今天……就我一个人……
Looks like this semester’s salon is getting ready to wrap up… though maybe we can still hope for a few people during those two weeks after everyone’s exams and before they go home on vacation? Anyway, if nobody comes, that’s perfect—I can use the time to study……
Today, thanks to the fact that nobody came, I finally got started on the translation assignment for the original-text course in sociology of science. The article by Winner that I chose, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” had two ready-made Chinese translations available for me to consult (I really wasn’t choosing it on purpose): one was the published translation in the *Classic Reader on Philosophy of Technology* edited by Wu Laoshi (translated by one of my senior classmates), and the other was an unpublished translation on some Taiwanese website. The former is relatively reliable; the latter is completely unreliable, though occasionally it can still provide some reference.
Although the first translation is quite reliable, after checking carefully there were still many small errors. Of course, as an assignment, I still had to refer to the existing translations and redo it myself rather than merely proofread it, so I first tried translating it on my own and then revised it against the two versions. Naturally, the very first thing I did was read through the translation in the *Reader* to grasp the general meaning; in addition, I searched and browsed most of the papers about Winner on journal databases to get a sense of the background (to be honest, that didn’t help much in this respect).
Back when I was taking the original-text course in philosophy of technology, I had already experienced a certain pleasure in revising classmates’ translations, because then there was an object to wrestle with. This time I felt it even more strongly, because the translation in the *Reader* is clearly fairly reliable, yet not so impeccable that there was nothing to pick at, like the version by Senior Brother Butian. So I could maintain a more sustained state of wrestling with it. Thus, although translating was still headache-inducing, there was at least some hope to it. But I still don’t know how to face translation tasks that give me no object to wrestle with. Being forced into it is probably possible, but the key question for me is not whether the work gets done, but whether I can establish a sense of pleasure in the work itself.
I spent a full day fiddling away in front of the computer (from 12:00 to 0:00) and completed only a little over 2,500 Chinese characters’ worth of translation, about one-sixth of the whole article. But considering that today I was dealing with the beginning of the article, which involves sorting out some basic lines of thought as well as adjusting to the concepts and the language style, the beginning is always the hardest part. The translation ahead should go much more smoothly… I think….
Having no one drop by the salon may help me finish the task sooner, but the ideal situation would be for one person to sit next to me and let me vent at any time—this damn thing is really suffocating me, suffocating me, suffocating me [echo]…… And on top of that, today the internet was acting up, so for almost the entire afternoon I could barely get online (for some reason, only for about five minutes after rebooting the computer could I connect to the wireless), to the point that every time I wanted to look up a translated term I had to restart the computer, and it was also hard to relax my nerves by browsing webpages (now I finally understand why Senior Brother Butian refreshes webpages countless times every day @@)……
Next time, the salon will still be held as usual. You’re welcome to come keep me company while I study ><~ Of course, if you just want to come chat, that’s still very welcome~
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Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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