of what from the Frankfurt School

01:15 Apr 1, 2011 

I appreciate all the time you've taken to offer all those sensible solutions. I think I'll go with your third suggestion, but in any event I'll add a note saying that there's something wrong with the source text.

20:45 Mar 31, 2011 

Thanks for the confirmation, Giovanni.
In order to make this intelligible, I think you have to do one of the following:
(1) Replace "from" with something else. For example:
"It is also a concern of the critical theorists of what [is known as] the Frankfurt School"
The objection to this is that it is difficult to see how this could have arisen. Words can be omitted, but how did "from" come to be added?
(2) Assume, as Simon says, that something has been omitted. In principle this is plausible, but in practice I find it difficult to construct a convincing sentence simply by adding words between "what" and "from" (which is surely where they were omitted, if they were).
(3) Again as Simon suggests, remove some words; either "of what", which leaves the following:
"It is also a concern of the critical theorists from the Frankfurt School"
or "what from", which gives us:
"It is also a concern of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School".

Unless you can clarify this with the client, I would recommend adopting this third option and translating it like that. It produces a coherent and valid result (because of course Horkheimer and Adorno were leading members of the Frankfurt school).

19:46 Mar 31, 2011 

Thank you both for confirming my suspicion about this text. No wonder I couldn't make sense of it. @Charles, I put the quotes. They're not in the original text. Thank you for pointing out the typo in the original. There's a new paragraph after Adorno.

18:55 Mar 31, 2011 

I'm not surprised you're having difficulty. As far as I can see the last sentence makes no sense as it stands. I presume, by the way, that the phrase you are asking about is not in quotes in the original text. Is that right?

Obviously the first question is whether what you have posted is exactly what your text says. I'm sure it is, but just to check. (I can see one error, which may or may not be in your text: the name is Max Horkheimer, with an "h" in the middle.) Assuming you have reproduced it exactly as it is, there must be an error or an omission, and one can start to try to work out what it might be.

It would also be useful to know what comes straight after "Adorno". Is that definitely the end of the sentence?

18:54 Mar 31, 2011 

Hello Giovanni. As a native English speaker I can tell you that this is almost certainly an error. Either there is something missing, or "of what" should not be there.