Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
Translation and the Meaning of Everything
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- 9,49 €
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- 9,49 €
Publisher Description
People speak different languages, and always have. The Ancient Greeks took no notice of anything unless it was said in Greek; the Romans made everyone speak Latin; and in India, people learned their neighbours' languages - as did many ordinary Europeans in times past. But today, we all use translation to cope with the diversity of languages. Without translation there would be no world news, not much of a reading list in any subject at college, no repair manuals for cars or planes, and we wouldn't even be able to put together flat pack furniture.
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. What's the difference between translating unprepared natural speech, and translating Madame Bovary? How do you translate a joke? What's the difference between a native tongue and a learned one? Can you translate between any pair of languages, or only between some? What really goes on when world leaders speak at the UN? Can machines ever replace human translators, and if not, why? The biggest question is how do we ever really know that we've grasped what anybody else says - in our own language or in another? Surprising, witty and written with great joie de vivre, this book is all about us, and how we understand each other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Written by an award-winning translator and professor of comparative literature, this book is informed by considerable culture and an original, probing intelligence with a mostly light touch the title riffs off of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, whose babel fish, when inserted in one's ear, could translate any imaginable language. If only it were that easy. Bellos gets readers to think in new ways about the implications of moving a series of words from one language and society to another. Of the 7,000 tongues currently used by humankind, works are translated between roughly 50. The preponderance of translation is into English, which explains why translating is a well-paying profession in Japan, Germany, and France but not here. Whether translating Ast rix comics or caustic Chinese doggerel, puns and wordplay or even legalities at the groundbreaking Nuremberg Tribunal, translators are far more than a kind of literary middleman. It is a breeze to get lost in translation, and for this reason Bellos cannily exclaims, "We should do more of it."
