Quantifier variance faces a number of difficulties. In this paper we first formulate the view as holding that the meanings of the quantifiers may vary, and that languages using different quantifiers may be charitably translated into each other. We then object to the view on the basis of four claims: (i) quantifiers cannot vary their meaning extensionally by changing the domain of quantification; (ii) quantifiers cannot vary their meaning intensionally without collapsing into logical pluralism; (iii) quantifier variance is not an (...) ontological doctrine; (iv) quantifier variance is not compatible with charitable translation and as such is internally inconsistent. In light of these troubles, we recommend the dissolution of quantifier variance and suggest that the view be laid to rest. (shrink)

Background: Critically ill patients often require complex clinical care by highly trained staff within a specialized intensive care unit (ICU) with advanced equipment. There are currently limited data on the costs of critical care in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). This study aims to investigate the direct-medical costs of key infectious disease (tetanus, sepsis, and dengue) patients admitted to ICU in a hospital in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam, and explores how the costs and cost drivers can vary between the (...) different diseases. -/- Methods: We calculated the direct medical costs for patients requiring critical care for tetanus, dengue and sepsis. Costing data (stratified into different cost categories) were extracted from the bills of patients hospitalized to the adult ICU with a dengue, sepsis and tetanus diagnosis that were enrolled in three studies conducted at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in HCMC from January 2017 to December 2019. The costs were considered from the health sector perspective. The total sample size in this study was 342 patients. -/- Results: ICU care was associated with significant direct medical costs. For patients that did not require mechanical ventilation, the median total ICU cost per patient varied between US$64.40 and US$675 for the different diseases. The costs were higher for patients that required mechanical ventilation, with the median total ICU cost per patient for the different diseases varying between US$2,590 and US$4,250. The main cost drivers varied according to disease and associated severity. -/- Conclusion: This study demonstrates the notable cost of ICU care in Vietnam and in similar LMIC settings. Future studies are needed to further evaluate the costs and economic burden incurred by ICU patients. The data also highlight the importance of evaluating novel critical care interventions that could reduce the costs of ICU care. (shrink)

Ramayan Through Kundalini Yoga Shodasi is an ideal read for Sanskrit-literate readers who are open to eclectic yogarthas and connotative meanings -------- So you thought Vyasa was before Valmiki, Mahabharat was before Ramayan, Rama a Vishnu avatar, and tantrism distinct from vedism? Think again. In Shodasi: Secrets of the Ramayana, Telugu poet Seshendra Sharma re-reads the Ramayan to come up with a number of new conclusions. Much of the book sets out to prove that Ramayan was written before the Mahabharat. (...) Sharma discusses how Indra is cited more often than Vishnu, thus placing the context of the Ramayan closer to Vedic than Puranic thought. He quotes from the Mahabharat to show how it follows descriptions of hills, rivers from the Ramayan. The Mahabharat has some prose, and therefore, it must have been composed after Ramayan, which is entirely in poetry. These are only some of the numerous reasons that Sharma offers to suggest a new sequence of our itihasas. Sharma’s book is also an experimental reading of the Ramayan through the interpretive lens of what he calls Kundalini yoga. Hanuman’s flight to Sri Lanka gets a new interpretation. “Charana Charite Pathi” is interpreted as the path of Kundalini, and the first verse of the Sundara Kanda “Tatho Ravana Nithayah” is interpreted by Sharma to refer to Hanuman traversing the sushumna nadi of the Kundalini. Trijata’s dream becomes the Gayatri mantra through an imaginative recasting of words as numbers. Gaja (elephant) means eight, danta (teeth) means thirty-two, and maha-gaja-chaturdantam somehow also adds up to 32 syllables, which is the number of syllables in the Gayatri mantra. That Trijata’s dream is halfway through the Ramayan also becomes significant for Sharma, he calls it the ‘central bead’ in the Ramayan garland of 24,000 beads. Identifying 32-syllables as the Gayatri follows a convention, for mantras are referenced by the number of syllables; however, it is the “secret” yogartha—or mystical, anagogical translations—derived by Sharma that becomes problematic, unless he is considered an authority in his own right. conclude that the name Sundarakand is unrelated to any descriptions of beauty of any of the main characters in the Ramayan. However, Soundarya and Tripura-Sundari are well-known conventions in the tantric tradition and hence, Sharma concludes that Sundarakand derives its name from Shakti’s beauty, and “Sundara-Hanuman” means “Hanuman who is a devotee of Devi” (117). A coda in this book is about the benedictory verse in Kalidasa’s Sakuntalam which has traditionally been understood to refer to Ishwara. Sharma re-interprets this verse highlighting the “eight forms” of the last line as the eight forms of Devi that please Ishwara. This book is suitable for a reader who is Sanskrit-literate and open to eclectic yogarthas and connotative meanings. Sharma cites substantially from the Ramayan in roman but without diacritics, this is difficult to follow; and he does not always include translation. Sharma often cites commentators without citing names and sources. It is not clear why the book is called Shodasi—readers may note, this book is not about the Srividya tradition. Even if the reader is unconvinced by Sharma’s reasoning or methodology, the free flow of references may prove absorbing for a reader interested in the subject. This could also be an eclectic reference for a scholar researching tantric elements in the Ramayan. - Mani Rao The Sunday Standard Magazine The New Indian Express 29th November 2015 . (shrink)

