Dan said: > If one is translating a language, one does not assume that a word > that has no direct correspondence in the target language is > meaningless. Rather, one tries to obtain the word or words that > convey the meaning in the origional language. In a similar vein, > an athiest can understand the framework in which religeous words > are used and obtain a meaningful translation to an athiestic > framework.
In Star Trek scripts, there's apparently liberal use by the writers of "TECH", which means "put some impressive technobabble here". The shooting script then replaces "TECH" with "recalibrate the neutralino shield harmonics" or whatever. When I'm watching Star Trek (which isn't often in recent years), my brain does a reverse translation to "TECH": I don't even bother parsing those bits and trying to fit them into a coherent framework because that's not the point. I think that I (and maybe other Europeans?) do a similar sort of thing with American political discourse. I sort of assume that there's a "DEUS" in the original version of the speech that someone then replaces with a fancy religious flourish. Stripping out these doesn't usually make too much difference to the meaning. To me, this case were talking about here is like that, because it still clearly makes sense with just the Iraqi people's forgiveness involved, and that in turn reduces in less charged language to something like the version I gave earlier. Now, perhaps by subconsciously doing this I'm missing something very important sometimes, but I don't really think I am. And in any case the alternative - that the political class of the world's largest military power have worldviews largely shaped by Bronze Age Mesopotamia with a leavening of the opinions of the senatorial class of Late Antiquity - is a little scary... (Of course, if the de-Godified version doesn't make sense, as it doesn't in actual discussions of theology or in one of JDG's favourite Bush quotes, then this process doesn't work.) Rich _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
