Can we stop the elitist anti-translation memes...

Can we stop the elitist anti-translation memes? The rare cases where texts are untranslatable are not worth the extra trouble of learning an ENTIRELY NEW LANGUAGE.

you're right but you're about to get shit on by a bunch of anons who are desperate to cling to any excuse possible to not read a book and shit on people who do

Is the English translation that bad in comparison to the native text though?

My man if your first language is English just read all the works originally written in English. I guarantee you will never finish them by the time you die.

That entirely depends on the source text and the translation. Some target texts are unadulterated shit, some are great. Céline apparently is hard to translate (I read him in Dutch, so no idea), but even texts/writers that are "hard to translate" can be very much enjoyed in translation, some very rare cases such as Joyce excepted.

tl;dr: fpbp

why is joyce not enjoyable in translation? How even book could be more enjoyable in original language if this is my second or third language and nuances that makes "prose" so great will fly over my head??

>nuances that makes "prose" so great will fly over my head
This is the main thing that gets me. To fully understand what the author's doing with the language we're talking about being fluent, not just having a basic grasp. As much as I wish I was able to be proficient with every language under the sun to fully enjoy works in their original tongue it's hardly practical or likely.

>Protestant heretic detected

What a fucking bullshit

Yes, the meme has definitely to stop

Joyce should be read in English because he's a master of language, actually. Finnegans Wake is untranslatable.
In my opinion you should read a book in its original version only when it hasn't got a translation yet but you urgently need to read it and you can't wait. For example I'm not an English native speaker but recently I've read books in English because I'm interested in current philosophy and I don't want to wait years for a translation. English native speakers are highly disadvantaged though, because they don't even get to know what are the non-English books still untranslated but worth reading NOW. How so? Because they usually learn a language as a hobby or because they want to read their favorite non-English author (so they already have a purpose and they don't discover novelties). I didn't learn English because I wanted to read Joyce, but because I need it to survive in this world. This, though, lets me get in touch with books still untranslated that I coincidentally see on here. This doesn't happen to English native speaker. I don't if I made myself clear... if you have any questions I can clarify my statements

*I don't know if

well some translations are flat out bad, so its not a "meme" its a reality. of course it depends on what you read, the worst offenders of this are poetry translations and most posters here dont touch poets.

itt: monolingual plebs

The only translation I read is the Bible. But in general I avoid reading translations. There are plenty of good books originally written in English to read.

Can confirm (at least for Manheim - Celine). He does a good job. I've read him in both languages, Manheim does him justice.

>There are plenty of good books originally written in English to read
For most of the history of mankind English was a shitty proto-language nobody cared about. Its moment of glory is now, and it's just a lucky coincidence if you were born in an English speaking country. But if you don't read works written in Greek, Latin, Italian, French and German you're basically missing 80% of the best existing literature, so you're just a complete pleb.

I plan on eventually learning Latin or French. But for now reading Shakespeare plays and the KJV bible will do.

Ay yo hold up lemme just go learn all those languages so I can read those books lmao suck a dick faggot I'll just read English books.

>to cling to any excuse possible to not read a book
How could I have not seen this before
You're totally fucking right

>Finnegans Wake is untranslatable.
The mandarin translation is a best seller in China, no joke

it soldnlike 3k copies lol

It was translated in Italian as well, but I've never checked it

The threshold of quality at which a work loses enough in translation to be worth learning the original language for is lower than that of the worst book one would read were they to spend their life reading only the greatest books, and by a significant margin. This thread is full of brainlets who can only comprehend literature at the level of plot and tell themselves they read for theme.

>tfw estoy aprendiendo español para leer libros
>descargué Don Quijote
>no entendí nada
fml

Yo se este sientir

It's just more pseud posturing like most people on this board. I'd bet my left nut 9/10 people who spout that meme are too fucking lazy to learn a single sentence let alone an entire foreign language and alphabet.

I want to agree, but Celine's works don't translate well at all because of all the lower caste French jargon he used. In most cases, the translation is just fine though. If possible, I'd recommend translations that have extensive commentary by the translator. Stanford Luce's translation of Conversations with Professor Y is great.

>The rare cases where texts are untranslatable are not worth the extra trouble of learning an ENTIRELY NEW LANGUAGE.

It may be so, but learning a language gives you much more than the possibility to read books written in it. If you don't have the time to learn it shouldn't stop you from reading, but in the end I think learning a language is always worth the trouble.

>Apenas está aprendiendo español
>Trata de leer un libro de hace 400 años

>German
I happen to have learnt it by the time I was in high school.
>French, Italian
I'm learning Latin right now, those languages should be a joke after that. If not, English is anyway chock full of French vocabulary, and Italian should be instinctively understandable after knowing both French and Latin.
>Greek
Admittedly this will take some time.

