Kathleen's Page

1. My mother is not computer literate. In fact, she is computer phobic. How timely it was when yesterday I read that, “Plato… feared writing would diminish individuals … and reduce opportunities for critical dialogue (because texts cannot answer questions)” (Prior & Lunsford, 2008) (p. 83). Mom was lamenting the fact that several acquaintances continued to email her rather than call her on the phone even though she had made it clear that she neither wrote nor read email (my father is the intermediary between the computer and my mother). Her argument was that you can’t ask questions and receive immediate answers. I had to interject that many people, not just the young, sit in front of a computer screen and check their emails constantly, or IM, or have their text messaging phones attached at the hip. These are some of the new literacies about which Bill Kist speaks and writes. I am no seer (and dare I state the obvious [I always do]) in predicting that emailing and texting will fall by the wayside in favor of some new modes of communication. The kids who text today will be thought of as dinosaurs when a new generation invents other new literacies in favor of the “old ways of the good ole’ days.”

2. In this reading, I am particularly intrigued by the notion of the “’death of the author,’ as readers actively (re)shape the texts they encounter” (p. 85). Can any written creation truly be considered original anymore? As authors, don’t we just take old ideas and words, rearrange them, and put them into a new order? It seems that all works borrow from others intertextually.

3. I once had a class in translation from Spanish to English. We continuously debated about what the goal of the translation should be. Was it about a literal word for word translation? Even so, a word in Spanish is not the same as the “equivalent” word in English because vocabulary is cultural. The image that a banana conjures up in the mind of a Costa Rican is different from that of a Spaniard or of a North American. For the Costa Rican, it may be a bunch of green bananas on a tropical tree in a rain forest whereas the North American thinks of a single banana or small bunch of yellow fruits at the grocery store. Therefore, even in a word for word translation there is something lost. “Reflection and research on translation offer particularly rich illustrations of how complexly writing works within and across social ecologies.” (p. 87). This is true in all genres. In poetry should one be true to rhyme, meter, rhythm, imagery, theme? Not only might one lose something in a translation, but something may be gained by attending to only one of the complexities of a written work of art. Might a translated work then be considered an original?

4. An anecdote about translation: Online translators cannot appropriately capture the language (I’m not sure a human can quite either). I’ll never forget when one of my former students tried to write a composition first in English and then fed it into an online translator. Instead of a “soap opera man” (actor) the translator came up with a “man of soap.” The student wondered how I knew that he didn’t write his own work in Spanish.