As the post notes, inferential distance relates to differing worldviews and life experiences. This was written to an audience that mostly understands what inferential distance has to do with different worldviews—how would you explain it to a different audience?
Well, a typical translation doesn’t try to bridge the gap between languages, it just picks something on the far side of the gap that seems similar to the one on the near side. But that leaves something out.
An example of this is in translations of Harry Potter, where Dumbledore’s password is translated into a local sweet. The UK versions has “Sherbet Lemon” while the US version has “Lemon drop.” Are these the same? I assumed so, but actually it seems the UK version has a “fizzy sweet powder” on the inside. In Danish and Swedish, it’s (mis?) translated as lemon ice cream—which isn’t the same at all. And in Hebrew, it’s translated as Krembo, which doesn’t even get close to translating the meaning correctly—it’s supposed to be an “equivalent children’s dessert”—but the translation simply doesn’t work, because you can’t carry a Krembo around in your pocket, since it would melt. Does this matter? Well, the difference between a kindly old wizard who carries around a sucking candy, and one who carries around a kind-of-big marshmallow dessert. But that’s beside the point—you don’t translate the life experience that growing up eating sherbert lemons gives you, you find an analogue.
The only way to translate a specific word or term accurately could be to provide so much background that the original point is buried, and the only way to translate an idea is to find an analogue that the reader already understands. And that’s why translation is impossible—but we do it anyways, and just accept that the results are fuzzy equivalents, and accept that worldviews are different enough that bridging the gap is impossible.
Perhaps one could say that a complete translation of an English work would include a full description of English culture. This is kind of similar to complexity and Turing machines. Any program could be described in any programming language, by first fully describing the programming language in question.
One point I’d bring up is to understand Harry Potter not as a necessary and complete work, but rather as the best method J.K.Rowling had of fulfilling her intentions using limited time and resources. It’s possible she didn’t care about “Sherbet Lemon”, but all she cared about was to raise some experience in the reader, as a way to optimize a greater pleasure. Perhaps a translator would realize this, and find some superior detail, both for people with other languages, and even for future English works.
On the more intense end, it could be later identified that setting the plot around Magical Wizards is inferior to doing so in space stations, and many of the details are revised accordingly, but in ways that would maximize the benefits of the material.
Agreed—and this reminds me of the observation that all of physics is contained in a single pebble; with enough undesrstnding, you could infer all of physics from close observation of quantum effects, find gravity at a very small scale if you had sensitive enough instruments, know much of natural history, liked the fact that earth has running water that made the stone smooth, that it must be in a universe more than a certain age given its composition, etc. With enough detail, any facet of a story requires effectively unlimited detail to fully understand.
And that makes it clear that we don’t intend for every translation to be of unlimited depth—but the depth of the translation matters, and we trade off between depth of translation and accuracy. Translating Sherbert Lemon as Lemon Sorbet is probably a lack of understanding and an overly direct literal-but-incorrect meaning, while translating it as Crembo might be a reasonable choice because of the context, but is not at all a literal translation.
As the post notes, inferential distance relates to differing worldviews and life experiences. This was written to an audience that mostly understands what inferential distance has to do with different worldviews—how would you explain it to a different audience?
Well, a typical translation doesn’t try to bridge the gap between languages, it just picks something on the far side of the gap that seems similar to the one on the near side. But that leaves something out.
An example of this is in translations of Harry Potter, where Dumbledore’s password is translated into a local sweet. The UK versions has “Sherbet Lemon” while the US version has “Lemon drop.” Are these the same? I assumed so, but actually it seems the UK version has a “fizzy sweet powder” on the inside. In Danish and Swedish, it’s (mis?) translated as lemon ice cream—which isn’t the same at all. And in Hebrew, it’s translated as Krembo, which doesn’t even get close to translating the meaning correctly—it’s supposed to be an “equivalent children’s dessert”—but the translation simply doesn’t work, because you can’t carry a Krembo around in your pocket, since it would melt. Does this matter? Well, the difference between a kindly old wizard who carries around a sucking candy, and one who carries around a kind-of-big marshmallow dessert. But that’s beside the point—you don’t translate the life experience that growing up eating sherbert lemons gives you, you find an analogue.
The only way to translate a specific word or term accurately could be to provide so much background that the original point is buried, and the only way to translate an idea is to find an analogue that the reader already understands. And that’s why translation is impossible—but we do it anyways, and just accept that the results are fuzzy equivalents, and accept that worldviews are different enough that bridging the gap is impossible.
Like that example a lot, thanks for the comment.
Perhaps one could say that a complete translation of an English work would include a full description of English culture. This is kind of similar to complexity and Turing machines. Any program could be described in any programming language, by first fully describing the programming language in question.
One point I’d bring up is to understand Harry Potter not as a necessary and complete work, but rather as the best method J.K.Rowling had of fulfilling her intentions using limited time and resources. It’s possible she didn’t care about “Sherbet Lemon”, but all she cared about was to raise some experience in the reader, as a way to optimize a greater pleasure. Perhaps a translator would realize this, and find some superior detail, both for people with other languages, and even for future English works.
On the more intense end, it could be later identified that setting the plot around Magical Wizards is inferior to doing so in space stations, and many of the details are revised accordingly, but in ways that would maximize the benefits of the material.
Agreed—and this reminds me of the observation that all of physics is contained in a single pebble; with enough undesrstnding, you could infer all of physics from close observation of quantum effects, find gravity at a very small scale if you had sensitive enough instruments, know much of natural history, liked the fact that earth has running water that made the stone smooth, that it must be in a universe more than a certain age given its composition, etc. With enough detail, any facet of a story requires effectively unlimited detail to fully understand.
And that makes it clear that we don’t intend for every translation to be of unlimited depth—but the depth of the translation matters, and we trade off between depth of translation and accuracy. Translating Sherbert Lemon as Lemon Sorbet is probably a lack of understanding and an overly direct literal-but-incorrect meaning, while translating it as Crembo might be a reasonable choice because of the context, but is not at all a literal translation.