Reaction to Weinberger
Erika Loja
Reaction to the “Anonymous Sources” by Eliot Weinberger
According to Weinberger in his essay “Anonymous Sources” he assures that translation is a necessity. Although not everyone may think that it is a necessity because you don’t have to know other languages than your own, in my opinion knowing other languages is always an advantage in all aspects. Knowing and speaking a certain language is different from translating someone´s foreign work into a new language. I myself, am a Spanish speaker person but that doesn’t mean I am able to translate Spanish to English perfectly, I know some words but not all. There are more advantages of getting hired by companies because you are bilingual and are a translator rather than someone who lacks all of this. “Translation liberates the translation language” pg 18; this quote caught my attention because translation will never be the same as the original. It goes beyond that. You can change and use different words that have a similar or exact meaning to what the original text said. Weinberger affirms that no translation will be identical to the original text. He also gets aggravated when people say translation is problematic. In my opinion I think the reason why some people considered translation to be problematic is because it changes a lot of things from the original text but then again wouldn’t a literal translation be just boring? Translation is not about translating words one by one, it’s about translating the idea of the text into another way of writing.