I was talking about the idea, not the words. The language doesn't make a difference: the idea "My monkey is wearing a hat" is the same idea as "Ma singe porte un chapeau".
This is going significantly off topic, but given that the topic is simply 'dear God, this man's a Congressman!' I hope I'll be forgiven.
I don't think you can claim that the idea is necessarily the same once you've changed the words. Words are unique from one another, and often carry different subtle shades of meaning, which can change across time and space. A translation is the best attempt the translator can manage to render ideas in a different language, but for the words to carry the exact same ideas is rare except in the most trivial of cases.
Even the example that you've chosen, a very simple sentence about concrete things, in two related modern languages we can understand well, serves a good example of the point. I imagine the idea you were trying to put across was not this one:
You're an educated guy who posts in a forum about biological evolution, and so you're probably quite aware that a chimpanzee is not a monkey. You're thinking something more like this:
However, when you translate it into French, you change the idea slightly. Only one of the above is a monkey with a hat, but they are both les singes avec les chapeaus, because the French word 'le signe' applies equally to monkeys and non-human apes.
In the example ICANT was talking about, we're discussing more complicated, theological topics, and we're translating from an unrelated language as it was written thousands of years ago. It's presumptuous in the extreme to think that the translation you have has captured the same idea as that held by thos who first wrote it.
Edited by caffeine, : Messed up the chimp in a hat picture
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Problems with second photo loading.
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Undo the previous edit. Wordpress.com seems to have had a temporary problem.