The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!
are little different than the version Luke quoted, and are mostly understandable (with the exception “gang aft agley”) to a sophisticated English reader with no special knowledge. I am somewhat inclined to call that version a rewrite rather than a translation, just as I would consider some modernized versions of Shakespeare to not be translations, but rewrites.
The standard problem of drawing lines in a continuum rears its head again. There are some reasonable arguments for calling Scots from this time a dialect of English, and many others for calling it a separate language. This is complicated by people’s personal and national identities being involved. Questions like these generally end up being settled more by politics than by details of the different linguistic varieties involved.
The original lines:
are little different than the version Luke quoted, and are mostly understandable (with the exception “gang aft agley”) to a sophisticated English reader with no special knowledge. I am somewhat inclined to call that version a rewrite rather than a translation, just as I would consider some modernized versions of Shakespeare to not be translations, but rewrites.
The standard problem of drawing lines in a continuum rears its head again. There are some reasonable arguments for calling Scots from this time a dialect of English, and many others for calling it a separate language. This is complicated by people’s personal and national identities being involved. Questions like these generally end up being settled more by politics than by details of the different linguistic varieties involved.