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But to answer your question, yes. If an unbiased translation is impossible (which it is), the solution is to have versions with as many contradictory biases as possible, so they hopefully cancel each other out.
Christianity enters the chat…
This reply has only upvotes and I still think it’s underrated.
When you’re used to seeing the word classist it takes a second to remember a classicist isn’t someone who is prejudiced against ancient Greeks and Romans.
They are prejudiced against the working class instead?
No, they despise classic literature.
Even if I don’t know what a “classicist”, I wouldn’t be injecting my two cents into a conversation like this.
Ah the agenda of checks notes not adding sexist remarks not included in the original text. What an awful agenda that is.
Classicist sounds hyper specific to classical Greece.
Classicism can be broadly applied to Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, because of how often the sources intermingle (with many older Greek sources transmitted through Roman copies, and many Roman sources themselves written in Greek), but there’s usually an element of specialization in one or the other for any given classicist.
I like the way we handle it in German, where Klassische Altertumswissenschaft is the study of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome as pioneered by Friedrich August Wolf in the 1700s, and Altertumswissenschaft is used for the more broad study of antiquity.
The German impulse to just smoosh words together is perpetually amusing and awe inspiring
I can see why you like it, fassgealterte Langeweile
Können wir aus dem Namen ein langes zusammengesetztes Substantiv draus machen?
Natürlich ist daß ja doch verstatten!
Reminds me of a story an old friend of mine loved to tell.
In her undergrad, she majored in classics and archaeology. One summer she was working at a dig on the island of Cyprus. One day she needed to go into town for some supplies. She walks into the store, and suddenly she realizes. “Fuck. I don’t speak a word of modern Greek. How am I going to talk to the shopkeeper in this tiny town in rural Cyprus?”
She decides to just do the best she can, and she tries to talk to him in the only Greek she knows…Ancient Greek.
The shopkeeper gets befuddled, then looks her dead in the eye and says, in English, “lady, no one has talked like that here in 2000 years!”
yea basically everyone there can speak English
Where can I find a unbiased translation?
Thank you!
I would wager that will be possible about 5-6 years after the AI singularity. Currently all translations have some sort of bias and cannot grok both the source and destination languages natively.
Edit: I hope I used grok correctly. Someone older than I am that actually used that slang when it was popular please correct me. As I understand it Grok means: To intuitively know and understand the deeper meaning of a word, concept, meme, sociological nuance, or process.
AI likely has a more biased output than most humans as humans have a drive to hide bias and AI does not, plus AI is trained on internet data where people talk differently to how they do in real life, and even more differently than translating a 2000 year old poem.
“AI” is at our current point an attempt to make humans talk dumber. An attack on the language and on the reliability of interactions between humans not knowing each other all their life.
It’s somebody trying to make Orwell’s newspeak and Idiocracy the reality, both at the same time.
I’m become conspiracy-minded lately, sorry.
I just think this would make sense, that people possessing dumb material power in the real world have become desperate enough to try and poison the humanity so that it wouldn’t take that power from them.
“Grok” is from a book called Stranger in a Strange Land. It’s… interesting but not my favorite. You might read it though if for no other reason than to understand the word haha
Definitely do not watch The Man Who Fell to Earth which was supposed to be based on it.
Does anyone have a link to her actual findings? I tend to be skeptical of headlines like this.
Also, the first woman? Props to her but I’m quite surprised no one else has done that
Dunno if she ever published her findings as such, but here’s an interview where she talks about it:
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/01/16/how-emily-wilson-translated-the-odyssey/
Also, the first woman? Props to her but I’m quite surprised no one else has done that
Yeah, it’s indeed false. I didn’t even research it actively, but Wilson on her Twitter profile mentioned an Italian translator who translated Homer years before Wilson.
(To be sure, I just checked Italian Wikipedia. It was Giovanna Bemporad, her translation was published in 1970.)
(To be sure, I just checked Italian Wikipedia. It was Giovanna Bemporad, her translation was published in 1970.)
Yes, which she translated into Italian… and the very first paragraph of the article linked in this thread indeed notes Wilson is the first woman to translate it into English, just as the Tweet indicates…
Are you a bot? Or just lazy?
Are you a bot? Or just lazy?
I am a bot. Beep boop.
The Italian woman translated it into English?
Not the first woman. The first woman to translate it into English, which is still surprising.
For a while, I would get YouTube recommendations with “Translators DID IT again - when do they learn???” videos highlighting what they viewed as horrendously biased censorship in translation.
Every once in a while, I give these idiots a minute of my attention and by their own data they look stupid. Whatever inaccuracy they thought was there pales in comparison to getting the writing to flow well in English.
Obviously a classicist is someone who studies how the working class can overthrow their divinely mandated white men overlords.
Right? No other possible thing it could mean.
Nothing else. Nothing at all.
Shawn is a moron.
Cool seeing her agreeing with what the otaku community has been complaining for years already, when is she getting cancelled? You can’t criticize translators anymore.
First of all…“Sexist and misogynist” redundant…sort of…because women can be sexist too. Misandry is what that’s called.
And a lot of stuff that’s called “misogynist” today isn’t actually misogynist. Some misandrists out there think any scene in a movie or book depicting a brothel with any kinds of events that follow afterward or before to be misogynistic
The same goes for any scene where a man rescues a woman from anything. I’m not kidding. some women out there literally think that old as dirt trope that’s been in every story ever written is somehow sexist.
I judge people only by the content of their character and then by their qualifications
First of all…“Sexist and misogynist” redundant…sort of…because women can be sexist too. Misandry is what that’s called.
Women can be misogynist too, misogyny/misandry describes the target of hate, not the hater.
I like how you started your comment by dunking on yourself
the rest of your points are not only irrelevant to this post but also to each other.
