Copeland Reading (Bruce)

Copeland writes that "when you translate, it is not just the word that you must consider but the power that resides around it" (128). Students of translation, perhaps due to a degree of naivete, long to translate every word of a text to the utmost precision, with little to no compromise. With any amount of experience, we realize that it is not so easy in practice. In fact, often times there comes a necessary realization, or maybe a disillusionment, in the concept of "words," in favor of an emergent property we call "meaning." By emergent, I mean a property absent in the constituent, but apparent in the whole. For example, a single ant is powerless, but a colony of ants is incredibly intelligent. Intelligence is an emergent property Similarly, a word is meaningless, but a body of text holds meaning. Each word can be thought of as an ant. One ant being slightly different could be acceptable if the colony can still perform its function, but many ants missing, or perhaps, important ants missing (i.e. the queen(s)), would collapse the whole. In that metaphor, a translator must think about translation similarly to transplanting a colony of ants.