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The two reading assignments for this week are Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the
The two reading assignments for this week are Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” and Eugene Nida’s “Principles of Correspondence.” Since we will not be meeting in-person this week, I am assigned the Discussion Questions here and you will have to (1) answer each of the bullet points questions below and (2) respond to at least one of your classmates, indicating your agreement with their ideas, areas they may have missed, or some other detail you think it important but not mentioned. In ALL CASES, you must be respectful when responding to classmates (there is ZERO tolerance for any offensive, prejudicial and hurtful language). Discussion Questions:
“Task of the Translator”
In the essay, Benjamin says that ‘translations that are more than transmissions of a message are produced when a work, in its continuing life, has reached the age of its fame’. However, when can a work of literature be considered to have reached such a level of fame? Can a translation be considered a work of art on its own and if so, when? Or is any such fame obtained for a translation a direct result of the fame of the original?
One task of the translator is to identify the intention towards the language into which the work is to be translated and, on that basis, create an echo of the original in the translation. But how does a translator decode this intention and then produce such an echo? How should the reader understand this intention of the translator?
The extent to which the translation can correspond to the essence of a work is determined objectively by the translatability of the original. That said, can a person truly determine, on an objective level, the translatability of the original or is such a process of determination necessarily subjective? Why or why not?
Discussion Questions: “Principles of Correspondence”
How does Nida understand ‘differences’ in translation and what are these ‘differences’?
What are the three basic factors in translating as outlined by Nida? What does each mean in detail?
What are the four principle levels in decoding in any language as described by Nida?
What are the two basic orientations to translating as outlined by Nida?
According to Nida, what are the four basic requirements of a translation? Explain the importance of each.
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