In Translation
across the permeable membrane

The main difficulty in translating cultural expressions lies in their figurative nature,
as they are culture-bound expressions and carry an implicit meaning which goes beyond their literal meaning. (MAAHmaidan)

hào zi wéi zhī

PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi's not-so-subtle reprimand falls on deaf ears Victor Mair at Language Log 10ii25

Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language Douglas Hofstadter (1998) is for me a go-to in matters of the art (and perils) of Translation

...Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today's computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.
(Amazon blurb)

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the example of adat

German English Victor Mair at Language Log

Brad DeLong translates Cicero: Stochastic Parrots on the Palatine Hill: Monday MAMLMs

On logs, Latin, and linear algebra: learning from a stochastic parrot; somewhat awkward questions about agency and pedagogy arising from working through one ridiculously knotty sentence of In Catilinam with an LLM

in qua nemo est extra istam coniurationem perditorum hominum, qui te non metuat, nemo, qui non oderit. How might you parse the two parallel clauses with "nemo" — and what does the distribution of negation tell us about the force of Cicero's claim here?