I get that ofcourse no languages will be exactly identical but as a bilingual, whenever i watch a show with my native language and the subtitles are set on to my second language, so many of the meanings get lost in translation even when the translation is pretty accurate? How could this be
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Ooh, I have a good example for this.
I have a Korean copy of Moby Dick. Now, Moby Dick has one of the most famous opening lines of any English language book: “Call me Ishmael.” The Korean edition translates this first line faithfully, but it also includes a footnote explaining that Ishmael was a character from the Bible who experienced great hardship, and therefore the name has connotations that should be remembered.
So the issue is that language isn’t just about the literal meaning of words. A Korean reader would have no difficulty literally understanding the phrase “Call me Ishmael,” but without having grown up in a Christian culture, they would have no reason to think that the name “Ishmael” *itself* has a greater meaning. The surface meaning of “This guy’s name is Ishmael” is easy to translate, but the deeper implication of “This character is destined for profound suffering” isn’t.
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