[continued from previous message]   
      
   decide which to use when?   
      
   In some sense, both of these (gender and familiarity) are the same   
   problem: distinctions in one language that do not exist in   
   another. A common example given is that Russian has no single word   
   for "blue", but instead has two words, one for "light blue"   
   ("goluboy") and one for "dark blue" ("siniy"). (Both Google and   
   DuckDuckGo translate "blue" as "siniy".)   
      
   "Mother tongue": If in a novel in English has some people   
   occasionally speak in Spanish (being their mother tongue, or even   
   as a way to conceal what they're saying), what does a Spanish   
   translation do with this?   
      
   (When this happens in movies, I will sometimes switch the   
   subtitles to that language, just to see what they do.)   
      
   Coetzee says to Dimoppulos, "your fantasy, that you were composing   
   the book in Spanish, for the first time--that you were in a sense   
   its author--was not unfounded." This immediately brought to mind   
   the Jorge Luis Borges story, "Pierra Menard, Author of the   
   Quixote", in which Menard does not translate DON QUIXOTE, but   
   concentrates on the work so much that he in fact recreates the old   
   Spanish as the author--the literary equivalent of method acting.   
      
   Coetzee also says, "In a film set in ancient Rome, you observe, we   
   do not expect Julius Caesar to speak in Latin. But--a thought   
   experiment--would it not be interesting if Shakespeare's JULIUS   
   CAESAR could be performed in a hupothetical Latin two thousand   
   years old, subtitled for our convenience in our own language? We   
   might learn a lot from the experience, principally about points of   
   untranslatability between Caesar's time and ours, points at which   
   the Romans are irretrievably alien to us." But the subtitling is   
   merely translation back into English, so it's not clear what is   
   accomplished by this--there is no untranslatability visible to a   
   viewer who doesn't know Latin.   
      
   And this has been done. Mel Gibson's THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST was   
   entirely in Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic, then subtitled in English.   
   But it started with a script in English, which was then translated   
   into Latin, Hebrew, or Aramaic. And the, that was translated into   
   the English subtitles. This may be because subtitles have more   
   restrictions than dialogue: they have to be brief enough for   
   people to be able to read them in the time they are on the screen.   
   (The rule of thumb seems to be no more than two lines of text,   
   displayed from two to four seconds. How one would do this with   
   rapid-fire dialogue is left as an exercise for the subtitler.)   
      
   (Of course, Greek was actually more in use than Latin at the time,   
   but the translator decided to use Latin, for which there was more   
   historical record of upper-class versus lower-class usage. See   
    for more information.)   
      
   Gibson also filmed APOCALYPTO using the Yucatec Mayan language,   
   although this was based on the modern language, as we have no   
   records of what the pre-Columbian version would have sounded like.   
      
   All in all, a lot to get out of a 120-page book. [-ecl]   
      
   ===================================================================   
      
                                        Evelyn C. Leeper   
                                        evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com   
      
      
              What has the study of biology taught you about the   
              Creator, Dr. Haldane?"  JBS Haldane: "I'm not sure,   
              but He seems to be inordinately fond of beetles."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)