Technology and Grammar

Mark Wilson emory2oo2 at hotmail.com
Fri Aug 16 14:36:40 EDT 2002


Carl:

You wrote:

--------
>So far as I can tell, this little exercise tells you what the analyzers who
>do the converting think the English counterparts of these participles are.
>It is essentially circular, revealing essentially what the analyst's
>judgment of these aorist participles is. But what is sought, I thought, is
>a basis for the analyst to make such a judgment.
------

We're getting bogged down in the non-essentials here. You have to
remember that judgments are unavoidable, and because of that, you
have to understand your results! This is a non-issue for linguists
or statisticians.

Because what you are looking for are not one or two anomalies, you
are looking for patterns that transcend translator judgment. That
is partly the dynamics of such a search... it thrives on allowing
translator judgments. Findings like, "in 94 percent of the time,
you have...." is what you are after. The work of the researcher
is to manually look at the other 6 percent. And statistically, he
does not need to examine all 6 percent.

The only way to skew the whole process if ALL TRANSLATORS were
working in concert to sabotage all translations from Greek
to English. On a realistic or practical basis, that is impossible.
Or as a linguist would say, the probably of that happening is
not zero, but the closest number to zero.

The mindset still seems to be looking for ways for this NOT to work.

I really had not intended this discussion to get into these kinds
of side issues. I realize some may think they are critical, but when
you look for trends, translator decisions are not a show stopper by
virtue of the fact that you have so many (hundreds of them), dispersed
all over the world, and spanning over a hundred years of independent
work.

Mark Wilson


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