In a beautiful recent essay, the philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong explains the reasons for his departure from evangelical Christianity, the religious culture in which he was brought up. Sinnot-Armstrong contrasts the interpretive methods used by good philosophers and fundamentalist believers: Good philosophers face objections and uncertainties. They follow where arguments lead, even when their conclusions are surprising and disturbing. Intellectual honesty is also required of scholars who interpret philosophical texts. If I had distorted Kant’s view to make him reach a conclusion (...) that I preferred, then my philosophy professor would have failed me. The contrast with religious reasoning is stark. My Christian friends seemed happy to hide serious problems in the Bible and in their arguments. They preferred comfort to intellectual honesty. I couldn’t. To what extent can we, historians of philosophy, claim the virtue of intellectual honesty? Speaking frankly, I do not find the practice criticized by Sinnot-Armstrong’s philosophy professor rare or unusual at all. We very frequently distort the views of past philosophers in order to reach the conclusions we prefer. We just call it “Charitable Interpretation.” In this essay, I discuss and criticize the logic behind so-called charitable interpretations in the history of philosophy. This phenomenon is ubiquitous and is not at all restricted to a particular philosophical strand or ideology. Analytic philosophers and post-modernists, Marxists, liberals, secularists, and fundamentalists, we all engage in the very same domestication project. Even more disturbing than the sheer ideological pervasiveness of this phenomenon is the fact that, on many occasions, superb philosophers and historians take part in this fairly childish endeavor. In the first part of this essay, I discuss the general logic of charitable interpretations in the history of philosophy, mostly by addressing discussions in metaphysics and epistemology. In the second part, I focus on the somewhat less noticed use of charitable interpretations in the study of political philosophy, and point out the quintessential role ideology plays in these discussions. In both parts, I concentrate mostly on the interpretation of Spinoza’s thought. I do so not because I have special fondness for Spinoza (“guilty as charged,” I admit), but because Spinoza is such a beast (and may I add, an enchanting beast) and attracts a disproportionate share of the domestication efforts from historians and philosophers of all creeds and persuasions. In the third and final part of the paper, I will begin to outline an alternative methodology, which suggests that past philosophers can be most relevant to our current philosophical discussion, to the extent that they provide us with well-motivated challenges to our common-sense beliefs. Such challenges have the invaluable virtue of being able to undermine our most fundamental and secure beliefs, and force us to engage with the most fundamental questions. What more can we expect from good philosophy? (shrink)

Wie jedes Krankenhaus hat Charité ihre Geschichte, die mit dem Erlaß des preußischen Königs Friedrich I. vom 14. November 1709 zur Gründung von Lazareth-Häusern anfing, um der Ausbreitung der Pest entgegenzuwirken, wozu es allerdings in Berlin nie gekommen ist. Am 9. Januar 1727 verfügte König Friedrich Wilhelm I. die Umwandlung des vor dem Spandowischen Tor errichteten Lazareth in ein Hospital und nannte es „das Haus die Charité“ nach dem Vorbild von Hôpital de la Charité in Paris. -/- Das Wort und (...) der Begriff Charité ist wesentlich älter als das Krankenhaus. Das Französische charité ist äquivalent dem Englischen charity und dem Deutschen Barmherzigkeit, während ihre Ursprünge im Griechischen zu finden sind: χάρις bedeutet Gnade, Gunst, χαριτόω Gnade oder Gunst zeigen oder empfangen, favorisieren oder favorisiert werden, gnädig oder begnadet sein. Das Krankenhaus ist ein Ort der Gnade, welche den Kranken und Bedürftigen zusteht aufgrund allgemeiner Verpflichtung, seinen Nächsten so zu lieben wie sich selbst. Die Gunst und die Gnade zu erweisen heißt auch, sich zu erbarmen und mitleidig sein, eigenes Herz für fremdes Leid zu offnen. -/- Seit ihrer Gründung weichte Charité von diesem Grundgedanke mehrmals ab, was bisher in ihrer Geschichtsschreibung mehr oder weniger wahrheitsgetreu festgehalten wurde. Dieser Tradition des Festhaltens und der Wiedergabe der Wahrheit bin ich verpflichtet, weil offizielle Geschichtsschreibung erneut beginnt, von der Realität abzuweichen und die Tatsachen zu leugnen, die sowohl unzweifelhaft sind als auch unzweifelhaft würdig sind, erzählt zu werden, weil es dabei um die Frage des Auftrags der Charité geht. -/- Charité wurde gegründet, um das Unheil abzuwenden, dennoch war ihre Geschichte keine Heilsgeschichte, wie ich bereits feststellte. Das Unheil setzte sich im 21. Jahrhundert fort, was ich zu unterbinden suche. Einziges Heilmittel dagegen ist die Wahrheit, daran besteht kein Zweifel, und der Weg, um die Wahrheit zu erkennen, ist die Barmherzigkeit. (shrink)

