Die Schwierigkeit von Verständigung
Christina Wodtke has an interesting post about language and the difficulties of translation on Elegant Hack, illustrated by an amusing sound clip of John Cage (posted on Derek Rogerson’s site) talking about a variety of translations of a haiku he was interested in. I was tempted to post my lengthy reply here, but I posted on her site instead. You can read it there.
(Incidentally, I originally tried to post the title of this entry in Polish, but it was tough to overcome the western encoding of the page. Setting the language to Polish with a span tag wasn’t enough, and BBEdit’s ability to translate odd characters to character entities doesn’t extend beyond western languages. Dreamweaver understands the different encodings, but I think I would have to change the encoding of my site to some form of Unicode to get the browser to allow me to post the Polish letters. And then I’m not sure if the database behind this site would handle it gracefully. So instead, you get a title auf Deutsche.)
Posted at 7:36 PM