hào zi wéi zhī
PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi's not-so-subtle reprimand falls on deaf ears Victor Mair at Language Log 10ii25
Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language Douglas Hofstadter (1998) is for me a go-to in matters of the art (and perils) of Translation
...Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today's computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.
(Amazon blurb)
German English Victor Mair at Language Log
Brad DeLong translates Cicero: Stochastic Parrots on the Palatine Hill: Monday MAMLMs
On logs, Latin, and linear algebra: learning from a stochastic parrot; somewhat awkward questions about agency and pedagogy arising from working through one ridiculously knotty sentence of In Catilinam with an LLMin qua nemo est extra istam coniurationem perditorum hominum, qui te non metuat, nemo, qui non oderit. How might you parse the two parallel clauses with "nemo" — and what does the distribution of negation tell us about the force of Cicero's claim here?
...There is a melancholy that permeates The Tale of Genji, which can be traced to the concept of mono no aware, or the sensitivity towards the fact that everything is transient and there is a sad beauty found in impermanence. This concept is still alive in present-day Japan, where cherry blossoms are viewed with the bittersweet knowledge that their beauty lasts only for a short while....Translating between unrelated languages is like creating a 2D map projection of a 3D globe, in that it's fundamentally impossible to be 100% accurate, and something has to give. While the cartographer has to decide how much of shape, area, distance, and direction to sacrifice, the translator needs to consider factors such as formality, fluency, structure and, in my opinion the most fundamental decision, whether to try to preserve the literal meaning or the emotional impact of the original. These tradeoffs are especially painful when it comes to poetry, where it's even harder to separate meaning and form. In poetry, the original form might have a specific number of syllables, or rhymes, or patterns of emphasis, which are necessarily tied to the language they were written in, such as the 5-7-5-7-7 structure of the traditional waka poem, and there is no objectively correct way to handle that in translation.