When charitable matching occurs, both the person initially offering the matching donation and the person taking up the offer may well feel they have done something better than if they had donated on their own without matching. They may well feel they deserve some credit for the matched donation as well as their own. Can they both be right? Natural assumptions about charitable matching lead to puzzles that are challenging to resolve in a satisfactory way.

Are the wishes of the dead more important than the needs of the living? This question is prompted by consideration of the Hershey Trust Company, a perpetual charitable trust that not only owns and operates the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania, but also owns a controlling interest in various Hershey-related for-profit entities. This unusual arrangement, and the conditions under which it was formed, have produced a situation in which a small, private boarding school for low-income students has an endowment (...) of $12 billion (in addition to its other corporate and real estate interests). The trust has been operating according to its founder’s wishes for decades, but some have wondered whether its resources could be put to better use for more urgent needs. This case will invite students to consider the question of how we should weigh the needs of the living against the wishes of the dead. (shrink)

The main objective o f this descriptive paper is to present the general notion of translation between logical systems as studied by the GTAL research group, as well as its main results, questions, problems and indagations. Logical systems here are defined in the most general sense, as sets endowed with consequence relations; translations between logical systems are characterized as maps which preserve consequence relations (that is, as continuous functions between those sets). In this sense, logics together with translations form (...) a bicomplete category of which topological spaces with topological continuous functions constitute a full subcategory. We also describe other uses of translations in providing new semantics for non-classical logics and in investigating duality between them. An important subclass of translations, the conservative translations, which strongly preserve consequence relations, is introduced and studied. Some specific new examples of translations involving modal logics, many-valued logics, para- consistent logics, intuitionistic and classical logics are also described. (shrink)

Some of the challenges in Sanders et al. (this issue) can be aptly illustrated by means of charity nudges, that is, nudges designed to increase charitable donations. These nudges raise many ethical questions. First, Oxfam’s triptychs with suggested donations are designed to increase giving. If successful, do our actions match ex ante or ex post preferences? Does this make a difference to the autonomy of the donor? Second, the Behavioural Insights Team conducted experiments using social networks to nudge people (...) to give more. Do these appeals steer clear of exploiting power relations? Do they respect boundaries of privacy? Third, in an online campaign by Kiva, donors are asked to contribute directly to personalized initiatives. In many cases, the initiative has already been funded and donor money is funnelled to a new cause. Is such a “pre-disbursal” arrangement truthful and true to purpose as a social business model? (shrink)

Philosophers, and students of philosophy, are often advised to interpret other philosophers charitably. In this paper, I present an alternative to interpreting charitably. I call it “the simple-model technique” and use H.L.A. Hart responding to John Rawls to illustrate it.

Ridley’s overall strategy, in bare outline form, seems to be this. Collingwood's points about the close connections between artistic expression and physical involvement with a medium are so good that anything else he says must be reinterpreted so as to be consistent with these Expression insights. In particular his overall theory of art, usually interpreted as an "Ideal theory" (according to which a work of art is somehow "in the head", perhaps as the content of a mental imaginative act of (...) expression) must be charitably reinterpreted to remove any apparent references to such mental entities. I spell out two related puzzlements with this strategy. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of how it is possible to understand the language of an incommensurable theory. The aim is to defend the idea of translation failure against the objection that it incoherently precludes understanding.

Interpretations are generally regarded as the formal representation of the concept of translation.We do not subscribe to this view. A translation method must indeed establish relative consistency or have some uniformity. These are requirements of a translation. Yet, one can both be more strict or more flexible than interpretations are. In this article, we will define a general scheme translation. It should incorporate interpretations but also be compatible with more flexible methods. By doing so, we want (...) to account for methods that seem to imply a sense of translation but are not reducible to interpretations. The main example will be the relative consistent proof between ZF and NBG given by Novak (1950). Further, we will explore a way of combining interpretations. This should account for truth conditions discarded by interpretations in translated theories. (shrink)

