Re: RT list: Re: Concept-Procedural

My responses to the following written by Unger:
   
  1. This just shows that the follow-up claim that procedural expressions are difficult to translate and learn is at least very controversial, if not unsubstantiated as Robin Setton seems to suggest.
   
  Even if I bend myself to accept that your informal test of but and however is right, it does not seem to be so with pronouns. I think the basic evidence of a good language learner/translator is the mastery the system of pronouns, be they as simple as in English or as complicated as in Vietnamese.
   
  2.
  It seems to me that you assume that one can talk of properties of procedural expressions without any attached assumptions about conceptual expressions. This cannot be true, just in the same way as one cannot have a view of semantics without attached assumptions about pragmatics and vice versa. Thus the criteria do not say explicitly but they necessarily imply.
   
  Best
  Minh
  

Christoph Unger <christoph-kuelvi_unger@sil.org> wrote:
    

1. The problem is that this is exactly as far as they get, but all these
responses are not satisfactory. They do not amount to satisfactory
explanations.

When teaching about procedural semantics, I usually do an informal
test in the classroom: I give them a few words such as `house', 'run'
etc and some such as `but', `however'; the task is to define the
meaning of these words for a friend who is learning their language. So
far no one claimed to have been able to do that for words like
`however' and `but'. All agreed that when explaining such words one
has to resort to giving examples rather than `definitions.' This is of
course not the empirical tests that you asked for, but it is enough
anecdotal evidence to convince me that the intuitions are robust.
  
...
  
In many years of practice in facilitating Bible translation work, I
have seen that translators have lots of problems with procedural
expressions --- and these problems are often the least
acknowledged. I am not saying that they pose more problems than
certain difficult conceptual expressions --- but these problems rarely
pass by unacknowledged.

Again, this is not the empirical evidence that you call
for, but to me it does give the RTheorists' claims about procedural
expressions and conscious meaning awareness a lot of
credibility. Sure, its not failsafe, but that was never claimed, nor
is it necessary for identification criteria to be failsafe.

2. The criteria does not say anything about non-procedural
expressions. Of course, some conceptual expressions may likewise be
difficult to consciously explain, for different reasons. Think of
polysemous words such as prepositions. The reason for difficulties of
explaining the meaning of these expressions stems from peculiarities
of the conceptual structure, not from a general difficulty of bringing
that information to consciousness.

...

...

Best,
Christoph

-- 
Dr. Christoph Unger
SIL International 
Alleestr. 7
67308 Albisheim
Germany
Phone: +49 6355 989939
       
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