On Tue, 5 Jun 2018 at 02:56, Jonathan Silk via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:

there is another issue with the Kielhorn quotation, I would say, namely that most (or at least much) of the inserted material is not necessary at all!

"All of this is inadmissible" is EXACTLY the same thing as "All of this is, however, inadmissible", with or without parentheses.
Every individual word? Is that somehow different from every word?
So I'm not entirely sure in this case also why Dominik picked this example, although knowing him I would not be surprised if he had this very point in mind as well... (and yes, I did not notice the incoherent sentences later in the paragraph...)

Yes, @Jonathan, I did indeed think that almost all Kielhorn's parenthetical additions could be removed without much problem. But also, there's just something totally weird about it. How would a contemporary reader feel if a German translation of Shakespeare, or an English translation of Goethe, had this many parenthetical statements? I think that we indologists are so inured to this habit of parenthetical translating that we don't see it with others' eyes.

Or - if we want an example of technical writing, take Tarski's Introduction to Logic. Written originally in Polish in 1936, and first translated into "exact" German in 1937, it appeared in the author's own English translation in 1941. There are no "Kielhorn" parentheses. None. The fact that this is the author's own translation of his own work makes it a particularly telling example, I think. To me, this says that someone who fully understands what they are translating doesn't use parentheses all the time, or ever.

Best,

Dominik