Words in author's native language?

It used to be common practice in scholarly works and in popular works aimed at educated audiences to quote works in the the language they were written in, at least for major classical and modern European languages. This is not a matter of the author using their native language, however, but of using the original language of the quotation.

This is less common practice today, presumably because Latin, Greek, French, German etc. are far less often taught in schools and far less often required for bachelor's or even advanced degrees. However, examples of it may still exist.

posted about 8 years ago

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Mark Baker‭

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Whenever you translate, there is a kind of "semantic loss", which may be easily circumvented when it comes to fictional texts but which may endanger the essence of nonfictional texts such as philosophical treaties or academical research, since the latter kind of texts may contain certain key phrases whose connotations would get lost in the process of translation. If concepts of a certain general interest are concerned, the words signifying them are included into the language system that had no way of referring to those concepts beforehand. Blitzkrieg, schadenfreude, realpolitik and gedankenexperiment are examples for such transfers into the English language.

If the concept signified by a certain word is more specific, there's no need to transfer it beyond the very text it is used in. "Waldesruh" (literally "silence of the woods" or "silence within the woods") is a proper example. I don't think that this word has found its way into English, and yet it's impossible to really translate it, since "silence of the woods" doesn't convey the culturally related imagery (nor its allusions to romanticism or the implied pastoral atmosphere of peacefulness) of this very word.

posted over 11 years ago

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schlossblick‭

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For French words, at least, it is mostly a pretentious way to show the author is cultured, thought funnily enough their "French" is often incorrect, though it will pass mustard for most readers.

For other languages, there are words or concepts that are not easily translated like the German gestalt, the Czech litost, or the Japanese bakku-shan

Though, as suggested, it is also sometimes used to give it a foreign flavor and greater realism.

I think that it targets speakers of that second language only if the book is mostly culturally dependent and the readership is assumed to be bilingual. For example a book using Spanish words whose MC is a Mexican descended teenager having a Quinciniera.

posted about 8 years ago

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Reed‭

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