The present text is the revised and corrected English translation of the book published in German by the Lang Verlag, Bern 2008. Unfortunately the text still has some minor flaws (especially in the Index Locorum) but they do not concern the main thesis or the arguments. It will still be the final version, especially considering my age. It is among the most widespread and the least questioned convictions that in Metaphysics Lambda Aristotle presents a theology which has its basis (...) in a metaphysics of substance. Doubts about theological interpretation are beginning to stir in a growing number of publications, but nevertheless the majority of research literature, compendiums and histories of philosophy argues within this frame. A closer look at the facts reveals that this conviction has no basis in the text. Quite the contrary it is based on a reception with theological interests. It arised over centuries, starting from Patristic times and the Middle Ages; it was influenced by Neoplatonic texts as the Liber de Causis or the Theologia Aristotelis, texts for a long time considered as original Aristotelian books. And, if you read not translations but the Greek text, you see that the word 'god' occurs much less than in a theological book should be. In some translations we find more occurences of that word, and especially in French, Italian, English translations some words as le Bien, l'Intelligence etc. are written with capitals to inticate that it is about god. To make it even more clear, we read often the term 'First Mover' or 'Unmoved Mover' as an other name for god, but this expression is never used by Aristotle. So the reader has the impression that Aristotle speaks continuously about god. In addition, in the present book you will find arguments which clean up with the outdated concept of substance in the Aristotelian text, a concept which was developed for quite other problems than Aristotle had, namely theolgical ones. And, if there is no substance, there is no corresponding metaphysics of substance and no theology or onto-theology. If substance, metyphysics, theology play no role in Metaphysics Lambda, what else is its content and aim? That is not so difficult to say because Aristotle says it sufficiently clear in his first sentence, περὶ οὐσίας ἡ θεωρία: our inquiry is about being; its aim is to develop the Frage nach dem Sein and to state a speculative answer: being is noesis, Sein ist Gewahren. (shrink)

This paper presents a simple pair of first-order theories that are not definitionally (nor Morita) equivalent, yet are mutually conservatively translatable and mutually 'surjectively' translatable. We use these results to clarify the overall geography of standards of equivalence and to show that the structural commitments that theories make behave in a more subtle manner than has been recognized.

Modern digital technologies—from web-based services to Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions—increasingly affect the daily lives of billions of people. Such innovation brings huge opportunities, but also concerns about design, development, and deployment of digital technologies. This article identifies and discusses five clusters of risk in the international debate about digital ethics: ethics shopping; ethics bluewashing; ethics lobbying; ethics dumping; and ethics shirking.

In the last decade alone, a growing body of preliminary evidence suggests that classic psychedelics (CPs) can rapidly and durably ameliorate symptoms and cognitive deficits associated with depression. However, the mechanisms by which CPs work in the brain are not well understood. Rodent translational research, in which experimental findings from rodents are translated to humans, is fundamental in achieving this goal. This chapter focuses on a representative subset of human and rodent studies investigating CPs for depression, including the various lines (...) of research that have been initiated to understand how they work. Our aim is to show that in addition to epistemic challenges that scientists face in translating findings from rodents to humans, there is also mismatch between experimental approaches used to investigate CPs in humans and rodents. We thus show current experimental practices are not conducive to mechanistic discovery. We end with a set of positive proposals to expedite the drive to translate CPs into effective treatments for depression. -/- Keywords: classic psychedelics, psychiatry, clinical trials, collaboration, extrapolation, major depressive disorder, open science, philosophy of science, rodent models, scientific practice, translation, validity . (shrink)

This paper considers the issue of translation failure between theories from the perspective of a modified causal theory of reference. It is argued that translation failure between theories is in fact a consequence of such a modified causal theory of reference. The paper attempts to show what is right about the incommensurability thesis from the perspective of such a theory of reference. Since relations of co-reference may obtain between theories in the absence of translation, incomparability of content (...) does not follow from failure of translation. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a way to translate the metainferences of a mixed metainferential system into formulae of an extended-language system, called its associated σ-system. To do this, the σ-system will contain new operators (one for each standard), called the σ operators, which represent the notions of "belonging to a (given) standard". We first prove, in a model-theoretic way, that these translations preserve (in)validity. That is, that a metainference is valid in the base system if and only if its (...) translation is a tautology of its corresponding σ-system. We then use these results to obtain other key advantages. Most interestingly, we provide a recipe for building unlabeled sequent calculi for σ-systems. We then exemplify this with a σ-system useful for logics of the ST family, and prove soundness and completeness for it, which indirectly gives us a calculus for the metainferences of all those mixed systems. Finally, we respond to some possible objections and show how our σ-framework can shed light on the “obeying” discussion within mixed metainferential contexts. (shrink)

