12/2 Reflection - Ellerie Ross

 The article about the psychology of language was very interesting to me as a linguistics major. I had heard in the past about the this theory and about how language shapes the way that you think about the world. I think this is true even with second languages to a certain extent even, when the speaker is in an environment where they are consistently expected to speak in their second language. For me, the issue that I run into the most when speaking Japanese has always been the degrees of politeness that are a large part of the language. For native speakers, they have an almost instinctual understanding of who they are speaking to, how that person stands in relation to their own position, and what social standing their conversation partner holds. For someone learning Japanese, they don't have this instant knowledge of all those things, which makes it difficult for learners to understand when polite speech is necessary, and to what degree. 

This concept is especially important while translating, because the author expects the reader to have the instinctual knowledge associated with the original language while reading. For example, for the Guugu Yimithirr language mentioned in the article, the author might expect the reader to have a knowledge of where the cardinal directions are and where the characters stand in a cardinal plane. This can be confusing for readers who don't have this kind of knowledge. That leads to the question of what a translator should do in that position. This brings into the equation the concepts outlined in the other article written by Schleiermacher. Should they translate directly, leaving the cardinal directions in order to show the original thoughts of the author, or should they change them into egocentric directions instead? In most cases, people would change the directions into egocentric directions because that would be easier to understand for non-native speakers. But in the case of a conversation using the Japanese keigo style, is it better to keep it or discard it? I feel like the conversation gets more difficult here. 

In both cases, with cardinal directions and polite speech, they exist in languages like English. The problem is that they are not used in the same way as Guugu Yimithirr or Japanese. In the first case, it's easy to change the author's words to be more clear, but in the second case, there would be more discussion about whether or not to keep the polite language. I think this brings up an interesting topic of where the line is for a concept to be too complicated or confusing to translate, and keeping the spirit of the original text.