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Difficulties of translation


This is an excellent video with Gregory Fried & Richard Polt on the difficulty of translating Heidegger. Heidegger is a special case, but many of the same difficulties apply to translating Husserl.


The entire video is worth your time, but I want to point to their discussion of the German word ursprünglich starting at 14:14. Professor Polt tells the story they initially translated this word as "originary", a term you often see in Husserlian texts describing perception. While discussing the term in a social setting, maybe it was a dinner party, Professor Polt says his wife spoke up telling him originary is not an English word. He decided in the second edition  to translate ursprünglich with the more common English word original.


That's funny because that is exactly what happened to me. I used originary somewhere along the line while discussing Husserl and my wife tells me it's not a word.


I decided to keep using the word originary because, for me, it carries with it not just the idea of being the first or original of something, but also because it expresses the idea of the source or well spring that is continually flowing giving life to the concept.





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