Translation and Translation Studies historiography and the misconceptualization of terms.

    Reading Translation and Translation Studies historiography is really mesmerizing... For the course of centuries, no intellectual or man of letters seems to have truly agreed on the definition of "literal" translation, and what translators mean when they use the term to criticize or appraise a translation work is always a little bit different each time.

    It makes me think of how most difficult conversations end up being unproductive and stagnant due to the misconceptualization of terms that hold puzzling and profound meaning by the persons involved in the conversation.

    People often presume their interlocutor comprehends a word to have the same meaning that they believe it has, which results in miscommunication. And it happens notably when the discussion involves difficult topics that one of them or both lack specialized of furthered knowledge. It is especially harder to notice that someone lacks knowledge on the subject discussed when they know how to pretend, through language and register, to be knowledgeable about it. They can swiftly use arguments that have little to none correlation to the topic and be fallacious without being noticed.

    Being surrounded by language studies and discourse analysis made me somewhat circumspect of one's argument, even if I don't hold enough discernment in the topic, because it is easy to use language to pretend you know about something. It also made me wary of simply debating topics just because, since debates should be really well structured by all involved - which rarely happens when they're both lay.

    Don't get me wrong, I surely am not an expert on debate or discourse analysis, but when you study so much about language it makes you ponder why one would, for example, artificially create "arguments" in order to counterargument them when they could just extract one from a real-life situation, or why would they gather these artificially created arguments disjointedly and haphazardly when discourses around a subject often have a pretty much organized structure and line of thought, regardless of what standpoint this discourse takes.