Many neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases and other brain disorders are accompanied by impairments in high-level cognitive functions including memory, attention, motivation, and decision-making. Despite several decades of extensive research, neuroscience is little closer to discovering new treatments. Key impediments include the absence of validated and robust cognitive assessment tools for facilitating translation from animal models to humans. In this review, we describe a state-of-the-art platform poised to overcome these impediments and improve the success of translational research, the Mouse Translational (...) Research Accelerator Platform (MouseTRAP), which is centered on the touchscreen cognitive testing system for rodents. It integrates touchscreen-based tests of high-level cognitive assessment with state-of-the art neurotechnology to record and manipulate molecular and circuit level activity in vivo in animal models during human-relevant cognitive performance. The platform also is integrated with two Open Science platforms designed to facilitate knowledge and data-sharing practices within the rodent touchscreen community, touchscreencognition and mousebytes. Touchscreencognition includes the Wall, showcasing touchscreen news and publications, the Forum, for community discussion, and Training, which includes courses, videos, SOPs, and symposia. To get started, interested researchers simply create user accounts. We describe the origins of the touchscreen testing system, the novel lines of research it has facilitated, and its increasingly widespread use in translational research, which is attributable in part to knowledge-sharing efforts over the past decade. We then identify the unique features of MouseTRAP that stand to potentially revolutionize translational research, and describe new initiatives to partner with similar platforms such as McGill’s M3 platform. (shrink)

The article presents the advantages and limitations of adaptive clinical trials for assessing the effectiveness of medical interventions and specifies the conditions that contributed to their development and implementation in clinical practice. I advance two arguments by discussing different cases of adaptive trials. The normative argument is that responsible adaptation should be taken seriously as a new way of doing clinical research insofar as a valid justification, sufficient understanding, and adequate operational conditions are provided. The second argument is historical. The (...) development of adaptive trials can be related to lessons learned from research in cases of urgency and to the decades-long efforts to end the productivity crisis of pharmaceutical research, which led to the emergence of translational, personalized, and, recently, precision medicine movements. (shrink)

I consider Ralph Waldo Emerson’s creative appropriation of a philosophical doctrine that helps to make sense of an attitude towards life, its gifts and its burdens, that is often expressed in Puritan diaries. The doctrine, now known as the doctrine of continuous creation, holds that in conserving the world, God re-creates it at every moment, making the same creative effort at each ever-advancing now that God made at the very beginning. Continuous creation was explicitly endorsed by at least one Puritan (...) diarist, Jonathan Edwards, and it helps to explain the intense self-inspection and valiant response to life to which other Puritan diarists (including Emerson's aunt, Mary Moody Emerson) testify. Continuous creation was an important ingredient in the idealism of Edwards and, once translated, it became an important ingredient in the idealism of Emerson. My primary aim to describe Emerson’s creative translation of the doctrine as Edwards understood it, but I also discuss Emerson's relation to the Puritan diary, considered as a literary form. I close by suggesting that for us, a version of the doctrine of continuous creation can perhaps be a source of optimism and an incentive to action, as I believe it was for Emerson. I also comment briefly on Emerson's grateful reliance on text-to-text translations. When Emerson studied translations of sacred texts from around the world, what he heard was not difference and dissent, but agreement: agreement on the very points that united him with Edwards, different as they were in other ways. (shrink)

According to the philosophical tradition, translation is successful when one has substituted words and sentences from one language with those from another by cross-linguistic synonymy. Moreover, according to the orthodox view, the meaning of expressions and sentences of languages are determined by their basic or systematic role in a language. This makes translating normative and evaluative discourse puzzling for two reasons. First, as languages are syntactically and semantically different because of their peculiar cultural and historical influences, and as values (...) and norms differ across cultures, it is unlikely that languages will have synonymous evaluative and normative expressions. If translation is only successful by cross-linguistic synonymy, it would seem that we will not be able to translate the value theoretic claims of persons from radically different cultures. But it is with such persons that dialogue on evaluative matters is imperative, to resolve ethical and axiological differences that could be the root of conflict. Second, as the orthodox account of meaning renders it linguistically relative, it is unlikely that expressions across languages will be cross-linguistically synonymous. Thus, on the Orthodox account of translation, translation is indeterminate (as W.V.O. Quine has argued) or impossible (as Jacques Derrida has argued). In this dissertation I argue for a novel theory of meaning and translation based on innovations in the translation studies literature and my prior work in cross cultural research, which I call Text-Type Semantics or TTS. TTS explains how translation is successful while affirming radical cultural and linguistic diversity. It treats disciplinary concerns as the neutral criteria to calibrate translation. On the basis of TTS I argue that we need what I call the “Quasi-Indexical” account of thick and thin concepts (or QI) to translate normative and evaluative discourse. I argue that QI and TTS succeed where competing accounts in the moral semantics literature (such as Non-Analytic Naturalism and Expressivism) fail. The argument also shows that the relativization of truth (in philosophy and beyond) to languages and cultures is mistaken. (shrink)

According to one influential view, something which we might have reason to think is a language, is not proven to be such until it has been translated. I will try to show, to the contrary, that it is necessary to appeal to factors which are independent of translation in order to establish that it is indeed a language which has been translated in the first place. If this is right, it follows that proof of languagehood, so far from depending (...) on translation, is in fact logically prior to translation. (shrink)

In “Conceptual Differences Between Children and Adults,” Susan Carey discusses phlogiston theory in order to defend the view that there can be non-translatability between scientific languages. I present an objection to her defence.

