Final Blog post

I had to look up when David Bello’s essay on “Foreign-Soundingness” was written because it felt outdated to me. (it’s 2013) This perhaps has less to do with his technical point, which is that maintaining the source language (in part or in whole) is the best way to retain the authenticity of the source text rather than attempt to make the target language fit the conventions of the source language. (although I’m actually quite open to both approaches) What felt outdated to me is the way this idea is discussed. Bello uses this language of introducing foreignness to a text, or of retaining some authenticity of foreignness, or adding “a flavor of foreign coloring,” the same language used by Diderot and Schleiermacher in the 1700s. (and he is certainly not the only to have done this since of course) Reading it today, I find it not only reeks of Orientalism (esp. for those "small" languages), but also assumes a flawed dichotomy of foreign vs native that I just don’t think can be justified anymore. Bello at one point says of a certain translation of Hindi words – “a linguistic anomaly in English” – that it would require “a translator’s footnote - because we do not know any Hindi.” Given that many of the ~570 million Hindi-speaking people know English, it seems many of those “we” do know Hindi. It turns out, “we” do contain multitudes.

I guess I’m ready for us to change the language around these ideas; do away with foreign and native, foreign and domestic, of equating whatever doesn’t sound “native” as “a representation of the funny ways foreigners speak,” etc. Perhaps moving towards the language of defamiliarization like Bruna Dantas Lobato did in her lecture, or thinking in terms of “translingualism” (“writing that crosses linguistic boundaries and thereby unsettle monolingual norms”) as another speaker, Eugene Ostashevsky has written about. Perhaps doing so would help liberate the translation process/practice to become more fluid and less locked into this binary of making one thing sound like another.

As for book covers, I am very much against placing a snapshot of the movie remake on them.

- Lois