Nadine Jansen Nadine Jansen

The importance of a good translation

Arriaga Omar Garcés Sunday 24 April 2011

The Licentiate Pero Perez healing, which begins the burning of books of chivalry by the reading of which Mr. Quijano is crazy, wanting to leave the world righting wrongs and redressing injuries, says in Chapter VI of Don Quixote de la Mancha, about a translation of Orlando Furioso, Ariosto, poured from the Italian, who who want to return in another language a book of poems will remove much of its natural value without ever reaching the point of their first birth, ie, perfectly text in their own language. may be true, and not only books of verse. Eduardo Langagne, sick writer celebrated for his translations into English of the work of great poets, that the Italians have coined a valid idiom for such occasions: traduttore, traditore! (Translator, traitor), it is considered that the work of those who translate a text into the mother tongue will always end up betraying the sense of the original.
The best evidence that this can be offered in our own context, a context that encompasses centuries of human history, is that where the Old Testament in Hebrew consigned to the "girl" conceive and give birth a child who would be the son of God (Isaiah 7, 14), who translated this passage into Latin, wrote that she would not give birth to the Messiah, it is natural that the girls give birth, but the "virgin" would conceive the Son of God.
The error is obvious: the Greeks led a virgin girl, because in Greek and in Hebrew both terms have a meaning similar to that of young women, meaning that, however, does not correspond to the miracle achieved by philological Latinos in its version of the Bible, the Vulgate, as "virgin" was not only "girl" to them as "untouched virgin," "pure," that no man has ever known. "

This, not to mention the loss of rhythm or the blandishments of language in a language there but not in another, so that would also have to be reconstructed on the basis of verbal materials in the other language. Every language has been said, is a way of seeing and organizing the world.

But Langagne commented at the time presenting a book of poems of Pessoa had just translate, it would be impossible to learn all the languages \u200b\u200bof the world, so that rather than a betrayal, transferred texts work should be considered a task altruistic, essential to introduce us to other worlds and understand the subtleties of the spirit of other peoples. In the final analysis, errors committed by anyone in any area of \u200b\u200blife.

In this regard, education and his strong arm, books are essential to remove the delay to any people, since an examination of the most important traditions of many others, it is possible to find solutions to dead apparently closed to understanding.

is what one imagines is raised as very risky and daunting undertaking literacy editing and José Vasconcelos, unprecedented anywhere else in the world at any time, bringing thousands of translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey and the classic world literature much of Mexico.

An action that might seem obvious to some, to others appeared as ridiculous, and more in a country where people die hunger and reading scholarly texts from other times and regions was seen as a useless luxury ...

But it is the twenty-first century, paradoxically, we believe that things have evolved. Sufficient to read the life of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, to realize how much they have.