Non-Epic Fail

In an attempt to enrich my corpus I went last Friday to a lecture on translating the Greek mythological thinking. Enjoyed it a lot (no irony meant!), but – alas! – the lecture was in Portuguese! Obviously there was no difficulty for me as a fluent speaker of Spanish in understanding the lecture, but I can’t possibly transcribe it or use for the purposes of my investigation.

As I said to Sally, I’m afraid our corpus is becoming uncontrollably diverse.

Anyway, just a couple of notes because I think such an outstanding experience as being exposed to academic discourse in a language you (think you) don’t know and understanding it deserves being mentioned, if not in the investigation itself, at least in the blog.

The lecturer was very formally dressed up, while the audience (mostly students) were looking quite casual.

There was very little talking per se: the lecturer had prepared a 10-page handout which he simply read out to us, thanks to which we understood it very well. Very articulate indeed, I guess it had taken him several weeks to prepare a text so impeccably academic and, at the same time, so easy to understand for speakers of a kindred but still different language.

Of course in such a situation there is very little room for humour or interactive elements which could, if they occurred, obstruct the communication.

A phrase to be engraved in every translation textbook:

EL COMENTARIO ES LA DERROTA DEL TRADUCTOR.

Which means:

A footnote is the defeat of the translator.