_ɪˈskeɪpɪz(ə)m _Weaver of Dreams

Sorcery!

Things that need to be known.

One uncanny aspect of translating is when I am grappling with a sentence that would sound particularly wrong if I tried to preserve any part of the original structure or idioms, because nothing about it matches the way one would phrase such an idea in my language, so what I need to do is mentally divorce the sentence from its syntax and vocabulary, to try and find how my language would give form to the same concepts. It always makes me wonder, what am I working with here? What is left when you remove the grammar and specific word choices from a sentence? I don’t know, a shapeless mental porridge of pure meaning, a nebulous feeling of what another brain has tried to express. I find it amazing that your mind knows just what to do with something so unfathomable—that it’s just like “right, right, give me a minute” as it distillates meaning out of words like it’s nothing then lassoes it down from the platonic realm of forms to give it a completely new shape. What is ‘meaning’ and how does it exist in your mind in this liminal moment after you’ve extracted it from a foreign language but haven’t yet found words in your own language that can embody it? I don’t know.

And the moment you peek back at the original, just to check some random thing, that delicate grasp of wordless meaning completely fizzles away until you get stuck looking at grammar and words again.

One uncanny aspect of translating is when I am grappling with a sentence that would sound particularly wrong if I tried to preserve any part of the original structure or idioms, because nothing about it matches the way one would phrase such an idea in my language, so what I need to do is mentally divorce the sentence from its syntax and vocabulary, to try and find how my language would give form to the same concepts. It always makes me wonder, what am I working with here? What is left when you remove the grammar and specific word choices from a sentence? I don’t know, a shapeless mental porridge of pure meaning, a nebulous feeling of what another brain has tried to express. I find it amazing that your mind knows just what to do with something so unfathomable—that it’s just like “right, right, give me a minute” as it distillates meaning out of words like it’s nothing then lassoes it down from the platonic realm of forms to give it a completely new shape. What is ‘meaning’ and how does it exist in your mind in this liminal moment after you’ve extracted it from a foreign language but haven’t yet found words in your own language that can embody it? I don’t know.

And the moment you peek back at the original, just to check some random thing, that delicate grasp of wordless meaning completely fizzles away until you get stuck looking at grammar and words again.

#more like a phone that's been plugged in for 83 days and doesn't know how to work without being plugged in anymore#i will sputter and die after six minutes out of the house @fiddleabout​

Truth.