In this article Johann David Michaelis’s views of language and translation are juxtaposed with his own experience as a translated and translating author, especially with regard to the translations of his prize essay on the reciprocal influence of language and opinions (1759). Its French version originated in a close collaboration with the translators, while the pirated English edition was anonymously translated at second hand. The article reconstructs Michaelis’s relationship with the French translators and his renouncement of the English version, (...) publicly condemned in London by Robert Lowth at the author’s request. These two processes represent different contemporary modes of translation and shed new light on emerging theories of linguistic and cultural transfer. (shrink)

Darwinian ideas were developed and radically transformed when they were transmitted to the alien intellectual background of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. The earliest references to Darwin in China appeared in the 1870s through the writings of Western missionaries who provided the Chinese with the earliest information on evolutionary doctrines. Meanwhile, Chinese ambassadors, literati and overseas students contributed to the dissemination of evolutionary ideas, with modest effect. The ‘evolutionary sensation’ in China was generated by the Chinese Spencerian Yan Fu’s (...) paraphrased translation and reformulation of Thomas Huxley’s 1893 Romanes Lecture ‘Evolution and ethics’ and his ‘Prolegomena’. It was from this source that ‘Darwin’ became well known in China – although it was Darwin’s name, rather than his theories, that reached Chinese literati’s households. The Origin of Species itself began to receive attention only at the turn of the twentieth century. The translator, Ma Junwu (1881–1940), incorporated non-Darwinian doctrines, particularly Lamarckian and Spencerian principles, into his edition of the Chinese Origin. This partially reflected the importance of the pre-existing Chinese intellectual background as well as Yan Fu’s progressive ‘evolutionary paradigm’. In this paper, I will elucidate Ma Junwu’s culturally conditioned reinterpretation of the Origin before 1906 by investigating his transformation of Darwin’s principal concepts. (shrink)

The present collection of translations arises from our work within Writing Urban Places, a network of researchers interested in the different ways citizens appropriate meaningful built environments through stories, and in doing so are also better able to integrate with others. A key locus in this respect is what our network has termed the ‘mid-sized’ [or ‘intermediate’] European city. Often afforded only cursory attention in the discussion of both culture and society, overlooked in favour of more usual suspects, such urban (...) places allow for a more de-centred, and on occasions regionally focused, view of urban practices, even as they play host to a significant element of contemporary European life and experience. The quest for meaningfulness and appropriation of the urban environment through co-creative, adaptive, and transformative processes (many of which have a textual quality) became central to the theoretical framework of this initiative. Between the individual places in which such processes could be observed and documented, we hypothesized, arises the problem of intermediation – the move from place to place, and its techniques. Translation, more than a textual practice among others, emerged as a structuring consideration of the project at a European scale. Other Destinations is the outcome of this collective process presented here, offering entry into this work to an English-language readership for the first time. We hope that, even as they bring their cities of origin somewhat closer to a new readership, those readers will be uprooted and moved some distance in the direction of these ‘other destinations.’ -/- The edited volume Other Destinations. Translating the Mid-sized European City thus features English translations of 15 21st century (mainly) literary texts published in different media (books, podcasts, journals, online/social media) originally written in languages other than English and that have not previously been translated into English. The selected texts cover the topic of mid-sized European cities, where mid-sized does not solely refer to the size in terms of geographical scope or the number of inhabitants, but also to their socio-historical context of urban identity where these cities are neither metropolises nor small towns, but “other”, lesser-known European cities. The texts selected to be translated in this edited volume cover cities like Volos, Canakkale, Varna, Plovdiv, Durres, Tirana, Porto, Den Haag, Osijek, Salzburg, Naples, Zrenjanin, Loule and others…. The publication intends to enhance the dissemination and accessibility to an international readership of texts about overlooked urban contexts, “other”, lesser-known European cities, their stories and signifying practices in order to develop a better awareness of these cities, their self-constructions, and their responses to the challenges of the present. (shrink)

In this article we approach a case of intersemiotic translation as a paradigmatic example of Boden’s ‘transformational creativity’ category. To develop our argument, we consider Boden’s fundamental notion of ‘conceptual space’ as a regular pattern of semiotic action, or ‘habit’ (sensu Peirce). We exemplify with Gertrude Stein’s intersemiotic translation of Cézanne and Picasso’s proto-cubist and cubist paintings. The results of Stein’s IT transform the conceptual space of modern literature, constraining it towards new patterns of semiosis. Our association of (...) Boden’s framework to describe a cognitive creative phenomenon with a philosophically robust theory of meaning results in a cognitive semiotic account of IT. (shrink)

