22 September 2009

Intralingual translation

Translating from one language to another is not necessarily harder than translating within one language, as shown by this blog post:

"I’ve begun translating a book, only to realize that a good portion of it is written in dialect from 1937 trying to pretend to be medieval. Here’s what I have so far… have fun laughing.

"Der Ackermann aus Böhmen – Johannes von Tepl

"The Farmer from Bohemia – Johannes von Tepl

"The First Chapter

"Grim extinguisher of everyone, baneful real of all (werlte), free murder of all men, his death, be it cursed! God, (ewer tirmer), hates you, (vnselden) increase lives with us, unlucky house commits violence to you…

"Yeah, I think I’m missing something. I think I better do some more research into old German before attempting this some more. Mostly because von Tepl is making up the spelling of words, and I’m trying to figure out what on Earth he’s even trying to put into German, plus he’s not capitalizing all nouns, which I never realized was so helpful.

"I hop youe hade a goodely Gigl ovr mye forrey into Older Gerrman."

1 comment:

  1. Intralingual translation is a double-edged weapon-- it enables the writer to convey the worldview, imagination and cultural specifities of the source language to the target text language. At the same time, it requires the translator and readership to be not just bilingual but also bicultural in order to fully comprehend the significations embeddedin the borrowed expressions and words transposed into the second text.

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