Robert Silverberg’s Reflections: March 2015
‘Where Silverberg goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow’
Reflections is a regular column by multi-award-winning SFWA Grandmaster Robert Silverberg, in which he will offer his thoughts on science fiction, literature and the world at large.
This month: Lost in Translation II
About fifteen years ago I did a column headed “Lost in Translation,” in which I discussed some of the problems of converting one language to another, noting, among other things, that if doing so is such a hard task on one small planet, how plausible is it going to be that we will ever develop handy translating devices that will let us communicate with the inhabitants of alien worlds? Since then I’ve had some further thoughts on the subject of translation, and here is a sequel to that first column, with some quotations from the original text in case you don’t happen to have the April 1999 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction handy at the moment . . .
You can read the rest of the column here, and find Robert Silverberg’s eBooks here – including Reflections and Refractions, a collection of his non-fiction columns. Please note: each column will remain on the site for one month only.
