I was recently reading an English translation of a non-theory-related non-fiction book that was published just a few years ago. Next on my list was re-reading Engels’ “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”.

I can only describe my experience as the most severe whiplash; comparable only to reading the comments on a news thread on .world after checking the Lemmygrad thread.

I found myself reading so slowly. In 30 minutes I would have barely read a few pages, even though I was not struggling with the content itself.

I found that it’s just that the language is so needlessly impenetrable. So many run-on sentences, so many odd turns of phrases, archaic terms (not relevant to Marxist theory), and bizarre sentence structures.

I have never read the original German text nor any other language translation, so I don’t have a point of reference. I don’t know how much of it is Engels’ writing style, versus the translator’s 19th century English.
A translation written in 1892 was not written for English speakers in 2026.

My question is: Would these works not become so much more accessible if we had a modern English translation from the original text?

If this would be considered useful, how could we realistically realise this for all of the fundamental works from that time period?

  1. I imagine that finding and hiring a translator who is familiar with Marxism to re-do the translations would be extremely difficult and expensive.

  2. Community translations are probably not feasible as translation requires a very specific skill set, not just fluent speakers.

  3. Machine translations might be possible, but it’s crucial to not lose any specific terminology and not misconstrue the meanings of certain quotes and phrases. The translator (whether human or machine) needs to have a strong grasp on Marxist theory and history to not distort the meanings in the text.

I would really appreciate everyone’s thoughts and suggestions on this. Maybe I completely dropped the ball on this topic.

P.S.

This is not just in regards to “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, it’s just the experience that inspired me to write this post.
I’m not unfamiliar with reading theory from that time period nor Marx and Engels’ writings in general. I’m also not completely unfamiliar with 19th century English, I’ve read plenty of fiction written in that time period as well.

  • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
    7·
    6 days ago

    Something that seemed innocuous to the translator and they decided to leave out or didn’t understand completely changes the meaning of what the author actually meant, and the error gets repeated centuries later

    This is a big issue when you study older texts where the original was not preserved and you only have a translation of a translation that survived. But it still happens regularly even today when books get translated into different languages, especially when they are not scientific literature but meant mainly for entertainment, translators take a lot of liberties and sometimes noticeably change the meaning of the original in order to have it sound “cooler” or more natural in their own language. To some extent this is just unavoidable. Very rarely will you be able to fully convey the entire nuance and “feel” of another language when translating.

      • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
        6·
        6 days ago

        Translating poetry is the most extreme example. Because if you want to preserve the rhyme and the meter you have to take enormous liberties with the meaning. If you want to faithfully preserve the exact wording then you will very likely completely lose the rhyme and meter.

        You basically have to be a poet yourself to translate poetry halfway decently.