Language

"In translation of poetry; there exists a possibility of components like imagination, art of wordplay, skill of constructing internal rhythm and expand of knowledge of the poet getting affected by the constraint and differentia of the translator."

"On translating text into the new language as it is in source language, there is a chance of it being emerged as an absurd sentence in the target language making no sense at all. In the attempt to make the translation meaningful to the target language, there exists a risk of the original work getting meddled by the translator’s style."

"The translator of a poem is only a transient mediator... in time all translations fall away, fade, become literary curiosities, time-bound and largely of scholarly rather than literary interest."

"Whenever someone suggests "how much is lost in translation!" I want to say, "Perhaps but how much is gained!" A new world of readers, for one thing."

"It is frustrating to be translating other people's autobiographies whilst mine is lying unpublished, banned by the Home Office."

"I think people who work on translation projects think that they're somehow peace negotiators because the belief is that we'll never stop killing one another until we understand and see one another as human beings. I think that's true."

"Translations [into the German language], even the best ones, proceed from a mistaken premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. ... The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue."

"That translation is the best which comes nearest to giving its modern audience the same effect as the original had on its first audiences. Just to illustrate that, may I use a rather crude example from modern French? French novelists often represent married couples as calling each other mon chou, which I don't think would strike a Frenchman as funny at all. If you translate that into English by the words, 'my cabbage,' you're going as far as possible as you can from the principle of equivalent effect. In fact, you're making the English reader think that Frenchmen are silly, which is the last thing that you should do. [...] The word [paraphrase] is much misused, by the way; it is often used as a term of abuse for very good translation. I should put it in this way, that it is permissible only where literal translation is liable to obscure the original meaning. I would go further and say that on such occasions it is not only permissible, but it is imperative, and therefore it becomes good translation, and the word 'paraphrase' should disappear."

"Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."

"In literary translations, it is this very articulation of expressions that matters the most to bring home to the readers the full essence of the original text in question."

"Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world."

"Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

"Jargon or gobbledygook, or what people who live in Washington or Ottawa call "federal prose," [is] the gabble of abstractions and vague words which avoids any simple or direct statement. ... Direct and simple language always has some force behind it, and the writers of gobbledygook don't want to be forceful; they want to be soothing and reassuring."

"More often than we are aware, it is the jargon which is the hurdle that a student cannot overcome rather than the mathematical concepts being introduced. After all, virtually every profession has realized the advantage of inventing sufficient jargon to ensure that it is held in respect by the layman! In teaching, however, our aim should be to pull down barriers, not erect them."

"Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists."

"In the natural sciences, language (mathematics) is a useful tool: like the microscope or telescope, it enables us to see what is otherwise invisible. In the social sciences, language (literalized metaphor) is an impediment: like a distorting mirror, it prevents us from seeing the obvious. That is why in the natural sciences, knowledge can be gained only with the mastery of their special languages; whereas in human affairs, knowledge can be gained only by rejecting the pretentious jargons of the social sciences."

"Margaret Mead noted... that scientists at the frontier, where the terminology and imagery are developed, speak mostly to other scientists at or near their own level of understanding. In this way, scientific language has escaped from the realm of "natural language." This is the fate of "any language taught only by adults to adults - or to children as if they were adults. ...It serves in the end primarily to separate those who know it from those who do not." Since then, linguists and anthropologists have been reinforcing the point that the cure cannot come from simple "translation" but may lie in recognizing that a difference in languages reflects a difference in world views. Without making the mutual accommodation of these views a prominent part of the agenda, science teaching probably has to remain superficial. I refer here to the work of R. Horton on African traditional thought and Western science, and of J. Jones in... New Guinea; both... have studied the ways in which the traditional cultures of the new learners differ from the scientific cultures of the teachers, and how and to what limited degree these differences can be decreased."

"Functional discourse ... serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason."

"Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task."

"The jargon makes it seem that ... the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin."

"Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean."

"We've all had the experience of talking about a long-lost friend with someone, and then out of the blue the phone rings and it's that same long-lost friend. Famous psychobabble quack Carl Jung called these occurrences "synchronicity." Skeptics regard these synchronicities events as mere coincidences. Others posit a pie-in-the-sky cosmic connection linking all things. Take a guess on which side of the argument I fall."

"Maria: Look, you wanna know why you look like Grandpa 1935? She has the key. So, you have two choices, all right? You can let her in on the whole alien conspiracy thing and hope that it shakes something loose from the dusty corners of her brain, or you can... No. You know what? That's not gonna work, so look... You have that one option, all right? Michael: No, no, no. What's my second option? Maria: You're not capable of it, I promise. Michael: Just say it. Maria: Form an emotional bond with Laurie. [Michael shakes his head] All right, fine. You don't like that answer, then go show her the secret alien handshake. Michael: [sighs] Okay, fine. What kind of psychobabble, Oprah crap do I gotta tell her? Maria: I can't put the words in your mouth, Michael. It's gotta come from you. It's gotta come from your-- it's gotta come from whatever organ you have sitting in for your heart. Just go over there and tell her in your own words that she can trust you, and make sure that she feels that you're being completely, emotionally honest."

"What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content. In that sense the character of the jargon would be quite formal: it sees to it that what it wants is on the whole felt and accepted through its mere delivery, without regard to the content of the words used."

"[Today’s jargon] was produced by philosophy and was in Europe known to have been produced by philosophy, so that it paved a road to philosophy. In America its antecedents remain unknown. We took over the results without having had any of the intellectual experiences leading to them. But the ignorance of the origins and the fact that American philosophy departments do not lay claim to them—are in fact just as ignorant of them as is the general public—means that the philosophic content of our language and lives does not direct us to philosophy. This is a real difference between the Continent and us. Here the philosophic language is nothing but jargon."

"The psychological patter of the '70s is as inescapable as Muzak and just as numbing: Are you relating? Going through heavy changes? In touch with yourself and doing your own thing? Are you up front, or just hung up and uptight? Boston Writer R.D. (for Richard Dean) Rosen calls it psychobabble, and in his new book by that title (Atheneum, $8.95) sees America awash in soggy therapeutic clichés."

"Bush dismissed as 'psychobabble' comments in reviews of his book about a presumed need to prove himself to his father or to history, specifically over Iraq and his failure to write about it."

"Horatio: [About reporting Eric's lost badge to IAB.] Ok, but you've done nothing wrong. Eric: Then how come I feel like I'm going to slit my own throat? Eric [to IAB Rick Stetler] That's a bunch of psychobabble...crap."

"Let's knock out the psychobabble. He was a pervert, a child molester, he was a pedophile. And to be giving this much coverage to him, day in and day out, what does it say about us as a country? I just think we're too politically correct. No one wants to stand up and say we don't need Michael Jackson. He died, he had some talent, fine. There's men and women dying every day in Afghanistan. Let's give them the credit they deserve."

"Just as bad, to declare everyone an addict may be even more psychobabble about people's compulsive, self-indulgent habits in need of the one true cure from the latest self-help regimen."

"Maybe we should give to charity or do some volunteer work; helping humanity one person at a time should only take forever. Better still, how about reading another self-help book written by some new-age, psychobabble guru that shows how to obtain spiritual contentment and financial success? That'll do the trick; there's nothing quite like putting our heads in the sand."

"Joey: You know, maybe-- and this is just a shot in the dark-- she didn't mean to send it to the gossips at large. Maybe she's just trying to get some private closure, never dreamed she'd be subjected to the Oprah psychobabble of her life-lacking peers. Now, do you guys want something to eat, or should I just bring over a nice tray of bon-bons so you guys can hunker down and watch your stories?"

