es. He would be well aware of the mutations of meaning that occur during translation. Mutations of language and thought: language reflects a certain way of looking at the world. Often a translation, divorced from the context of its worldview, loses its intended meaning to the substitute of an approximation from the language it is transferred to. This is not a question of talent on the part of the translator. It is the translator of "On Truth and Lies (Lie) in a Nonmoral (Extramoral) Sense," Daniel Breazeale, who points out in footnotes that there are no exact English equivalents for Nietzsche's German phrasings (Bizzell and Herzberg 888f, 889f, 890f, et al.).
What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus (Nietzsche 890).
The best description that Nietzsche can find for the basic unit of language, the word, is "nerve stimulus." Beyond that commitment he finds that words are, at best, an "opinion" regarding the experience one is attempting to convey through language:
... if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation! (Nietzsche 890)
Since, in his observation, words represent totally subjective evaluations of experience, Nietzsche concludes that language fills a different role than previously assumed. The conventional view (at least of his time) holds that language at its basic stage is a matter of "naming" things. Nietzsche, emphasizing the subjective nature of this intuitive process, calls it metaphor.
To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one (Nietzsche 890).
The building up of such metaphorical con...