Hello, my dear classmates! This is my first blog for our ASTU100. So I would like to introduce myself first. I’m an international student from Shanghai, China. And I had my grade 12 course in Toronto. This is my second year in Canada. The reason I talk about my own background is because that there is going to have a connection to my topic: globalization. In the past two weeks, we have talked about global citizenship and also had a joint lecture for CAP. Since this is a blog for English class, I want to share some thoughts about translating languages.
If we are going to talking about globalization, the first problem comes to us is the language problem. Even in our ASTU class students comes from different countries with different first languages. So translating of language has become an unavoidable problem. Does language lose some of its meaning when they are translated? Do the same meaning words in different languages give people different emotions? In my opinion, once literature is translated, it will lose more or less information it used to have. For example, Persepolis was first written in French. Now it has been translated in more than ten different languages and there are even more than one version for each language. In the version we had read in the last week the subtitle has been translated in to The Story Of A Childhood. While in the Chinese version, it is translated into I grew up in Iran. Even the original version is divided into four parts instead of the two parts that we read today. It is hard to say that the origin must be the best version. But at least it can pass on the most original message from author. By the way, since Persepolis was written as a comic book, readers can also get more information through pictures instead of just the words.
As a student who is going to study different literature, I think that will be a great help if there is a chance to read original version instead of translated version. So when people worry about that globalization may change the world into the same, I think once there are different languages for different cultures, we don’t need to worry about that. To illustrate, Gone with the wind written by Margaret Mitchell was translated into Chinese and the title was translated in to Piao, which means floating in air literally. But in Chinese it has more figurative meaning, it presents the weakness when protagonist faces the social situation. That is the glamour of different language, which also can be present more remarkable in Chinese poem, English sonnet, Japanese haiku and so on. People use those refined words in their own language with different culture to show their emotion. To understand their thoughts might be the reason why we need to study literature.
