{"id":11235,"date":"2020-02-09T21:37:57","date_gmt":"2020-02-10T05:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=11235"},"modified":"2020-02-09T21:37:57","modified_gmt":"2020-02-10T05:37:57","slug":"lost-in-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=11235","title":{"rendered":"Lost in Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently started reading <cite>Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint<\/cite>, a translation of <cite>Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt&#91;e&#93;<\/cite> by Franz Brentano.  My copy happens to be of the 1973 Humanities Press edition.<\/p> <p>In the translation of the 1874 foreword, I hit a sentence<\/p> <blockquote>I was prompted to undertake a rather detailed study of these opinions because  at the present time they enjoy an undue popularity and exert a lamentable influence upon a public which, in matters of psychology even less than in other fields, has not yet learned to demand scientific cogency.<\/blockquote> <p>This sentence is a muddle, with restrictions and negations working to say something contrary to what Brentano must surely have intended.  A scan of the original is available on-line, the German reads<\/p> <blockquote>Und was mich dazu trieb, auch auf sie weitl\u00e4ufiger einzugehen, waren nur eine ungeb\u00fchrliche Verbreitung und ein beklagenswerther Einfluss, welche sie gegenw\u00e4rtig auf ein Publicum gewonnen haben, das in sachen der Psychologie weniger noch als anderw\u00e4rts auf wissenschaftliche Strenge Anspruch zu machen gelernt hat.<\/blockquote> <p>That refers to<\/p> <blockquote>a public, who in matters of psychology less still than elsewhere have learned to make a demand for scientific rigor<\/blockquote> <p>So the muddle is <em>not<\/em> in the original, but is an artefact of translation that <em>doesn't<\/em> strive to be as close to the original as possible while conforming to the conventions of the target language.<\/p> <p>I checked a scan of the 1995 second edition of the translation, and found the same muddle as in the 1973 edition.<\/p> <p>Naturally, I'm wondering to what extent I can reasonably trust the <em>remainder<\/em> of the translation.  I re&auml;lize that passages <em>recognized<\/em> as crucial will probably have been treated with greater care and received more scrutiny, but there may be passages the importance of which has <em>not<\/em> been recognized.  And even passages whose importance were recognized might be poorly translated. (I certainly saw such cases in translations of the work of Aristoteles.)<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I recently started reading Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, a translation of Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt&#91;e&#93; by Franz Brentano. My copy happens to be of the 1973 Humanities Press edition. In the translation of the 1874 foreword, I hit a sentence I was prompted to undertake a rather detailed study of these opinions because at [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,117,720,4],"tags":[1551,289],"class_list":["post-11235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-communication","category-epistemology","category-public","tag-brentano","tag-translation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}