Why Is It Impossible To Translate A Book? - Walter Benjamin and the Task of the Translator

As someone who is doing her Master's in Translatology, I absolutely love this video. I think it's a great example of the concepts of "equivalence" vs. "adequateness" and the role they play in a "good" translation.

thank you, i'm reading this author's work for school and i couldn't grasp a single thing he said.

This make no sense. If one say book cant be translated properly to differentlanguage because it makes different book and we should read in the original… well guess what, reading something in learnt language is exactly the same like translating it. You have learnt the language from books and teachers, you learnt the grammar and words from dictionaries that are used for translations. Literarry every word that you learnt in the new language you translated first. So all knowledge of new language that you have is translatable and transfarrable into the translation. Simply by learning new language, you do not bring nothing extra to the table, only what has already been written and taught. In conclusion, you read and translate yourself. It might be different, but dont make reading in the original as something pure.

I loves this video, but for some reason I feel I just watch a 16min long add for lingoda 😅😅

Since reading Ward's translation of The Stranger in highschool I've been so interested in the role of the translator and in translation in general. The thought of how each language, in all its complexities (grammatical and societal), is capable of creating an inimitable tone or mood makes me wish I could understand them all.

No better time to start learning than now, I suppose haha :)

I read the same book but it was called "The outsider" can someone explain why the Titles changed?

I refuse to read translations, I read everything in its original language even if I don’t speak it. I have read the entirety of Les Miserables in French, Divine Comedy in Italian, Dom Quijote in Spanish and Brothers Karamazov in Russian without understanding a single word.

As someone currently studying art history this conflict reminds me a lot of the issues of iconography, which in layman's terms could be called the language of images, the way of analysing or even just describing art by identifying objects as certain things we know from traits that we recognise. A figure like Jesus might be recognised by the crucifix for example. But here lies the problem I think is similar to translating language. To people who aren't close to the culture, in this case Christians, however, this understanding is far from close at hand. Art can mean many different things depending on what the identity, the culture of the person who looks at it is.

As an example
many sayings that we use can not directly translate. In english we say "all clouds have a silver lining" but if your were to translate that directly into other languages, word by word, most native speakers of that tranlation would have to guess at what it actually means.

I would say that the saying tries to explain that some good can come even from bad experiences.

I was at that exact bookstore earlier today!

What is the name of the sound background

I have always been a big reader since i was young, always enjoyed it.
But I suddenly had an epiphany while doing my german homework when i was 14 and realising a word translated from german to french (my language) didn’t have the same implications and half of it was « lost in translation ». The staggering realisation that i was missing out on the original content of the books i was reading started my journey through languages and particularly reading in other languages. My language goal is always to be able to read books in their original language.

❤❤❤

Using Maman rather than Mom conveys those notions of apathy and despair only in the mind of the translator, sorry. For most English readers using the French word will just appear as "couleur locale". So much for being more Camuesque than Camus.

Translators and readers should make their final peace with the idea that a translation is an original work, a complete text in its own right. Chapman's translation of the Iliad is a British epic work based on a Greek story. Period. Translators are writers, not parrots.

I'm a native speaker of French and an avid reader of both French and English literature and I don't see the point about Maman. It means mother or mom and that's that. Let the reader interpret the word as he wishes. Some people are bent on finding unheard of meanings in perfectly common words. And what is the result of all that exercise in intellectual subtlety? A mere borrowing from the original language or some kind of so-called "literal" translation, ie the standard translation of the word as found in authoritative dictionaries. I mean, who doesn't see the impostor behind the translator here? If only he had found something original! But no, here he is, proud of his laziness, which he hides behind a screen of latinates. Users of "anglicismes" in French are the same: they claim the English words they use out of pure vanity or suivisme have such subtle meanings that obviously no French equivalent will do.

Oh God, I’m not quite at the point of learning languages to properly read literature. I wish I were one of those.

I'm late to replying to this video but if you see my comment PLEASE read Babel by R.F. Kuang. 


it's actually the book that brought me to your video. Very similar questions being asked. And the writing/plot/characters are phenomenal.

Great work here - and Waldun nails the difference between translation and interpretation.

I am interested in learning German, only to be able to read works of the German Exilliteratur (authors who fled Nazi Germany) in the original. I have several novels and memoirs in both the original and translated. Even with my pathetic level of German, by comparing the two it is obvious that the translation is lacking the author's import. For example, in Lion Feuchtwanger's "Der Teufel in Frankreich (The Devil in France)", on the first page in the original German, he expresses great antipathy toward his gaolers who have incarcerated him for nonsensical reasons and forced him (an author past middle-age) to perform hard physical labor just to keep him busy. The translator does not get this point across. Maybe he was in a hurry to meet a deadline, or maybe he did not get the point himself, or maybe it would have been impossible in English to express the author's point so concisely.

