The Standard Version Fallacy
🧠 Psych - 127 / 200
Hey,
How are you doing? We are so close to the end of 2021.
Today, let’s learn about The Standard Version Fallacy.
What is it?
The ancient fallacy of choosing a "Standard Translation" or "Authorized Version" of an ancient or sacred text and arbitrarily declaring it "correct" and "authoritative," necessarily eliminating much of the poetry and underlying meaning of the original but conveniently quashing any further discussion about the meaning of the original text.
Where does it occur?
A lot of debate happened last month around the release of popular Netflix series called “Squid Game”.
Apparently, the English dubbed version didn’t represent the true meanings of dialogues in Korean. Did you observe it?
Why do I need to know?
The easily demonstrable fact that translation (beyond three or four words) is neither uniform nor reversible (i.e., never comes back exactly the same when retranslated from another language) gives the lie to any efforts to make a translation of human languages into an exact science.
References & Studies: -
http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/ENGL1311/fallacies.htm
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