On the Relativity Front...

[Alexander Gross2]

As a continuation of our language relativity discussion and for those of you
with an interest in this topic, the paper I presented as the keynote address
at the International Jeromian Translation Conference 3 in Mexico has now
been published on-line.  It appears in the winter edition of Translation
Journal, a review that in its print & electronic forms has been in existence
since 1987.  It is entitled "Some Major Dates and Events in the History of
Translation" and you can see it at:

http://www.accurapid.com/journal/31history.htm

Although the subject matter may appear to deal more with translation than
with linguistics, this is very much in keeping with the views of the French
linguist Georges Mounin (in his many publications something like the David
Crystal of France), who held that there can be no valid theory of
linguistics that is not also a valid theory of translation.

The abstract follows:

ABSTRACT: The speaker will try to show some common threads in the history of
translation or at least some modern parallels with more ancient examples. As
for instance the perils of translating from Sumerian into Hebrew, Sacred
Egyptian into Classical Greek, or Aramaic into Arabic. Or the even greater
physical perils suffered by translators who have been murdered for their
efforts, from a Persian interpreter executed by Themistocles to French and
English translators burnt at the stake by religious conservatives to the
forced suicide of Walter Benjamin in Spain to the assassination of Hitoshi
Igarashi, Salman Rushdie's Japanese translator. Voltaire' s translation of
Hamlet's soliloquy into rhymed Racinian alexandrine couplets will be
compared and contrasted with the problems of translating into and out of
other "Public Presentation Languages," such as the epigrammatic
four-character maxims of Chinese philosophy, poetry, and medicine. The work
of a remarkable Iberian who long ago invented the first relational data base
and also sought to intervene between Christianity and Islam by translating
his own works into Arabic will be described, as will the career of Xuanzang,
perhaps the best-known translator in the world. After a brief glance at the
Persian translation academy of Jundishapur and the convergence at Toledo,
the presentation will close with an attempt to characterize the past fifty
years in translation, which have witnessed our field's greatest outgrowth
but have also seen the development of some curious beliefs concerning
linguistics and machine translation.

Happy New Year to all!

alex