I thought that Deutscher’s article on how our mother tongue can affect some fundamental aspects of how we think about the world was quite fascinating. It made me think about how some aspects of language are thought of sometimes as untranslatable, or at the very least extremely challenging to translate accurately; it is often said that our goal as translators is to give the readers of our translation as close as an experience to that of readers of the original, and I do wonder if these so-called untranslatable aspects might be reflective of certain irreconcilable differences between the experiences of the two audiences. For instance, consider the Japanese honorific system, and more broadly, keigo in general. Even if we are somehow able to capture accurately the degrees of politeness that were in the original text, it seems to me after reading the article that native English speakers would not be quite as acutely aware of the bearing they have on social relationships.
I think this also brings some clarity to Schleiermacher’s points on the two ways of translating, as he puts it. He draws a distinction between bringing the audience to the author’s original text, which he characterises as giving the foreign audience an experience similar to that if they had learned the language themselves, and bringing the author to the audience as attempting to write what the author would have written had they been a native of that language. Taking Deutscher’s article into account, we can see how these methods are different; in particular, when Schleiermacher says that the “father [of a work] is [the author’s] paternal tongue,” we see what he means, since the author would include in their work ways of thinking that would change if their native language were different, and so of course the work would be fundamentally different if we attempted the second method.
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