Lost in translation?
Lost in translation?
According to neo-Russellianism, in a sentence such as John believes that Mont Blanc is 4000 m high, any other proper name co-referring with Mont Blanc can be substituted for it without any change in the proposition expressed. Prima facie, our practice of translation shows that this cannot be correct. We will then show that neo-Russellians have a way out of this problem, which consists in holding that actual translations are not a matter of semantics, but also make an attempt at preserving some pragmatic features of the sentences to be translated. We then turn to translations that only preserve the semantic characteristics of the sentences and we argue that, although these translations are unable to show that neo-Russellianism is incorrect, they still show that it relies on some theses that seem to have no justification, apart from saving neo-Russellianism itself.
265-276
Felappi, Giulia
9c0bc4c5-5547-434e-8bbd-0c785bece1bc
Santambrogio, Marco
cb075a55-4148-4187-bbdd-b6e0e081868f
June 2019
Felappi, Giulia
9c0bc4c5-5547-434e-8bbd-0c785bece1bc
Santambrogio, Marco
cb075a55-4148-4187-bbdd-b6e0e081868f
Abstract
According to neo-Russellianism, in a sentence such as John believes that Mont Blanc is 4000 m high, any other proper name co-referring with Mont Blanc can be substituted for it without any change in the proposition expressed. Prima facie, our practice of translation shows that this cannot be correct. We will then show that neo-Russellians have a way out of this problem, which consists in holding that actual translations are not a matter of semantics, but also make an attempt at preserving some pragmatic features of the sentences to be translated. We then turn to translations that only preserve the semantic characteristics of the sentences and we argue that, although these translations are unable to show that neo-Russellianism is incorrect, they still show that it relies on some theses that seem to have no justification, apart from saving neo-Russellianism itself.
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Accepted/In Press date: 6 October 2016
e-pub ahead of print date: 20 October 2016
Published date: June 2019
Organisations:
Philosophy
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 401310
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/401310
ISSN: 0167-7411
PURE UUID: f30cdf09-3dae-4df8-af28-eff032528492
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Date deposited: 17 Oct 2016 08:09
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 05:57
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Author:
Marco Santambrogio
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