"A second way in which milieu control is affects group members is linked to groups' conscious efforts in that regard. That is, the groups maintain milieu control especially by way of labeling recalcitrant members as 'subjective' or 'objective agent.' The former term is used for those who are thought to have harmed the organization by their mistakes or failures in groups' operations."

"The first is that of total milieu control — control of all information exchange and imagery in an environment that seeks to extend itself to internal controls of every kind."

"He didn't want to hear any new-age psychobabble, like 'find your inner peace."

"A reliable system of indoctrination requires nearly total 'milieu control' in which the indoctrinatee has few or no alternate sources of information and values."

"This kind of 'milieu control' can be brought about through coercion, but at its most successful it convinces individuals that they are acting autonomously — as is the case for the ex-POW Sergeant Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate. The result is that milieu control disrupts the 'balance between self and the outside world', resulting in 'a profound threat to [the individual's] personal autonomy'."

"Such accounts are consistent with what Lifton described as 'milieu control', a key aspect of ideological totalism. As Lifton postulated it, this is primarily the use of techniques to dominate the person's contact with the outside world but also their communication with themselves."

"For the various psychological and self-help theories that abound among educated upper-middle class circles is called psychobabble."

"Brennan: Sweets has trust issues involving finding a home. Since he grew up an orphan, the anger he's sublimated has paralyzed him from developing a healthy perspective on what having a home means. That made him bond with us and our home so he didn't have to deal with his own emotional insecurities. Booth: Bones shoots from the outside! Three points! Sweets: Where's that psychobabble coming from? Booth: Well, you left one of your psychobabble books in our bathroom."

"In applying Erikson's totalism concept to the Thought Reform experiences of his subjects, Lifton famously identified eight 'themes' of the totalistic milieu: Milieu Control, i.e., monopoly of the spatial and informational environment."

"'Milieu Control' involves the control of daily schedule including food intake, sleep, information and time and space for critical reflection."

"The totalist administrators 'look upon milieu control as a just and necessary policy, one which need not be kept secret.' The assumption of 'omniscience' and 'ultimate truth' leads these administrators to consider it 'their duty to create an environment containing no more and no less than this 'truth."

"Although milieu control is more obvious in the situation of a prisoner whose environment is forced on him, spiritual purgation often begins with a similar structuring of a person's physical environment."

"What is shown is that typical ethical argumentation in everyday discourse is saturated with emotionally loaded language, and is highly persuasive in nature. Some insights derived from the emotivist view can be extremely useful in explaining how ethical argumentation works. Ethical arguments arise out of conflicts of values in which there is a pro-attitude viewpoint on both sides. Both sides use emotionally loaded language of a kind that supports one's viewpoint and that expresses opposition to the viewpoint of the other side."

"This kind of 'milieu control' can be brought about through coercion, Lifton believed, but at its most successful it convinces the subject that he or she is acting spontaneously rather than being directed by values that are alien to the self."

"This may be called milieu control. The Chinese Communist prison is probably the most thoroughly controlled and manipulated group environment that has ever existed."

"It is so easy for human thinking to become distorted that it makes sense to examine how we can keep our own thinking straight and thus avoid calamity. Importantly, we need to be on guard against the trickery of men. Make no mistake, you will encounter deceitful people who pretend to present the truth but actually distort it. To attain their objectives such people may resort to a selective use of evidence, emotionally loaded language, misleading half-truths, devious innuendo, and even outright lies.|"

"The loaded language proceeds according to the Orwellian recipe of the identity of opposites: in the mouth of the enemy, peace means war, and defense is attack, while on the righteous side, escalation is restraint, and saturation bombing prepares for peace. Organized in this discriminatory fashion, language designates a priori the enemy as evil in his entirety and in all his actions and intentions."

"To appeal to reason, you use facts, statistics, expert opinions, and examples that support your position. To appeal to emotion, you use emotionally-loaded language — language that elicits a strong positive or negative response."