I've been refining my take after reading some interpretation and explanations and this is final take:
Not every book will or should be for a white audience. It should cater to whoever they want. But the tweet also also seems to assume that every non white person has sufficient knowledge of their own culture to understand everything being written. Of course maybe that kind of person is not the intended audience which is also fine, but it's a bit alienating to be told that you're not entitled to learn about your own culture just because some random :lmayo: might benefit from a free translation
And no, this is not written by some mad white guy who doesn't understand what shawarma means. It's coming from an Asian immigrant who's far removed from his culture with little resources in English to learn about it.
Because there's only two groups of people, white and cultural. All the cultural people have a complete understanding of all cultural things.
they're right, readers are not entitled to footnotes. Authors who write incomprehensible texts or texts that rely on highly specific prior knowledge without footnotes aren't entitled to readership either.
This is why I took college philosophy online and 75% of the grade was posting a reflection of the reading to Blackboard and responding to other comments aka 100% bullshit never even opened the book
Remember when the hot new thing was responding to every request for clarification with "it's not my job to educate you"
I don't know this must be the odd shitty chapo.chat day because I can't for the life of me understand how some people could possibly agree with this shit take.
I image that not a single fucking second was spent reflecting on the fact that English is the default international language for decades now and so much stuff tends to be only available in English and not any other language. This means most people around the world can easily find themselves in a situation where they know English but not whatever random French or German shit word being used. Learning English by itself is already a privilege,
This ultimately means putting even more barriers around literacy worldwide for what? Like the OP said to own the crackers I guess. Whatever anecdotes someone may have about their experiences with editors feels really petty behavior and this is punching down not up.
Even when translations exist you have to deal with the fact very often they are inferior. Also by arguing for translations you already concede the author's intent isn't relevant anymore.
Do you have a problem with your shitty editor demands? Take it up with them not your readers. English isn't just the language of chuds as much as it sucks to admit it. This is not a hill to die on unless your biggest concern in life was just how many words you can write a day.
The real question is when the Bynar translations are out :picard-troll:
In English language books, the biggest offender is French.
For instance Imagined Communities is a good book written by polyglot. In it, there are parenthetical translations or footnotes for every non-English word or phrase except for French.
With French, English speakers are just expected to know it. Weird medieval/early modern hangover.
I saw a 19th or early-20th century translation of Cicero that put all of his Greek phrases in French, saying in an introductory note that it was because all educated Romans knew Greek, and all educated modern folk know French. Goddammit.
My other favorite time was the part in H.T. Lowe-Porter's translation of The Magic Mountain when Hans Castorp finally talks to his crush. It's like ten pages of untranslated French.
within the context of fiction, yeah it doesn't matter at all. there's an entire genre of literature with authors using fake words and random symbols and stuff in their writing, stuff doesn't have to be translated there. the only thing I found funny was the implication that nonwhite people are somehow more entitled to footnotes than white people are.
It's perfectly fine to wish to display the immigrant experience by liberally using Mandarin even if you don't speak it fluently, what I don't get is who the fuck is she talking to.
Lol, tbh not knowing your native language fully, but speaking some weird hybrid where you toss in random words from your native language and force them into an English grammar is the immigrant experience. It's actually probably one of the most universal immigrant experiences in the Anglo world (I imagine beyond as well).
Yeah, I agree, obviously it's not good communication. Probably some exceptions to this though, you couldn't write a good story about an immigrant community without incorporating this habit (imo Mafia movies and other media are a good example of this). But I do find it weird that the author is so allergic to footnotes. They're pretty non-intrusive, iirc The Three-Body Problem trilogy had a ton of footnotes providing historical and cultural context for what's occurring.
Also, agree with an allergy to "just google it", I know that the way certain words get used differ in the region of my country I'm from from the dictionary definition, and similarly the migrant community uses some words differently. Googling can be surprisingly useless when you're thrown in a foreign context.
This is a stupid struggle-session. The take is either absolutely correct or totally ridiculous depending on context that we'll never get because it was posted to the small character limit rage-bait site. And everyone here ate the bait whole.
I'm guessing this whole mess wasn't what you were expecting when you posted. :sicko-hexbear:
This is just an extremely Twitter way of saying, "Sometimes I write non-English words." You can't just go on the bird site and be like, "I like to challenge my readers by including foreign words without explanation, because I trust that they can pick up the meaning from context, or look it up, so that I can use the most accurate term for what I want to say and hopefully teach them something in the process." Get that shit outta here, nobody wants to see that. Instead, tell us how brave you are to defy all the haters who are dumb and bad and white, crank up the spiciness and kick off some drama, because that's how you get engagement.
I write on Chinese cultural shit for a majority-white and extremely Eurocentric academic field. Explaining every basic thing every single fucking time is indeed rather tiring. I don’t know what the context of her rant is, but I sort of see where she’s coming from. I mean yeah, when I intentionally use untranslated words/concepts, it’s typically so the reader has to realize that they need to do their part in learning new concepts and new ways of thinking/living in the world, rather than thinking everything can ultimately be translated/assimilated into the anglophone world they are already familiar with. So I guess it isn’t/shouldn’t be about shutting the reader out but rather asking them to think differently if they are willing.
