Mystery of the missing text solved (original) (raw)

Lost in translation

Nature volume 479, pages 171–173 (2011)Cite this article

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A discovered letter explains the loss of key paragraphs during the translation of one of Georges Lemaître's papers about the expanding Universe, shows Mario Livio.

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References

  1. Nussbaumer, H. & Bieri, L. preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.2281 (2011).
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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mario Livio is at the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA.,
    Mario Livio

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Correspondence toMario Livio.

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Livio, M. Mystery of the missing text solved.Nature 479, 171–173 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/479171a

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  1. Thomas Dent 10 November 2011, 07:35
    The references for this article are not visible in the online version.
  2. Declan Butler 10 November 2011, 11:58
    I thought I'd mention what seems to me perhaps a minor linguistic twist to the story. In Lemaître's letter to Smart he mentions that the section he would like omitted "is clearly of no actual interest." I suspect that he didn't mean to say "actual" but rather "current." It looks to me that he used a 'faux ami' or 'false friend,' where when working between two different languages one can mistakenly use a word that looks identical but which has a very different meaning. I suspect he meant "actuelle" in the French sense where it means 'current' or 'present,' whereas "actual" in English has quite a different meaning.
    That suspicion is reinforced by the fact that he seems to use at least one other faux ami in the text; where he says "I join a french text." When French people mean to say "attach/enclose" they often mistranslate this to English as "join" as the French verb for this is "joindre."
    If he meant "current" rather than "actual," I don't think it would change the meaning of the letter substantially, although "of no actual interest" might suggest he perhaps underestimated the significance of his work, whereas "of no current interest" might rather mean that he felt there was little point publishing in English what he, and later Hubble, had already been previously published, which might be why he suggested relegating this section to citations in the References section. Pure speculation of course.
    I asked Mario Livio, the author of the Comment and a fellow French speaker, and he says that he too suspects Lemaître made a translation error.
    It doesn't change the outcome, but I thought it was an interesting minor twist to the story &#8212 maybe the 'Lost in translation" in the title of the article was indeed apt.
  3. Declan Butler 10 November 2011, 12:07
    I thought I'd mention what seems to me perhaps a minor linguistic twist to the story. In Lemaître's letter to Smart he mentions that the section he would like omitted "is clearly of no actual interest." I suspect that he didn't mean to say "actual" but rather "current." It looks to me that he used a 'faux ami' or 'false friend,' where when working between two different languages one can mistakenly use a word that looks identical but which has a very different meaning. I suspect he meant "actuelle" in the French sense where it means 'current' or 'present,' whereas "actual" in English has quite a different meaning.
    That suspicion is reinforced by the fact that he seems to use at least one other faux ami in the text; where he says "I join a french text." When French people mean to say "attach/enclose" they often mistranslate this to English as "join" as the French verb for this is "joindre."
    If he meant "current" rather than "actual," I don't think it would change the meaning of the letter substantially, although "of no actual interest" might suggest he perhaps underestimated the significance of his work, whereas "of no current interest" might rather mean that he felt there was little point publishing in English what he, and later Hubble, had already been previously published, which might be why he suggested relegating this section to citations in the References section. Pure speculation of course.
    I asked Mario Livio, the author of the Comment and a fellow French speaker, and he says that he too suspects Lemaître made a translation error.
    It doesn't change the outcome, but I thought it was an interesting minor twist to the story &#8212 maybe the 'Lost in translation" in the title of the article was indeed apt.
  4. Paul Adams 10 November 2011, 14:54
    I think Declan Butler's surmise is spot on. As I read Lemaitre's letter, these 2 gallicisms popped out in the otherwise excellent english.
    It is indeed striking and humbling that LeMaitre was obviously far more concerned to advance science than his own reputation: autre temps autres m?urs!
  5. Nolan Walborn 11 November 2011, 18:17
    I am not a French speaker but I am fluent in Spanish and immediately recognized the false cognate "actual", before reading the comments. The number of words with Latin roots common to English that have evolved related but different meanings is remarkable and continually leads to confusions. These days, there is Google: "false cognates Spanish" produces 592,000 returns; "French" only 129,000...
  6. Luis Gonzalez-Mestres 14 November 2011, 13:59
    The question was not just whether Hubble censored Lemaître, but why he did not cite his 1927 paper. In any case, Lemaître was clearly the first to formulate the wrongly called "Hubble's law".
    See also the transcript of the Humason interview :
    http://www.aip.org/history/...
    Best regards
    Luis Gonzalez-Mestres (CNRS, France)