Originally Posted by
kiki1982
Of course. I suppose it varies from language to language, but passive knowledge (that which you don't produce yourself, like reading and listening) is always better, because you usually understand more than you use, also in your own language.
I always get frustrated by the lack of French and German I can speak. In my head, I can have a perfect conversation, but make me do it, and it goes belly-up.
Annamaria is right in that many languages are genetically related. Even across different language groups, you can recognise certain roots (linguist call them) that mean the same. Take a simple object like chair. The Dutch is 'stoel' (pronounced stool), the German is 'Stuhl' (pronounced the same) and the English have 'stool' which is essentially a chair without the back on it, but they've got chair (which obviously replaced stool as the common word once the French were there; and yes the stuff you submit to the doctor probably also comes from the idea you sit on a stool to produce it) from the French 'chaise'. You only need to think a little it more general to be able to understand more. The Italian and Spanish words come from the word 'to sit' (sedia and silla), which comes from Latin, but it reated to D zitten, G sitzen and English to sit and seat, and gives English words like 'sedentary'.
OK, that's quite simple, but reading and learning like that probably gives you a great advantage. It takes less effort to remember words.
When it comes to translations, and certainly literary translations, I think many translators (of what I see on Proz) overestimate their knowledge of their foreign language. You've got Chinese and Indians translating into English which is not English, and Dutch translating into Dunglish (and the Germans) as it is called, but then you get the native speakers who go 'anything that is translated must be translated by a native speaker'. They forget that a mother tongue speaker of the source always understands the source that little bit differently. In most texts, this doesn't really matter, but I think in literary translation that is particularly important.
For example, for those who know German, there are people translating from German struggling with modal verbs and Konj. I (direct discourse). I ask you: why does one think one can translate properly if one doesn't understand the text! I dread to think what they make of a seriously intricate literary text.
And it's not only about pretty simple things like this (you can learn those), it's also about implied jokes, symbolism, which some of those people can't possibly understand.
As an author (and certainly a poet), I for one, would insist on a native speaker source translating my work first and then have a native speaker target work on it to discuss on why the native speaker source has used certain words and so the NSS can correct the NST if he gets carried away.
When it comes to Polish, without really knowing any, but having spent several weeks with Poles, I think there is the problem that it is an extremely intricate language, very dense with a lot of cases and suffixes that slightly change the meaning of things. If you get the meaning totally, then you've got the problem that it destroys the flow of the language as you need a lot more words than you should use. And then there is a kind of hidden anger, sense of depressed quashed superiority and honour that is really difficult to capture. Don't know about the modern generation (they've probably lost it a bit), but the older generation certainly still has it. Different than the Czechs for example. The Czechs are entrepreneurs and they make do, the Polish wallow i melancholy. Difficult to understand why you would get stuck in the times about 100 or 200 ago when you were a great nation. In the meantime, everyone is moving forward. Dutch writer Marcellus Emants captured that astonishingly well in his Polish character Oszinsky, but I suppose it's difficult to understand.
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