Lost and found: The art of translation
For faculty in the School of Arts & Sciences, translation is an art that allows us to communicate across cultural difference.
For speakers of multiple languages, the idea that an object and its verbal representation are distinct from one another is no provocation. To use Magritte’s 1929 painting, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images) as an example: this is not a pipe, nor מקטרת, nor ቧንቧ, nor غليون. These words for pipe, in Hebrew, Amharic, and Arabic, respectively, are verbal and written representations of the same thing, but they are different sounds with different cultural connotations and traditions of use. And of course, in cultures without traditions of smoking, like Ancient Greece, there is simply no such word and no such thing.