> Yes, he did coin those terms, but I think they made more sense to his
> fellow Greeks than "the this" and "the how" do to us -- which is
> practically no sense at all. A cardinal principal in translation is
> that the translation has to make sense to the readers of the target
> language -- otherwise, why bother doing it? Translation does not
> involve replacing each word in the source text, one by one, with a word
> in the target language; that is an interlinear, which is meant to be a
> crutch for learners of the original language.
>
> Any serious translator of Aristotle has to find meaningful English
> expressions which, in the translator's judgment, express to English
> readers what Aristotle was saying to his contemporaries, or as close to
> that as possible. That's the skill of translation; evading that by just
> putting in something like "the this" is falling down on the job.
>
>
>
As the professor who taught me Greek philosophy used to say, a good translator must not only know the language s/he is translating out of, but also the language s/he is translating into. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20041029/ac857f2e/attachment.htm>