Edit: I should add that, I think this problem arises from having to write to a PMC readership, where you have to write to an imagined reader who has zero material connections with you other than through the market of sales and citations.
Broke: Not translating "yi" as "righteousness" because the use of "yi" in ancient Chinese text is contextual and has no good English equivalent.
Woke: Not translating "yi" as "righteousness" because "yi" is shorter to type than "righteousness."
This is a :LIB: issue for :LIB: brains and :LIB: bear dot net fell for it hook line and sinker. If the author doesnt want to add footnotes fine. Usually the readers if they enjoy the book enough will do their own footnotes and post it online if they want others to read it.
But i dont even understand the context of where the statement comes from. Like nobody has ever said mayos are entitled to footnotes. Footnotes are added so book is readable by more people so it sell more. Its not about mayos being entitled to anything its just about shifting more units cos we live in capitalism last I checked and authors wanna sell more book to make money which can be used for goods and services.
It's about virtue signalling, and also "going viral" on Twitter so you can shill your latest book.
It's got nothing to do with anything.
There was a similar thread a while back saying "don't write vampires having secret cabals because it's anti-Semitic" and then having a link to their book "which has vampires written by a Jewish person".
You are literally being sold an ideology, you stupid libs.
I mean I basically agree but the implication that PoC readers are more entitled to the translations is pretty funny. I'm just imagining that you have to write into the publisher with proof of nonwhiteness and you get the good edition
Sometimes I wish your dumb, racist belief that liberals are throwing money and book deals at “entitled” non-white people was true
did you respond to the right comment? where did you even read this in their comment? the original tweet says "readers, especially white readers, are not entitled to footnotes", which makes it sounds like if you're Indian, you're somehow more entitled to footnotes than if you were German or something. it makes no sense.
I think they meant writing to the publisher to buy a book from them (and proving non-whiteness to get the footnotes edition). "Good edition" meaning with the footnotes. Not trying to get a book published by a publisher where yeah they're more likely to reject POC authors
For one, she’s referring to FICTION, not history or philosophy, subjects that obvi have to be more expository
:hahaha: :hahaha: academics feel even less obligation to explain themselves. i've read books that'll just paste a whole passage in not-what-the-book-is-written-in and gesture 'this proves my point' :farquaad-point:
That's fine in fiction. In any non-fiction work you should probably have a footnote.
For one, she’s referring to FICTION, not history or philosophy
Someone probably should have mentioned that and pinned it to the top comment.
Hey it's like Twitter is perfect for incindery comments with no context
not what the tweet says
when did this site become /r/tumblrinaction? seems really sudden
All the annoying types like you rage-quit the site because you meltdown over every thing like this and your response is just being smug as fuck to all the good posters on this site.
:cringe:
your username is from a children’s cartoon and you are emotionally illiterate.
:PIGPOOPBALLS:
Twitter really is absolutely perfect for giving people enough characters to make a point but too few to give enough space to clarify it.
Yeah I mean with this tweet it's worded well enough to get across the point but it's ridiculously easy to read both 'no one should have to assume and write for middle class white Americans as their intended audience and make everything easy for them to understand because they aren't actually the centre of the fucking universe' and 'I like to make sure what I write is mostly inaccessable for a huge number of people unless you've got the time and education to sit down with a big fucking reader alongside the book cos then if you have that privelege you get to show off how super special you are.'
So yeah everyone arguing about it winds up basically shouting past each other.
‘no one should have to assume and write for middle class white Americans as their intended audience and make everything easy for them to understand because they aren’t actually the centre of the fucking universe’
Okay, yes, but what about all the people who are reading it in English because it hasn't been translated to their first language and English is one of the main lingua franca of the world? Being obtuse doesn't help anyone, and deliberately making your text hard to read is going to cause more problems for second language readers or people with limited education than it is for middle class college educated white people.
Yeah it's a tricky issue alright. I mean ideally, translations etc. Wouldn't be driven by profit but by making the work accessible to many people.
And again it is case by case. If an editor wants a writer to change an idiom to a less precise US mid class idiom that's an issue as it strips whoever wrote it/said it of some of their cultural identity. There's also the argument that hey, maybe this work isn't supposed to be as accessable to as many people as possible because in doing so you're removing nuance from the work.
I do completely understand the whole annoyance at smug liberals who have the time, education, money etc... to actually get the most out of literature like this.
I would take a chill pill, you have some decent points in this thread but come across far too aggressive to convince anyone. Have a nice bath and do something that calms you. I know how it feels, here have a hug :meow-hug:
There is actually a better version of twitter with a much higher character limit. It's also open source and federated, but people still use Twitter for some reason smh.
what if there was a multi-user blog with a minimum character limit?
that was a rhetorical, I already know nobody would use it.
https://joinmastodon.org/
You can even make your own server for it! I did. :D
"No I will not explain" :liberalism:
"We must never stop explaining" :sankara-shining:
The fundamental purpose of language is to communicate, not to obfuscate. If someone is writing in English then they should give thought to whether any non-English words will be understood by English speakers. Anything else is just poor communication.
I say this as a diaspora Asian and it cuts all ways, including English language authors randomly sprinkling french and latin into their writing.
