Translations are imperfect and rely on the translator understanding the original work, leading to variance between translations. If a written work was repeatedly translated to different languages infinite times, would it eventually become a Shakespeare made not by monkeys, but by mistranslation?
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Personally, I doubt that it would become Shakespeare (either literally or metaphorically), if only because the manner in which something is written is often more important and impactful than the meanings of the individual words.
I’ll give you an example:
>Hate crime.
That’s a command to despise illegal activity.
>Hate-crime.
That’s a standalone term for an illegal activity predicated on bigotry.
>I hate crime.
That’s an opinion about illegal activity.
>I hate-crime.
That’s a confession about being a violent bigot.
>I hate crime, Billy.
That’s a statement to Billy about one’s opinion on illegal activity.
>I hate-crime, Billy.
Again, that’s a confession (to Billy).
>I hate-crime Billy.
That’s a player’s response to a Dungeon Master’s prompt, with said prompt being this: “You – an unrepentant bigot, apparently – are approached by Billy, the town’s magistrate. Billy is an elf, and you despise elves. What do you do?”
Other than adding “I” and “Billy” to the mix, we only altered the punctuation, and we were able to construct quite a few different meanings. When colloquialisms, cultural references, and wordplay get thrown into the mix, direct translations become more or less impossible, meaning that the real content of the piece gets lost by default.
You can still end up with the same story and the same details, of course, but the tone, the meter, the deeper context, and everything else that differentiates “writing” from “text-based content” vanishes.
The monkeys might still enjoy it, though.
Not sure, but going by existing evidence, a written work repeatedly translated into different languages over thousands of years gets you the Bible
I’m rereading East of Eden (a very badass book) right now. Steinbeck talks about how this happened with the Bible. People roll around quoting a misinterpreted Hebrew text that has been bent into something else
The best example is the world most popular book which was only transcribed & translated from many languages starting from Hebrew for almost 15 centuries until the printing press was invented and the first printed version appeared.
Imagine a game of “Telephone” that you played with the entire world for 1,400+ years while using multiple cultures/languages/idioms/etc.. imagine how distorted from the original it has become.
That’s the bible!
Infinity is a terrifying concept, for we are doomed to never be able to capture it in our minds eye, nor comprehend it fully. Infinity, infinity, wherefore art thou infinity.
You just described the history of the Bible
Shakespeare ain’t got nothing on the bible, which has been collected, compiled, translated, revised, abridged, bent, twisted, and spun so often it makes your head spin.
Semi-related but there used to be apps that would run your sentence through google translate across a chain of languages at random and yield interesting results
There are a few video games with mods that do exactly this. I remember playing one for Half Life and it was utterly incomprehensible for the majority of it’s run time.
Well there was that one translation of Dracula that turned out to be just a fan fiction rewrite that no one noticed for years
There was a Star Wars thing years ago that was translated from English to Chinese back to English and they referred to the Jedi as the Presbyterian church.
Unrelated: I’ve had a great shower thought to share and I keep getting denied. I had to read this shower thought 3 times to follow. Aren’t shower thought supposed to be short and sweet? Congratulations on making the cut, OP!
Shower thought similar to the ship of Theseus paradox?
If we keep translating Shakespeare into every language and back again, we might end up with a version that reads like ‘To be or not to be… but only if the Wi-Fi is strong enough!’
I thought something similar while watching the show “Dark” the other day
You can have fun trying this by Google translating a paragraph into Spanish, taking what it gives you and translating it to French, taking what that gives you and translating it to Swahili, and so on, as many times as you like, then, translate your latest result back to English to see if any of it makes sense. It’s like reading English translated by an alien with a 1% understanding of how it works.
We call that final version: Google Translate Deluxe Edition
I feel like possibly any Shakespeare I’ve read was translated one way or another.