I loved this video thank you !!

it`s fascinating how this year I entered the university where I will dig more deeply into English and other languages, as well as into "the skill of being a translator", and how I learn that the deeper knowledge of a language turns out to be less required, than the knowledge of stylistic features. it`s just every time I used to read a translated book I haven`t even thought about it, for me being in "a camp of purists" was the most right thing to do.

Concerning the translation of the first line of 'The Stranger' by Camus, I remember as a French student, in my English translation class dealing with three different translated works about this line; and I was really disconcerted by the amount of subtilities that may be examined or not by the translator, and it was very tough ! but also at the same time it was really stimulating to deal with translation work, we often don't get it how hard it can be. And I particularly agree that reading in the original version is of course the best thing to do!

The funny thing is I speak French, and work at a Translation and Interpretation company, while living in a country that speaks mostly English. It is very interesting how things are translated to convey what is intended and how sometimes literally translating words for words does not work because certain ways of saying things just cant be literally translated but needs to be taken in context to know how to properly translate. :-)

amazing video

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
~Ludwig Wittgenstein

Hello!!! Do you advice always to read the book or essay in the original language or the translation despite it's not your "mother" language? In my case is with philosophy. I want to read german authors, but I´m waiting until I "master" in a certain way the language so I can read the original version. Also, it´s partly because the mistrust I have with translations. Is it accurate? Does it express the message the author wanted to give? Thank you for all the videos, greetings from Argentina.

Love the camerawork and the editing!!

The quality of your videos improved insanely

There's no limit in translation. The main problem is that most translators tend to think their headcanon is more "right".

I love Japanese culture because of anime, but fell in love with Japan because of it's language. I'm learning Japanese thru analyzing songs (that i love) lyrics and it honestly hits different!

I used to read Russian literature translated and talk to one of my friends who speaks Russian natively, she'd read the original and we'd compare.

I recently searched about how to translate Arabic poems to english...but realized its impossible job even for prof. Interpreters

Your video just came out when I was finished reading "The task of the translator"! But not only did I enjoy this selfish contingency, but also appreciated, as usual, your insight, the aesthetic work done with the video, and the case study of "The Stranger". Thank you so much for sharing it with us!

Every upload feels like a holiday and I've only been around for a few weeks! Thank you so much for this video because I found myself nodding furiously and laughing in relief at some of the ways that you describes translation. My bachelors dissertation involved translating a Turkish short story collection - I got stuck on the title! It was wonderful!

I also got lucky enough to take a translation module in final year and so much of what I learned and explored fed the translation and essay writing process. It felt transformative. Feels good to find digestible and interesting videos by someone who loves words and all that can be done with them <3

The extent to which language is a barrier can be seen, for example, in the case of Benjamin's sometime lover Anna Lacis. Lacis' barrier is exemplified by what she is called in Western discourse. There, as for example on Wikipedia, she is not called by her birth name but by her nickname "Asja". In the last decades of dealing with her, it has been consistently pretended that this woman's name was Asja and not Anna, because there is no understanding of Russian/Latvian naming in the West. Susan Ingram's work on her is worth looking at if anyone wants to study this notoriously underexposed person.

Spoilers: L'étranger

Does anyone else end up buying the same book over and over with different translations?
I’ve got Fitzgerald’s Odyssey for nostalgia, Lattimore’s Odyssey for accuracy, and Fagles’ Odyssey for kicks 😅

What an amazing video. I experienced this first hand when I was talking about Oscar Wilde 's The Importance of being Earnest (I'm a native Spanish speaker) with people who read the translation. The word earnest in Spanish doesn't carry the same double meaning like it does in English so the WHOLE POINT OF THE PLAY IS LOST. I found a new translation where the name was changed and they went "oh! Now I get it!"

A bad translation can ruin a good book.
Really interesting and underapriciated topic.

What I do not like is when translators change or omit cultural points to make it more understandable/appropriate for another culture to read. Reading translated books is a way to experience another culture and this disrupts this.

This video comes just when I start my “Translation and culture” classes. I read Benjamin’s essay a few days ago and your description helped even more. Keep going!

I just read The Stranger for the second time, alongside The Myth of Sisyphus for a presentation. I like the direction you're going for in this video (but Freud is always invited if Maman is at the party 😉)

Shooing away Freud made me laugh!

this video just reminded me of some tiktoks that people posted about the english dub of squid game. this stands for both dub and sub but, the tiktoks were about how the tone and the underlying information that a tone carries about a particular character, it's not communicated effectively when you translate it to another language. And like you said, if you translate sentences in isolation, it can interfere with the subject matter as a whole.