Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything
An Oxford professor once refused to teach translation classes because no one on his faculty could define the word. This audio turns that provocation into a tour of how meaning really travels: C.K. Ogden's word magic, Douglas Hofstadter's experiment in which dozens of translators squeezed a 16th-century French poem by Clément Marot into three syllables a line and each produced something different, the film Spanglish, where a Mexican mother's young daughter translates with stamping feet and waving arms, and Humpty Dumpty rebuilt in French by sound alone. It closes on instant coffee, espresso, and one question: is every word a successful mistake?
An Oxford professor once refused to teach translation classes because no one on his faculty could define the word. This audio turns that provocation into a tour
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