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To: SunkenCiv

Some of my earliest Greek translating was from this work. Couldn’t see the forest for the trees, though. IMO a good many ancient texts could use a colloquial translation. One that irks the purists but enlightens the layman.


12 posted on 10/18/2021 2:55:45 PM PDT by Fester Chugabrew (No nation that sanctions the wholesale slaughter of its unborn citizens is fit to endure.)
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To: Fester Chugabrew
I rate translations on three levels:

a) the pedestrian: does a decent job without too many odd or archaic terms (or uses notes), but loses quite a bit of nuance and detail;

b) overly literal and technical, where it's almost as though you're looking at a palimpsest of the Greek;

c) the rarest, where the translator knows both the source and English very, very well and can capture and convey just about all the detail and nuance.

It's very hard to find anything like (c). What's shocking to me is how easy it is to find sloppy translations. I was looking recently at a translation of Phaedrus where Phaedrus responds to Socrates' initial criticisms of Lysias' speech by stressing its completeness or comprehensiveness. Somehow that slipped by the translator and got turned into something else like just "full," which just blurs up the point being made terribly. What I detected is that the translator was much more careful with Socrates' speeches, which strikes me as sloppy because the whole dialogue was written by Plato, not just Socrates' parts.

13 posted on 10/18/2021 3:14:50 PM PDT by pierrem15 ("Massacrez-les, car le seigneur connait les siens" )
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