Outside of your list I also speak Russian and Chinese. Chinese took me 3 years, which was very long, and I fully believe that it is harder than any other language mentioned. Languages are easily learnt.

I hope you're joking, high-school level German is no way near close to understand literature.

Also Latin has really nothing to do with French directly, sure it's the "back-bone" of most of the languages but it won't be a "joke", it's more beneficial to learn French instead, Latin has no use.

If you cut your time in Veeky Forums down to 5 minutes a day and stopped reading shitty translations, I guarantee you could learn a few foreign tongues in a year s' that you could read the materially how they were supposed to be read: as they wont written.

Depends on the language. I think it's worth it if you have a vested interest (a philosopher should probably know ancient Greek, and artist would do well to know Italian, Latin and Chinese for history, etc.), but there's plenty of languages that don't have much of a point. Who the fuck wakes up thinking they want to learn Estonian? Or Icelandic?

>Languages are easily learn[ed]. (faggot)

This is true. I think it might be easier for those of us that grew up speaking two or three languages, but I think as soon as you skip the hurdle of learning your second, you're good to go. I vaguely remember reading about scientists finding some proof for this as well. That once you've tapped into that part of your brain, it demonstrably becomes easier to memorize new languages.

You don't even have to be that committed. I learned basic Japanese just by fucking around on Rosetta stone for half an hour every week. But that's the key. You have to do it at least once a week. If you're going to be a stupid nigger and try to binge-learn a whole language in three days, it probably won't work out. And never be afraid to challenge yourself and go on to the next phase. You're brain's wired to seek out patterns, so as long as you know the BASIC part of the basics, you should be able to recognize what's going on.

>I hope you're joking, high-school level German is no way near close to understand literature.
I chose that slightly weird wording because I went beyond the high school course as my parents would take me to Germany, and I would read books there on my own to pass the time. You could say I acquired German for free without purposefully going for it.

>Also Latin has really nothing to do with French directly, sure it's the "back-bone" of most of the languages but it won't be a "joke", it's more beneficial to learn French instead, Latin has no use.
I see. Still, I want to learn Latin, and since I have the motivation for it, I know that I will accomplish it.

Chinese, to think of it, has been relatively useless given the 3 year investment. What amazes me is that I can just keep cramming languages inside my head.

pizdish kak dishish

>Languages are easily learnt.
>What amazes me is that I can just keep cramming languages inside my head.

imagine if antilogocentrists already lived during renaissance, we would have been spared protestantism.
>don't be a pleb, luther

Translated poetry is a waste of time. Learn at least one other language and you will have an inexhaustible wealth of poetry between the two.

Definitely this.

Ya ne govoril, chto horosho mogu razgovarivat', no mne ponyatny teksty. Po-tvoemu eto mnogo?

tak naxui blat pizdish?
>rebata ya naxui 5 yazika znayu ))
>no ebat kak 4urka na vsex baltayu((

Nu takoe. Zato ya na nih chitayu. Eto zh Veeky Forums.

> I also speak Russian and Chinese.
>Ya ne govoril, chto horosho mogu razgovarivat'

Lu4she ne 4e ne govori bratok, esli ti plavana znaish ruski, to razgavarivat' lehche dolzhno bit.

In any case, I don't see the point in your objection. Western European languages are all interrelated, and even have ties to Latin and Greek, and if you're gonna do it for reading books, you honestly can do it, because you would be learning, like, 60% of a full language considering the links.

Reading translations is cheaply bought knowledge. You have little knowledge of the context and culture in which the work was originally written. It's better to just read works originally written in a language you know.

Joyce himself when talking with the Italian translator of fw said that "nothing is untranslatable"

literal brainlet

t. continues to read the greeks in translation

good 1 ur killin it

>Joyce should be read in English because he's a master of language, actually.
I wholeheartedly agree, but you are probably the same person that reads Don Quijote in English

Charles Bukowski also got friendly with his German translator when he went on book tours in Germany.

English has the COMBINED! vocabulary of three languages.

>If a translator can't translate something into English
>He's a shitty translator
>Or it's a poorly written book

I don't read the Greeks. The only translations I read are ones of the Bible.

This.
Maybe not for Greek or other small languages like Albanian.
But anyone skilled at English, only need to git gud at etymology, and all untranslated works of Europe become accessible.

Not really. I mean I'm bilingual (English and Spanish) but if a book is in German I'm not learning a fucking language for 8 years to read it. There are important works of literature in dozens of languages; nobody is REALLY fluent in more than two or three.

Reminder that if your writing is so ass-backwards it can't be translated, you are a bad writer. If you use words so nonsensical that they can't be explained in footnote by a translator, it's unlikely native speakers understand them either.

This. We have literally trillions of words. If you can't explain the term in footnotes, you're a bad translator. Or the author is writing totally nonsensically.

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