Critical Reflection 1
Assignment: As Confucius said “True wisdom is knowing what you don’t know” and Socrates said “Wisdom is knowing what you don’t know.” This assignment is asking for the story of your personal search for information, as well as what you are learning about the topic in terms of what you know vs what you don’t know.
- What do you know?
- Explain what you already know about your essential question. Explain why the topic is important to you, and what is motivating your inquiry.
- What understandings and experiences are you bringing with you as you start this research process?
- How have any outside sources informed your understanding of your essential question?
- What don’t you know?
- Why is it important for you to find out more about this question. Tell what you want to know about your essential question?
- What are the areas of inquiry that you think need to be explored?
- What are the other questions that are lurking just beneath the surface of your guiding essential question?
My essential question asks how translation is always a matter of interpretation as much as one of basic equivalence. Most of what I already know about my essential question is from experience. As someone who grew up in a multilingual household, I have always been consciously and unconsciously translating my whole life. While translation is familiar to me in a personal sense— translating “simple” things for my family and friends, like road signs or lines in TV shows, I have never translated a text. I think that translating a full-length text will expose me to the many other layers and meanings of translation.
I want to find out more about this question because I want to eventually be able to extend it beyond linguistic translation and carry it on over to “emotional” translation (for lack of a better wording). I want to think about interpretation and its role in our understanding of others, of literature etc, and what it means in terms of translation in the traditional sense.
Other questions lurking beneath the surface of my guiding question are: what can I learn about languages by translating texts? What does translation reveal about the intricacies of language, communication, and culture?
A text that I will be referring to this week is an essay by Walter Benjamin entitled The Task of the Translator. I also want to read more on the subject of interpretation and I have been considering Aristotle’s De Interpretatione as an option, though I would most likely need to find a lighter version of it.