Friday, November 30, 2007

Japanese Translation of "Orientalism"

A Japanese translation version of “Orientalism” is available. Who is this translator? To translate this magnificent book, it requires not only a tremendous amount of knowledge of colonial history, East and West, but linguistics, philology, epistemology, etc. This book cannot be translated without recognizing the difference between linguistics and philology and what kind of academic subject epistemology is…

I don’t intend to read the Japanese version of “Orienalism.” Never. While translation work can be simple word replacement (though it must not be so), this book is so deep, a mere translator cannot and should not handle this work by Said.

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