i agree with your point below about translation (that literal word-for-word rendering is not the job of the translator, etc.), but i wonder why you think aristotle's use of language made any more "sense" to his students than they do to us. this seems more a faith-claim than a conclusion drawn from evidence. the stock in trade of people like socrates and plato and aristotle was arresting uses of language. using phrases like "to ex hou" or "to ti en einai" to talk about things is just another way of trying to get people to think otherwise than they usually do, to pay attention to what they're saying and thinking in ways that they usually do not. socrates' approach was getting people to admit that they didn't understand the words they use every day. it looks to me as if aristotle's approach included the use of slightly awkward phrasings that could not easily be confused with ordinary, everyday speech, and so also were not easily reducible to people's preconceptions about what a word like, for example, "eidos" means.
*IF* one thinks that this is at least part of what aristotle was doing, then your point about translation means that, in fact, the translator's failing to convey the, er, "arresting-ness" of the language would constitute "falling down on the job".
in the end, the question here turns not on the laziness of the translator as much as on a plausibly philosophical disagreement about what aristotle is doing and how he is trying to do it.
fwiw
j
> 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.
>
>
> Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org
> __________________________________
> A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was
> equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is
> the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to
> John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt
>
>
>
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>