Saturday 27 December 2014

Interpretation and academia.

No translation or interpretation exists in isolation- translating a piece of work is not easy and can be prone to subjective errors. Errors creep in through slang, unfamiliar/obsolete/changed words, or simple translators bias.

The same thing happens with interpretation. Errors creep in because it's what you feel is right, or you skip over something because it doesn't make sense.  You may have even misunderstood an important paragraph or term.  This is obvious in English manuals of the time where it is common to misuse/abuse Italian fencing terms- so you struggle a little trying to figure out if he means the Italian term or his bastardised explanation, or somewhere in between.

The Wikteneur has  done a lot to improve this, and it is a step in the direction I want to investigate. But the thing that's missing is an immediate relationship to the original texts. Wouldn't it be nice to highlight bits of the text and then leave comments- describing what you think it means, possibly linking to video explanations. Creating threads on contentious or difficult passages so you can debate with others and try to find out the real meaning?

I've found something that may be useful for this.  It's designed to share lesson notes and create discussions about them- which is pretty much what I want to do, but focused on the original texts as much as possible.  I'm going to test this out with a few people to see how easy it is to understand and if it works for us.

If it really helps cultivate discussion around the manuals and help those who want to get into this aspect of HEMA get started- as well as improving my understanding.  I'd be very happy indeed.