Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: An American Experience Conditioned by Semantic Reification
Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: An American Experience Conditioned by Semantic Reification

Summary/Abstract: Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989) is based on the experience of a Polish immigrant woman with an emphasis on her language acquisition process. Her memoir focuses on how fixed meanings of words in language affect collective perceptions and how these perceptions affect individual lives. Throughout her work, Eva’s Polish-speaking and English-speaking selves contradict one another. She is confused because of the difficulty of translating one language into the other without losing the cultural meanings of the words. She has hard times trying to define who she is in the acquired language and is bothered by the fixed and determinate meanings attributed to the words in it. In other words, she is troubled with the reification in language. Making use of the points of view of various disciplines on language and reification such as sociology, history and philosophy, this work will show how semantic reification influences Hoffman’s life as an immigrant in America and discuss whether she manages to overcome the negative influences of it.

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