In this article we wish to share the work in which the Group of Peirce Studies of the University of Navarra has been involved since 2007: the study of a very interesting part of the extensive correspondence of Charles S. Peirce, specifically, his European letters. Peirce wrote some of these letters over the course of his five trips to Europe (between 1870 and 1883), and wrote others to the many European scientists and intellectuals he communicated with over the course of (...) his life. The translation of those letters has been an excellent practical example of the creative and abductive nature of translation, as well as of the cooperative character of research. Translating Peirce's letters has allowed us a deep study of some theoretical aspects, and at the same time it has permitted us to work creatively and cooperatively to enrich the common vision of this scientist and philosopher. (shrink)

This essay will criticize Peter Lamarque’s claim in The Opacity of Narrative that reading for ‘opacity’ is the way to read literature as literature. I will summarize the idea of ‘opacity’ and consider the plausibility of this claim through an examination of Lamarque’s related comments on translation. The argument for ‘opacity’, although it insists on the importance of attention to a work’s form in the apprehension of its content, involves, at the same time, a certain obliviousness to form, indicated (...) in the first instance by an unpersuasive conflation of lyric poetry and prose fiction. Through a comparison of opposing approaches to the translation of a novel written in verse, and an analysis of why the translation of poetry is generally understood to be more challenging than the translation of prose, I will argue that reading for ‘opacity’ does not adequately capture what it means to read literature as literature. (shrink)

A guide for translators, about the translation theory, the translation process, interpreting, subtitling, internationalization and localization and computer-assisted translation. A special section is dedicated to the translator's education and associations. The guide include, as annexes, several independent adaptations of the corresponding European Commission works, freely available via the EU Bookshop as PDF. For a “smart”, sensible translation , you should forget not the knowledge acquired at school or university, but the corrective standards. Some people want a (...) translation with the touch of the source version, while another people feel that in a successful version we should not be able to guess the original language. We have to realize that both people have right and wrong, and that their only fault is to present requirement as an absolute truth. Teachers agree at least on this principle: “If a sentence is ambiguous, the translation must also be“. There is another critical, less easy to argue, based on an Italian phrase with particularly strong wording: “Traduttore, traditore“. This critique argues that any translation will betray the author‘s language, spirit, style … because of the choices on all sides. What to sacrifice, clarity or brevity, if the formula in the text is brief and effective, but impossible to translate into so few words with the exact meaning? One could understand this criticism that it encourages us to read “in the text.” It seems obvious that it is impossible to follow this advice into practice. (shrink)

This paper inquires into literariness, a much neglected problem in translation, from a cognitive poetic perspective; it tries to show the nature of proxy as concerns translation through various illustrations, hence what is termed by Bausse-Beier the proxy principle, and in passing answer the philosophical problem of translatability or untranslatability. Literariness, not limited to literature, may exist in all texts. It can be defined as the form of a text that is suggestive of something, different from that of (...) a text that is not. Any text that is literary is a literary text. Literariness may be realized through the use of metaphors, personifications, imagery, hyperbole and so on, and through the employment of pattern such as alliteration, paranomasia, meter, rhyme and so on. In translating a literary text, a translator should capture the literariness, otherwise the translation fails. However, in the process of translation, some of these features that contribute to the form, such as phonological or prosodic ones, will be definitely lost. If literariness is to be maintained, there should be a way for compensation. Analogy comes to the fore, though translation is by nature analogical; it is employed to reveal the iconicity between signifier and signified through some means of representation. In such an endeavor, optimum relevance should be aimed at so that a good proxy can be ensured: what is in the mind of an original reader should be that in the mind of a translation reader. (shrink)

This paper explores Victoria Welby's fundamental assumption of meaning process (“semiosis” sensu Peirce) as translation, and some implications for the development of a general model of intersemiotic translation.

This translation of an English essay that was subsequently published in the Journal of Humanities Therapy 8.2 (December 2017), pp.75-111, was published in the proceedings of the 2017 Bk21+ International Conference on Philosophical Counseling and Therapy.

Marathi Translation of Bertrand Russell's Preface of History of Western Philosophy.

Criticism and recommendations are very much welcome. Please don't hesitate to contact me with them. -/- .

In this paper, we discuss three translation techniques: literal, cultural, and artistic. Literal translation is a well-known technique, which means that it is quite easy to find sources on the topic. Cultural and artistic translation may be new terms. Whilst cultural translation focuses on matching contexts, artistic translation focuses on matching reactions. Because literal translation matches only words, it is not hard to find situations in which we should not use this technique. Because artistic (...) translation focuses on reactions, judging the quality of an artistic translation work is one of the most difficult things one can do. We end up having a score of complexity and humanity for each one of the mentioned techniques: Literal translation would be the closest thing we have to the machines world and artistic translation would be the closest thing we have to the purely human world. By creating these classifications and studying the subtleties of each one of them, we are adding degrees of quality to our courses and to translation as a professional field. The main contribution of this paper is then the formalization of such a piece of knowledge. We, however, also lay the foundations for studies of this type. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the translation of a line in Plato's description of the ‘greatest accusation’ against imitative poetry, Republic 606a3–b5. This line is pivotal in Plato's account of how poetry corrupts its audience and is one of the Republic's most complex and interesting applications of his partite psychology, but it is misconstrued in most recent translations, including the most widely used. I argue that an examination of the text and reflections on Platonic psychology settle the translation (...) decisively. (shrink)

