| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: them with Paula and Amy. Their initiations gave their new inmate
at first an almost dazzling sense of culture. Mrs. Moreen had
translated something at some former period - an author whom it made
Pemberton feel borne never to have heard of. They could imitate
Venetian and sing Neapolitan, and when they wanted to say something
very particular communicated with each other in an ingenious
dialect of their own, an elastic spoken cipher which Pemberton at
first took for some patois of one of their countries, but which he
"caught on to" as he would not have grasped provincial development
of Spanish or German.
"It's the family language - Ultramoreen," Morgan explained to him
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: much which was unseen, and which contributed to my comfort; but
save for a general impression of automatic organization, I fear I
can convey very little of the difference to your mind.
`In the matter of sepulchre, for instance, I could see no
signs of crematoria nor anything suggestive of tombs. But it
occurred to me that, possibly, there might be cemeteries (or
crematoria) somewhere beyond the range of my explorings. This,
again, was a question I deliberately put to myself, and my
curiosity was at first entirely defeated upon the point. The
thing puzzled me, and I was led to make a further remark, which
puzzled me still more: that aged and infirm among this people
The Time Machine |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: caution: metaphors differ in different languages, and the translator will
often be compelled to substitute one for another, or to paraphrase them,
not giving word for word, but diffusing over several words the more
concentrated thought of the original. The Greek of Plato often goes beyond
the English in its imagery: compare Laws, (Greek); Rep.; etc. Or again the
modern word, which in substance is the nearest equivalent to the Greek, may
be found to include associations alien to Greek life: e.g. (Greek),
'jurymen,' (Greek), 'the bourgeoisie.' (d) The translator has also to
provide expressions for philosophical terms of very indefinite meaning in
the more definite language of modern philosophy. And he must not allow
discordant elements to enter into the work. For example, in translating
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