{"id":277946,"date":"2010-04-22T20:08:24","date_gmt":"2010-04-22T20:08:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/04\/22\/foreignization-and-neologism\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:40:55","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:40:55","slug":"foreignization-and-neologism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/04\/22\/foreignization-and-neologism\/","title":{"rendered":"Foreignization and Neologism"},"content":{"rendered":"

A shorter post today: what are blogs for if not indulging (\u00e0 livre ouvert<\/i>, as they say) parbaked ruminations? Removing this one from deep freeze and tossing it to the hive mind. Two summers back at Banff, an author was defending her insistence on using foreign words in her novel, which her American editor objected to. I believe the word she\u2019d picked out as an example was one for a kind of bed, because to say the word \u201cbed\u201d in English\u2014or even \u201ccot,\u201d which it was visually closer to\u2014was not to name the item in question with any accuracy. It was precisely a kind of bed her likely readers would not be used to having around, much less making or lying in.<\/p>\n

M. Lynx Qualey brings up this practice in the context of translation at the QC<\/a> \u2019s Constant Conversation<\/i><\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

On the other hand, there\u2019s a more complex foreignizing. For instance, in Elias Khoury\u2019s Yalo<\/i>, translated by Humphrey Davies, you will find the word kohno<\/i>, which appears often, untranslated. But this word\u2014changed into an English phrase\u2014would break down its meaning into too many component parts. By leaving it as kohno<\/i>, Davies holds the concept together, and creates an image of kohno<\/i> in the reader\u2019s mind. Perhaps even teaches us what kohno<\/i> means.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

My brother, a Japan scholar, once got off the Acela excitedly brandishing the Amtrak magazine, Arrive<\/i>. It had used the Japanese word for delicious in a restaurant review. \u201cIn a few years,\u201d he predicted, \u201cit\u2019ll be hip to say oishii<\/i> at a sushi bar.\u201d Menus may rival literature as a smuggler, into English, of alien vocabularies. After all, everyone eats, and likely less parochially than they read.<\/p>\n

All ordinary examples of ways foreign words can pass into parlance, reinforced by repetition until they summon a rough concept or clear image. \u201cThe result,\u201d Edith Grossman writes in Why Translation Matters<\/i><\/a>, \u201cof the linguistic infusion of new means of expression is an expansion of vocabulary, evocative potentiality, and structural experimentation.\u201d Matthew Ward\u2019s use of Maman in the first line to his 1998 translation of The Stranger<\/i> (instead of Stuart Gilbert\u2019s 1946 \u201cMother\u201d) may be read among other things as a victory, in the intervening decades, for compulsory public school foreign language education. Though we worry, too, about how aggressive the already dominant English is in its assimilation of other tongues, for while these also grow and change, they are likelier to do so by incorporating English.<\/p>\n

But it strikes me that this rhetorical pattern of introduction and insistent repetition has been a strategy of science-fiction since its inception. From the foreign country of a posited future, SF authors introduce neologisms. Some of these by their very construction, portmanteau or otherwise, clue us in to their meaning, but others are conceptually elusive enough that only context triangulates them. SF critics use the word freefall to denote the opening phase in any story, before the reader figures out the rules of the world and lands on his or her feet. In this, and the marginalization of their reading public by commercial segregation, SF and world literature would seem not only to share practice but be subject to a similar prejudice against textual difficulty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A shorter post today: what are blogs for if not indulging (\u00e0 livre ouvert, as they say) parbaked ruminations? Removing this one from deep freeze and tossing it to the hive mind. Two summers back at Banff, an author was defending her insistence on using foreign words in her novel, which her American editor objected […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1646],"class_list":["post-277946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277946"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":322276,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277946\/revisions\/322276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}