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04/13/12(Fri)21:00 No.8849817>>8849704
>I
just finished reading Ada Lovelace's translation of the Sketch of the
Analytical Engine, a paper written in the 1800s when people had a bit
more time to learn and Italian would have been _useful_ for any reader.
First of all, the essay, while translated by an Italian, was a French translation of Babbage's English lecture.
But
you don't get it. Menabrea translated the lecture so it could be
published in a French journal, and Lovelace translated the paper so it
could be published in an English journal. You just don't publish
foreign-language papers in a national academic journal as a matter of
policy, it's not about knowing the language or not. Hell, even today,
every successful academic writes in his native language in his native
country and in English in anglophone journals. Every academic is thus
capable of reading English by necessity, but they still translate
academic papers locally just because. The references of the papers
aren't translated and included in the same journal, it's up to the
readers to find them and be able to read them.
You'll also notice that an Italian engineer translated a lecture from English to French.
And those weren't "professional translators".
But
yes, of course translations have always existed: for children, for
dilettantes, and generally to make sure people other than obsessive
scientists and erudites had a general education. Not everyone had the
time to learn Persian, or even French for that matter.
It doesn't
change the fact that any expert was polyglot by necessity and read the
subjects of his works in the original language.
Go find me a
professor of [insert language] literature, who hasn't read most of the
works he teaches about in the original language. And when you find him,
please report him to his academy so he can be fired. |
