| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: First of all, I will state, as well as I can, the legal and
social relation of master and slave. A master is one--to speak
in the vocabulary of the southern states--who claims and
exercises a right of property in the person of a fellow-man.
This he does with the force of the law and the sanction of
southern religion. The law gives the master absolute power over
the slave. He may work him, flog him, hire him out, sell him,
and, in certain contingencies, _kill_ him, with perfect impunity.
The slave is a human being, divested of all rights--reduced to
the level of a brute--a mere "chattel" in the eye of the law--
placed beyond the circle of human brotherhood--cut off from his
My Bondage and My Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs: "The girl and the treasure were both stolen from me
by a rascally panglima, Ninaka," said Muda Saffir,
seeing that it would be as well to simulate friendship
for the white man for the time being at least--there would
always be an opportunity to use a kris upon him in the
remote fastness of the interior to which Muda Saffir
would lead them.
"What became of the white man who led the strange monsters?"
asked von Horn.
"He killed many of my men, and the last I saw of him he
was pushing up the river after the girl and the treasure,"
The Monster Men |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: powers of expression as the ancient classical ones.
Such are a few of the difficulties which have to be overcome in the work of
translation; and we are far from having exhausted the list. (6) The
excellence of a translation will consist, not merely in the faithful
rendering of words, or in the composition of a sentence only, or yet of a
single paragraph, but in the colour and style of the whole work.
Equability of tone is best attained by the exclusive use of familiar and
idiomatic words. But great care must be taken; for an idiomatic phrase, if
an exception to the general style, is of itself a disturbing element. No
word, however expressive and exact, should be employed, which makes the
reader stop to think, or unduly attracts attention by difficulty and
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