▲ 22 points
back
16 comments
Not exactly sure why this is a Hacker News thing but...
I wholeheartedly disagree with: "I would argue that the translator serves the author and the original text. Period." I think it should be pretty obvious that a translator servers primarily their readers, specifically non-native speakers who want to read a work without learning a new language.
Which then creates the problem of what do you leave out in a translation? Because you can go nuts trying to keep every syntactic nuance, but then you lose the forest for the trees - the text has no flow for the reader, it becomes hard work where it wasn't originally and the overall experience is flawed. Or you can be faithful to the broad strokes of the work, the essence of it, while changing many of the finer details to achieve it. I think both methods can serve a purpose, but they need to do so clearly and consistently.
It's a little like trying to draw a 3D object in 2D - you can only show a slice at a time and no matter what you do, you are forced to make serious omissions. So a translator should do this mindfully. Discounting other approaches feels a little smarmy and pointless.
> Not exactly sure why this is a Hacker News thing but...
This sort of comment pops up anytime an article on anything other than straight-up apps/coding/business/whatnot is posted, but the answer is always the same: Anything of interest to Hacker News readers belongs on Hacker News. And this sort of thing is of interest to many Hacker News readers.
No, this is not the criterion. US politics, for an example, is "of interest to Hacker News readers", but makes for awful (and mostly pointless) discussion, so it's discouraged as a topic.
In fact, "anything of interest to [the people who form the community]" is an inherently meaningless rule: as things are posted that "go beyond" the interests of the community, the site will begin to attract a new audience that is interested in those things, leading to a community shift or dilution. Such a setup can make sense in a closed community, but not in an open one.
The real spirit at the core of the HN content guidelines, I think, is something like this: we want posts where reading them evokes the hacker mindset in people. AI? Cryptography? Engineering? Great. "Lean startup" entrepreneuralist exploration? Sure. Cat photos, gender-studies rants, brand movements? Not really.
It's actually a rather strict guideline; a large number of things on the front page at any given moment aren't really "HN material", as can be seen from the low quality of the discussions they provoke. The guidelines are enforced with a rather light hand, though. It's hard to convince a person currently in possession of An Opinion that they'll probably regret the five hours they wasted in that thread picking apart e.g. the pros and cons of iPhones lacking headphone jacks. Easy enough to convince them afterward, but very hard at the time.
(I've always found that the best forums have "benevolent dictators" who are willing to kill these conversational vortexes and then take the heat for them. pg was this person at HN's start; but now HN is far more of a standard "just moderation, no emceeing" forum.)
For the record, this is what the guidelines say:
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
So while most mundane political stories (ie, the election cycle, politician gaffs, etc.) are pretty clearly off-topic, there are some stories with political, social and economic ramifications that I'd count as being highly on-topic, such as stories relating to universal basic income. As evidence, I'd submit the fact that YCombinator itself is sponsoring research into basic income.
More to the point for this particular post, the topic of translation, both human and machine, is intellectually gratifying to many hackers, including ones as illustrious as Douglas Hofstadter. Are you prepared to argue otherwise?
Re: your last paragraph, I thought I was arguing for this post being a good example of something that does fit the spirit of the guidelines. Apparently my point didn't get through.
> Apparently my point didn't get through.
You seemed to be complaining about the kinds of posts that are getting upvoted these days on HN. Although you didn't specifically address this particular post, others here did. I thought you might be chiming in to support these complaints, but it wasn't clear to me, which was why I asked.
I'm glad I was wrong.
The dismissive mention of "gender-studies rants" as canonically not fit for Hacker News disappoints, but does not surprise, me.
"Rants" specifically; an actual treatise on gender that engages the creative intellect without having an overriding status-signalling dimension that poisons all productive discussion would be fine. But such things don't exist, as far as I'm aware, any more than there exist countries where every citizen votes technocratically. (Well, except deep in the humanities departments of universities, where they're rendered in intentionally-obscure manners, with the implicit goal of avoiding having to engage with easily-offended laymen who haven't read any of the prerequisite texts.)
I think it's a good topic for HN. Even those focused on programming can appreciate the topic of translation between computer languages, which is something that is non-trivial but likely much, much easier than translating between human languages.
This is something I wish we'd been taught in high school, or even college. For the most part, the idea that translation can be highly subjective seems glossed over:
> It goes without saying that translation is an impossible task, fraught with pitfalls, and that the result can never be more than an approximation.
Not exactly sure why this is a Hacker News thing but...
Godel, Escher, Bach had a whole chapter on translation, and of course the topic keep cropping up after the specific chapter. So if you agree that Hofstadter's work can be discussed on HN, than translation should be ok.
Hofstadter also wrote a whole book on the subject ([0]).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot
> Not exactly sure why this is a Hacker News thing but...
Second only to "HN is becoming Reddit", or possibly "Go ahead and downvote me, but..." as the most boring comment to read on HN (I plead guilty to polluting the comments with the last one on more than one occasion).
There's no translation, only betraying.
The translator is a spy of dubious allegiance, reporting the sayings of an alien tribe.
(Ridendo dicere verum.)
> There's no translation, only betraying.
Sounds much better in the original Italian: "Traduttore, traditore".
Translator, a traitor (to the original text).
Nice! It also works in at least a few other romance languages, I'm going to use it in the future.
Actually, the translator is injecting alien thoughts into his tribe, therefore betraying the native customs and ideas.
Not getting the text exactly right is peanuts, aside from being impossible.
(Ridendo, etc.)