Great video! I am a Japanese Language and Literature major, this term we talked about the same concept in our literature class! Edward Hall identifies Northern Europeans and Americans as low-context culture people, meaning they are more explicit and they tend to take things literally while he identifies Japanese as high-context culture people. For example, in English, the subject is mostly in the sentence to elaborate on who is the one doing the action, meanwhile in Japanese, the subject is not included most of the time! You have to figure out who is the one doing the action by the context. This difference can cause translation to be altered more when it is translated to English rather than Turkish (which is also high-context based.) I enjoyed watching the video a lot, keep up the great work!
this is really interesting because i faced the same dilemma when i was reading crime and punishment. i had two copies in my hand, both decades apart, and could definitely notice the difference in words and the writing style. love the video !!!
some books just have a particular significance to the language that is it is written on, such as books that have strong themes of culture with internal refrences can make it hard to translate and maintain it's charm
Dazai's No Longer Human is fantastic! That being said, it was more or less his magnum opus, so I would recommend checking out some of his other works first, such as The Setting Sun and The Flowers of Buffoonery, both of which are translated by the same person (Donald Keene)
I am brazilian and most of the books I read are translated. As I'm still improving my english and french, anytime I can get and ebook with the original text I try reading it, but sometimes it is too massive or advanced for me to understand or I just want something simpler and I end up grabbing a portuguese version. Something I notice as a reader is that this thing of losing the content isn't actually a thing most of the times, cuz' authors have already learned their books are read all arround the world and try to make it more 'universal'?? But sometimes it just isn't possible to keep integrity. If you pick any book from Stephen King or Tolkien, for example, there will be lots of page footers giving you the context of what they said or just a note from the translator saying they had to cut some stuff so the story made sense. With Tolkien, actually, it might be even harder to translate because all of the songs and poems in the books are translated (and rhyme). And in the end of the books there is a section with the original writings. About brazilian content being exported and translated, I think there are some understanding problems. Many of our books that are translated are classic and demand a lot of knowledge not only about brazilian culture but brazilian history as well. There is the case of the movie 'O Auto da Compadecida' too, that causes a lot of strangement to most foreigners because it is entirely based in the culture of one specific region of Brazil and uses this for the comedy and jokes. Tbh, many brazilians (me included) will probably never understand the movie FULLY because we aren't inserted in 'Nordeste'. (sorry for extending myself so much and for any grammar error! Hope I've contributed for the discussion :) ) [video was awesome btw!]
