares.

Oh and you def don't speak 7 languages

newfag pls go

>READING fluency in 7 languages
Do you even have it in one?

Learning a language for some people is extremely unfair because if you're not taking a class and don't have any native speakers to talk to in that particular language then you're basically fucked. Even if you're able to read a bit here and there, you're still not using the language enough to get the ins and outs and you have nobody to correct your mistakes.

>you have nobody to correct your mistakes.
you do, actually, it's called a brain

WELL, WRITING IN ALL CAPS IS PRETTY INDICATIVE OF THAT, FOR ONE.
YOU ALSO THROW THE WORD FUCK AROUND ALOT, LIKE A REDDITOR WOULD DO TO MAKE THEIR BASELESS ARGUMENTS SEEM MORE ASSERTIVE (and therefore true) TO HIS FELLOW, COLD AS ICE TEENAGERS.
YOU ALSO HAVE THAT UNIQUE REDDIT FLAVOR OF 'it's not ignorance, it's the shared limit of everyone's potential knowledge' WITH YOUR ASSUMPTION THAT YOU CAN'T BECOME FLUENT IN A LANGUAGE (learning a language 100% is borderline a non-sequitur. You don't even know your mothertongue one hundred percent, as you still have the ability to enrich your vocabulary)
AND I ASSUME THIS SILLY NOTION STEMS FROM WHEN YOUR TRIED TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE BUT COULDN'T ARSED TO REACH A COMPETENT READING LEVEL.

A book isn't translatable. Only the meaning is translatable. The language is the art. What "has a deleterious effect" is this idea that the art isn't in the language, that somehow, the meaning is any more than half the artifact (at best).

>The language is the art
Agree. And this art of the language can be recreated in another language. We call this translation.