Sometimes it takes a while for me to come up with discussion questions about the articles that we read for class, and other times it comes too easily. It seems that when I am not strictly "required" to come up with questions or comments, they simply spill out! Since I won't be contributing questions for Wednesday's class, I decided to post them here instead. :)
First of all, I must say that this article was very interesting, and it called to mind the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, which says that a person's language affects (or at least influences) his or her conceptualization of the world. Otheguy seems to be making the opposite argument: that a person's conceptualization of the world affects or influences his or her language. So is it one or the other, or both (like a two-way street)?
Additionally, while I agree that cultural adaptation plays a role in the way language is used, I cannot completely disregard the idea of "word-for-word" translations. Why can't it both? If a translation of this kind exactly followed the word order of the donor language, the result would belong to neither language. Speakers who employ loan translations instinctively adapt them to their native syntactic structures and semantic devices, in order to avoid this problem. So, I still believe that the notions of "loan translations" and "word-for-word" translations are valid.
As a last question: Did Otheguy end by totally refuting the existence of loan translations, or not? Thanks for listening! :)
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Hola Ali, I don't think Otheguy's aim was to refute the idea of a loan translation. I think he wanted to demonstrate that there are many spurious loan translations. In other words, not every new term or concept, not every act of synchronic creativity is a loan translation (although they do exist).
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