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.
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.