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.

  • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • Wertheimer [any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.