12/02 readings Bowen

I am really interested in the reading You Are What You Speak. I strongly believe in his idea that language will affect our way of thinking and how we portray the world. This resonates with me because I always feel like my ability to learn a new language is strictly limited by my first language, Chinese, especially when it comes to time.

Although it seems like most Chinese speakers are not severely affected by their language in terms of how they think, I feel differently. In Chinese, there's no need to change verbs based on tense—it's always the same verb no matter when. Even though I have studied English for many years, I still can't figure out the proper way to speak using correct tenses or fully understand the concept of tense. When reading a grammar book, I can kind of get the concept and use it to solve some simple problems, but that's as far as it goes. In my mind, I feel like I don’t have this thinking pattern about tense, and I just can't speak or write while taking tense into consideration.

This isn't just about English—it's the same for my Japanese as well. I think it's because Chinese lacks different verb forms for tense, which makes it harder for me to adapt to these concepts in other languages.

 About the On the Different Methods of Translating reading, I feel like my thinking about how to translate has changed greatly this semester. At the beginning of the semester, I thought that as a translator, I should do my best to move the Reader Toward the Author, preserving the cultural and linguistic nuances of the original text to respect the author and keep the book as it is in the original language. But through learning and practicing with various types of texts, I find myself now leaning more toward the Move the Author Toward the Reader side, adapting the text to the target language and culture.

I think this change in my thinking happened because I no longer take myself, someone who knows about Japanese culture, as the default reader. Now, I also consider that there are many people with different cultural backgrounds who might read my translation. I realize I should not be selfish and only think about how I, as a reader, would love a translated book to look, but also consider what others might want the book to be like.