Why do translators do this?

get fuckin owned kid
lmfao
t. the translator

Because the alternative is much worse. Those words are often impossible to define, or they have three dozen different traditions of interpretation claiming to be the only legitimate definition.

Usually the ONLY satisfactory translation of the central Greek philosophical terms is to leave them untranslated, and it's actually annoying when they don't do it. Same with many other things, e.g., translating Kant or Hegel, because the German idealists use words in deliberately novel ways that riff off of their existing philosophical and common-sense usage.

The Greeks were doing similar things, but even more obscurely, because they were giving the FIRST self-consciously philosophical and systematic uses of the words in history, often to clarify their completely arbitrary usage by previous philosophers. The problem is, much of this is inaccessible to us. We don't know what they're reacting against, because it isn't recorded, so we have to make lots of assumptions about why they were so forceful in systematically using certain terms. And we only have so much to work with, so we can't even come to a consensus on the systematic definition.

If you read philosophy remotely seriously, which is the only way to read philosophy, you will very quickly be familiar with all these terms anyway, and you'll be glad they're in the text directly.

>>9554710
that's fucking definitey just the word "idea" but with weirdly drawn letters

>>9554687
"eidos" is usually translated as "form"
"idea" is usually translated as "idea"
the translator must have left an explanation for their lack of translation, check the translator's note or any translator's footnotes
and don't confuse "idea" with a mental concept

>>9554719
Maybe, but it's still distinctive from how 'idea' is used in contemporary discourse. Leaving it in that form, or to capitalize it "Idea," like many do, accomplishes what the other anon pointed out.

>>9554710
excellent post

>>9554719
>weirdly drawn letters

>>9554710
this
'arche' remains almost completely untranslatable in context, for example

>>9554893
There's something nasty going on in that passage, that much I can tell.

>>9554710
That's great but they could at least transliterate it for people who don't know how to pronounce Greek letters and therefore might be drawn to, I don't know, a translation.