Kim,
beware of your heroic offer! I read some books in both the original and
translated formats and KNOW that they are different. Not only has the
translator his 1st person understanding of WHAT to translate, the words
convey the new language's ambiguity for the reader's OWN 1st person
interpretation. (Lately about Self-organization in(orig) German and an
excellent English version. German is my 2nd mother-tongue, English I live
with - although only in the US - since 1965)
Communication is Glücksache (matter of luck). (The orig. German proverb
sais it for "foreign words" - Fremdwörter sind Glucksache).
In scientific discours it is even worse. Bruno's difficulty stems from the
urge to explain *his own* ideas to people with less knowledge than his own
(not the regular 'teacher's problem' who conveys mostly only
*general*knowledge) and 'you' (we all) do our best to follow. It is
never enough.
I think the trick of the 'Old Man' at the Tower of Babel was a dirty one: to
mix up 'peoples' languages. This is why 'national' sciences are dfferent,
even in physical sciences. Not the equations: the meaning/conclusions.
The figments.
JohnM
On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 9:20 PM, Kim Jones <kimjones.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
>
> On 31/01/2009, at 3:37 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> >>
> >> I've also tried to dig through both Bruno's thesis with the help of
> >> google translator. It works for a while but soon one hits a wall
> >> with a
> >> difficult sentence/paragraph which is hard to understand even if it
> >> stands as the author inteded - and extra hard to understand if its
> >> meaning is corrupted by the translation.
> >>
> >> Bruno, I'd love to read your thesis in english, but I fully
> >> understand
> >> how hard it must be to get a good translation that you would be happy
> >> with. At the end, it might be easier to start from scratch, take the
> >> essential from both thesis, update a little bit and write a book in
> >> english on your own directly. Is that an option for you?
> >
>
> Bruno reads beautifully in French.
>
> I have offered to translate some of his stuff - the Brussels thesis is
> a wonderful read in French, I can't really understand the stuff about
> the construction of the computer because I have no background in
> computer science, but I can translate all the text into good,
> idiomatic English if I could generate some little income in the
> process. He has said "The road to hell is paved with the best of
> intentions" to me in the past, and I agree with him on that, also that
> publishing deals will benefit the publisher, not the author, but there
> are many people (me included) who love his stuff now and wish it could
> be presented to a wider audience.
>
> Failing that, a few of you might have to learn French, which would
> benefit your brain cells anyway. French is just English pronounced
> wrongly anyway ;-)
>
> K
>
> >
>
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Received on Sat Jan 31 2009 - 08:47:34 PST