This is a Belarusian translation of an essay interpreting the much-neglected Second Part of Kant's book, Conflict of the Faculties, entitled “An old question raised again: Is the human race constantly progressing?”, by showing the close relationship between the themes it deals with and those Kant addresses in the Supplements and Appendices of Perpetual Peace. In both works, Kant portrays the philosopher as having the duty to promote a “secret article”, without which his vision of a lasting international peace (...) through the agency of a federation of states is bound to fail. Both works identify this article as involving the necessity of publicity as a transcendental condition for peace, and call for philosophers to engage politicians and lawyers in a creative attitude towards lawmaking. Kant’s visionary program has failed to reach its goal up to now, not because it is too idealistic, but because philosophers have failed to take up the challenge. (shrink)

This paper uses Martin Luther and Mao Zedong's translation strategies to philosophize anew the dialectic between the national and the global in the history of revolutions. Luther and Mao each instigated a "revolution" by translating a universal faith into a vernacular; the end product in each case was the globalization of his vernacularized faith and the export of his local revolution all over the world. By vernacularizing a universal faith, Luther and Mao respectively inaugurated a new national idiom, a (...) new national identity and, in the case of Mao, founded a new nation. The far more intriguing phenomenon which I identify – and on which I seek to make my most original contributions is: Protestantism and Maoism developed global reach not despite, but because of, their insistence on a local translation-articulation of a universalist ideology. My paper attends to both the similarities and differences between Luther and Mao. (shrink)

This essay strikes new paths for investigating the politics of translation and the (non-) universality of the concept of “human rights” by engaging them in a critical dialogue. Part I of my essay argues that a truly universal concept would have available linguistic equivalents in all languages. On this basis, I develop translation into a tool for disproving the claim that the concept human rights is universal. An inaccurate claim to universality could be made to look valid, however, (...) if one culture dominates over others, and manages to impose its own concepts and exclude competitors. Part II explores how human rights, initially a modern Western concept, became more and more universalized as a result of the global reach of Western political and economic power. I attempt to shed new light on the subject by investigating the role of translation in bringing about the global hegemony of Western legal and political languages and concepts. Since translation always involves a choice of foregrounding one of the two languages and cultures involved, the translator is a power broker who can promote one voice at the expense of the other. My examples for conducting this investigation are the key contributions made by China and the West to the drafting of the UDHR: with ren and rights representing respectively the West and China’s proposed solutions to crimes against humanity in the immediate aftermath of World War II. While the concept rights became increasingly assimilated into the Chinese language along with her repeated defeats by colonial powers (and was already firmly established in the Chinese vocabulary by the time of the drafting of the UDHR), ren by contrast has never been included by any Western language and culture. (shrink)

This paper establishes a critical dialogue among three kinds of cross-national activities: translation, the Olympic Games, and international relations. All three activities involve interstate _amicitia_ —where _traduttore/traditore_ cannot be clearly distinguished, and where amity/enmity cannot be easily set apart. My discussion of the structural similarities among these three kinds of cross-national activities intersects with my examination of the historical connections of the Olympic Games to translation and international relations. -/- The essay also seeks to shed new light on (...) international relations via Translation Studies, and to demonstrate how international politics can be examined as the “politics of translation” in action. -/- (solicited by the International Comparative Literature Association Committee on Translation). (shrink)

The entry of resonance into chemistry, or the reception of the theory of resonance in the chemical community, has drawn considerable attention from historians of science. In particular, they have noted Pauling's ¯amboyant yet effective style of exposition, which became a factor in the early popularity of the resonance theory in comparison to the molecular orbital theory, another way of applying quantum mechanics to chemical problems.$ To be sure, the non-mathematical presentation of the resonance theory by Pauling and his collaborator, (...) George Wheland, helped to facilitate the reception ; but this presentation was vulnerable to the confusion that arose among chemists owing to the similarity between resonance and tautomerism, or between foreign and indigenous concepts. The reception occurred at the expense of serious misunderstandings about resonance. This paper investigates the ways in which Pauling and Wheland taught, and taught about, the theory of resonance, especially their ways of coping with the difficulties of translating a quantum-mechanical concept into chemical language. Their different strategies for teaching resonance theory deserve a thorough examination, not only because the strategies had to do with their solutions of the philosophical question whether resonance is a real phenomenon or not, and whether the theory of resonance is a chemical theory or a mathematical method of approximation, but also because this examination will illuminate the role of chemical translators in the transmission of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)