Schleiermacher and Deutscher (Cat)

 Schleiermacher

Schleiermacher brings up the concept of the translator either "bringing the reader to the author" or "bringing the author to the reader." I feel that both of these concepts are interesting in the sense that they both end up leaving out a lot of important information for the reader no matter which way you decide to translate. By bringing the reader closer to the author, some of the story elements may fall away because the author will have to attempt to explain somewhat niche elements or cultural references to the reader which may cause the flow of the text to diminish. This causes the translated text to not be as similar to the original text since the original text often doesn't need to explain cultural aspects or nuances to the reader since the reader is already inherently aware of those aspects. However, if the author decides to bring the author to the reader, the author may be removing elements that may be considered to be crucial to the original text. The author may also be removing the import that emotions or understandings or possibly mistranslating them when localizing them to the language they are translating into. 

Deutscher

Deutscher discusses how Whorf's belief that language shapes our perception of reality is not entirely true based on recent evidence disclaiming this way of thinking. Especially when it comes to the way certain languages organize the contents of a sentence, SVO, gender, etc. Whorf's ideas feel very tunnel-visioned. From personal experience, I feel that if this concept were true, then it would be very difficult for me to communicate in Russian with my parents and use both English and Russian interchangeably as in theory some of the concepts in Russian would be impossible to express in English and vice versa. However, I can communicate my thoughts and ideas just fine even when flipping back and forth between the two languages within one conversation. It was really interesting to learn more about the gender-ification of objects described in this paper. I have long been aware that the Russian language assigns gender to inanimate objects, but it is very interesting to see that an object's gender may alter from one language to the next as well as the general meaning or traits assigned to that gender. Discussion about directions is also very interesting to learn about as I have realized that I would simply not survive receiving directions in certain languages as I am directionally challenged and do not remember my compass directions from the top of my head.