Okay, here we are. Welcome back to Words, Words,

we're on kind of a translation binge here on young heretics on Fridays I got this question

about idiomatic translations and whether we can trust translations that are kind of more informal and I've been using this as a way to talk about the message which is a very famous somebody even say notorious and controversial

translation of the Bible into this kind of casual easy

straightforward I would say vivid and poetic kind of speech and I promise that I am

going to get to evaluating whether or not I think the message really counts as a translation,

whether it's faithful and so on and so forth, but what I've been doing is laying the groundwork for talking about register in translation and talking

about register more generally in our language and what it means and what it gets

across. I've been arguing that it communicates essential aspects of our experience of the world

and that calling somebody your buddy or your bro is different from calling them

your friend or your companion and each of these words has a different register, that is it gets across a different

social kind of context, a different set of ideas about people.

And so these words, just like there are no synonyms, there are no interchangeable registers. words just are dealing with poetry or with literary work that the part of the art is the

ineffable connotations the non-direct and sort of associative ideas that you get across in your

translation and so when you translate I've been saying you want to find the

register in the target language that mirrors or reflects the register and the tone of the original.

And I come back now again to my metaphor of the paintings from the Renaissance that depict ancient people like the philosophers

of ancient Greece or the characters in the Bible wearing clothes that come from a Renaissance court or from the peasantry of a European nation.

And as I said, back in the beginning, they didn't do that because they were dummies.

They didn't think that's how people dressed in the before times like everybody had always worn cod pieces and Renaissance clothes.

They did it because they knew that those clothes would have the same impact on the viewer that the real clothes of the original people would have had in their time.

So if somebody's a peasant in a Renaissance painting, they're being made vivid with a kind of updated analog for what they would have been wearing back in the day.

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