Translation Question Week Two

This week's question is regarding the idea of rebelling against your own language when you translate.

I find this question super interesting because it accurately portrays the translator as a ghost writer that doesn't have ties to a specific language or culture. When Ortega mentions the fact that a translator "is translating himself from a language to a terminology," it gets me thinking about how translation only works if both the writer/translator and the reader have "previously and individually come to an agreement" about the words and their meanings, so therefore, the idea of translating culture comes back into play, since each culture has their own connotations and definitions of words. This then results in a difficulty translating some phrases. For example, one of the readings talked about Sylvia's silvies, and we discussed the slang term from Gomorrah. Sometimes, words are just placeholders, and that makes the translator betray their own language when deciding on a substitute. You're translating a culture. So sometimes you must betray that culture for the sake of another.

However, I believe the translator betrays a little of both cultures and languages. Since there is no way to keep everything from the original in a translation, in a sense, the translator betrays the original by giving something up. After reverse translating the Egan poem, I feel like the pulvarization and molding that I had to do also betrayed the translation because I had to create something different from the original to attempt a reflection. It is here where I begin to question the ghostliness of the translator because as much as we want to believe that the original writer wrote what we read, technically, it's not true. Technically, it's the translator that wrote it because they had to betray their own language and act as the original writer.