I'd venture to say that the most difficult thing about being a religious studies major is dealing with foreign languages. It's the only true obstacle I've found in the program. I had a brief introduction to the problem with Asian religions, but that was just a survey course and it wasn't detailed. It mostly relied on translations of concepts and putting the ideas in Western terms.
That's not true of Hinduism last semester and Islam this semester. A Hinduism course is packed with Sanskrit terms that have no one word or short phrase translation in English. Take for example the term "atman." It's loosely translated to mean "soul," but that's really a shallow understanding of what it means. It's NOT the soul that we have from Christianity. (For those interested in etymology, atman is derived from the word for breath, just like spirit in English (aspiration).)Translators of texts have to choose between making it accessible by using the closest English word that has an incorrect connotation and having it precise, using the untranslated term. Most academic translations tend to go with the latter, and you can get a rough measure of how good an edition of a text is by what they choose to translate and what they leave.
It might not be too big of a problem to have the occasional word in a foreign language if the language is not too distant from English. French or German would be no problem at all. Ubermensch? I can see it and at least have a pronunciation in my head. It would hardly phase me when reading. This isn't the case with Sanskrit and Arabic, primarily because the alphabets and sounds aren't the same. And that's where it gets messy. When transliterating words from Sanskrit to English and our alphabet, the end result is often cluttered with dots, dashes, and a slew of accent marks I didn't even know existed. Here's an example that I just pulled off another website: adhikāradr̥śā (I have no idea what this means). What the heck is that diamond? If you see that reading, does it flow? Or does it take five minutes to try to figure out how to pronounce it before you can even consider the context? I've found that it really is necessary to get the pronunciations, because the accents change the words, and they're similar enough to where shortening it to "adhik" in your mind will just confuse it with other words.
It took several weeks of Hinduism before I felt comfortable with the transliterated words. Halfway through the semester, I'm still struggling with the Islam.
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5 comments:
how do your professor's address this? just curious.
wow, ignore that apostrophe.
For Hinduism we had a brief introduction to pronunciation in class. There was also a pronunciation guide in the textbook, which was nice (but still a pain to consult so often). For Arabic, zilch. It's something I'll put in the teacher evals, because even just a short introduction does help.
this is something i find true when transliterating words for kids in Greek.
Also, I understand the translation aspect of this problem from Latin/Greek. Do you translate the text as it would sound best in English? Do you leave the text as close to the Latin/Greek way of writing, which you understand, but is messy English that few other people would understand the nuances of?
P.S. I almost took Sanskrit at LSU. Just to round out my arsenal of languages I won't use in everyday life.
What I garnered from this (unsurprisingly), is a detailed view of a specific obstacle that humans face in coming to understand other cultures, an obstruction hindering "us" to a degree that renders the use of the word largely inaccurate outside of a special context.
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