English → Korean → English: Jimmy Wales in Korea
The article here is interesting in its own right, but I just thought I’d point out an interesting note which caught my attention:
Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted in English and Korean, and the article was written in Korean. Mr. Wales’s comments have therefore been translated from English to Korean and back into English.
[Interview] Wikipedia founder critical of real-name Internet system
I was very concerned about that article, because it would seem to the average English reader that Jimmy Wales said exactly those things in the interview. However, apparently he did not. He spoke, it was translated into Korean, then it was later back-translated into English again.
I actually contacted the author of the article, offering to listen to the original tape verbatim and simply transcribe the audio to text. I received no reply.
For example, I find it difficult to believe that Wales said exactly, “But on the Internet, the need for copyright protection is less than what some people claim. They claim that you need copyrights to turn a profit, but the example of Wikipedia has shown that isn’t the case.” Wikipedia is not a profit center — it is expressly a non-profit entity, and it likely would not have been as successful if it had been a for-profit model.
Hi Gregory,
I had similar thoughts, but I didn’t feel like I was familiar enough with Wale’s views to comment. I just found the whole phenomenon surprising from a translation point of view.
It’s reminiscent of the (bizarre) way that people evaluate machine translation: first, put in some English, then send it through MT to another language, and then back to English through MT. Of course the result will suck!
The note doesn’t give any explanation of why the original words couldn’t have been used. I share your misgivings.
Sup Pat. Long time.
Anyway, something I noticed is…
When teaching English to Koreans, I try to dissuade them from relying on their Korean-to-English dictionaries. A Korean language teacher expressed the same for English-to-Korean dictionaries as well. They are not good. They are more like mediocre thesauruses because they lack context.
If even dictionaries suck, I wonder if anything can be translated “perfectly.”
Sup Pat. Long time.
Something I noticed is…
When teaching English to Koreans, I try to dissuade them from relying on their Korean-to-English dictionaries. A Korean language teacher expressed the same for English-to-Korean dictionaries as well. They are not good. They are more like mediocre thesauruses because they lack context.
If even dictionaries suck, I wonder if anything can be translated “perfectly.” (Although I’ve read somewhere that Murakami enjoys English translations of his novels, but probably b/c something gets lost/added by it.)