Schleiermacher and Deutscher Reading Responses (Grace)

Reading Responses (Grace)

Schleiermacher Response

Schleiermacher, in a very dramatic and perhaps overly flamboyant way, offered his opinions on two methods. of translation, one of which he agreed with far more than the other. The first method involves moving the reader towards the author. In other words, the reader should be immersed within the cultural nuances of, and understandings brought about when reading something in a foreign language. Schleiermacher believes that this is the most effective way of translating, as the reader becomes immersed in the culture of those who speak that foreign language. While there may be cultural barriers and historical contexts that might be unfamiliar to the reader, Schleiermacher believes that this confusion is better than complete ignorance, which comes to light when he talks about the second method of translation.

This second method brings the writer closer to the reader. In other words, if the reader is reading a German translation of a work, the translator should strive to make the author write as if they were a German author.  Schleiermacher does not believe that this is a good method of translation, as this method reduces the cultural aspects of, and potentially misinterprets or omits the nuances of the foreign language, present in the original work. For example, if the foreign piece is historical and is based off of historical events that took place in that foreign nation, and holds great cultural importance to the characters in the work, trying to localize such a work using this method would completely destroy the original cultural significance of the work. Therefore, I agree with Schleiermacher that this second method is far worse than the first.

Deutscher Response

I found this article to be much more eye-opening than the previous, as the topics it discusses are things that I had never thought about before: the fact that different languages make us feel obligated to think about different things. The way that speakers of different languages think about directions especially struck me as intriguing. One way that this shocked me was how speakers of languages that navigate using only the cardinal directions are able to tell at any given time (even after being spun around blindfolded!) are able to tell which cardinal direction they are facing. This is something that most English speakers, who generally use themselves as a reference of direction, cannot do. After reading about this, I thought about how a translator would go about translating one of these cardinal direction-dependent languages into a primarily self-reference-dependent one. Should the translator just use the self-referential system when translating into English, just the cardinal system, or a combination of both? I hope that we can discuss this topic in class!