Joseph and the law of translations -Reply

[Mark Tushnet]

At the risk of sending a message before scrolling
through all that have accumulated:  People
interested in this thread might find an article in
the current (December-January) issue of Lingua
Franca amusing.  The article, "My Translation
Problem," by Paul William Rogers, describes
"translations" from Mandaean, "a a tiny offshoot
of the Aramaic language," and from Egyptian
hieroglyphics.  To give you a flavor, here's an
excerpt.  After quoting from a translation from
the Mandaean which uses the phrase, "Avaunt, flee
in fear," Rogers writes, "'Avaunt'?  I hate to
quibble, but this word had vanished from common
usage 300 years before [the translator] was born.
Does the original text contain an equally archaic
term?  If so, how well would you have to know a
language--one hardly five people on the planet can
read a word of--before you could spot *archaisms*
in it?  If antiquity is the object here, then why
not render the Mandaean into Middle English or
Anglo-Saxon?  Hell, why not pig Latin?"