by David Bellos
In memory of my teachers
Table of Contents
Title Page
Prologue
ONE - What Is a Translation?
TWO - Is Translation Avoidable?
THREE - Why Do We Call It “Translation”?
FOUR - Things People Say About Translation
FIVE - Fictions of the Foreign: The Paradox of “Foreign-Soundingness”
SIX - Native Command: Is Your Language Really Yours?
SEVEN - Meaning Is No Simple Thing
EIGHT - Words Are Even Worse
NINE - Understanding Dictionaries
TEN - The Myth of Literal Translation
ELEVEN - The Issue of Trust: The Long Shadow of Oral Translation
TWELVE - Custom Cuts: Making Forms Fit
THIRTEEN - What Can’t Be Said Can’t Be Translated: The Axiom of Effability
FOURTEEN - How Many Words Do We Have for Coffee?
FIFTEEN - Bibles and Bananas: The Vertical Axis of Translation Relations
SIXTEEN - Translation Impacts
SEVENTEEN - The Third Code: Translation as a Dialect
EIGHTEEN - No Language Is an Island: The Awkward Issue of L3
NINETEEN - Global Flows: Center and Periphery in the Translation of Books
TWENTY - A Question of Human Rights: Translation and the Spread of International Law
TWENTY-ONE - Ceci n’est pas une traduction: Language Parity in the European Union
TWENTY-TWO - Translating News
TWENTY-THREE - The Adventure of Automated Language-Translation Machines
TWENTY-FOUR - A Fish in Your Ear: The Short History of Simultaneous Interpreting
TWENTY-FIVE - Match Me If You Can: Translating Humor
TWENTY-SIX - Style and Translation
TWENTY-SEVEN - Translating Literary Texts
TWENTY-EIGHT - What Translators Do
TWENTY-NINE - Beating the Bounds: What Translation Is Not
THIRTY - Under Fire: Sniping at Translation
THIRTY-ONE - Sameness, Likeness, and Match: Truths About Translation
THIRTY-TWO - Avatar: A Parable of Translation
Afterbabble: In Lieu of an Epilogue
ALSO BY DAVID BELLOS
Notes
Caveats and Thanks
Index
Permissions
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
Prologue
When I was an undergraduate, a story went around among students in my college that a fellow called Harris had refused to teach translation classes on the grounds that he did not know what “translation” was.
He’d challenged the faculty board to tell him what it was he was being asked to teach. Everyone knows what it is! they said. Translation has been taught here for centuries. But knowing how to perpetuate an academic tradition is not the same thing as knowing what you’re doing. Harris could not possibly teach a subject his seniors were unable to define.
We thought it a great giggle: a junior don had used a philosophical conundrum to get out of a chore and tied the fuddy-duddies into knots.
Despite the tantalizing puzzle set by Roy Harris at the start of my adult life, I have dared to teach translation for several decades since then. I have also translated many books and become the director of a program in translation and intercultural communication. So it’s about time I tried to answer his question.
However, answers are best found when the question itself is well put. “What is … ?” doesn’t normally provide a good prompt. It usually leads you headlong into hairsplitting disputes about the meanings of words.
The meaning of the word translation is not without interest, of course, and I’ve devoted one chapter of this book to the issue. But it isn’t as important as many other questions that arise just the same, whatever word we use.
Here are some of those other questions: What can we learn from translation? What does it teach us?
Many others then spring to mind: What do we actually know about translation? What is it about translation that we still need to find out?
We also have to ask: What do people mean when they offer opinions and precepts about the best way to translate? Are all translations the same kind of thing, or are there different operations involved in different kinds of translating? Is translating fundamentally different from writing and speaking, or is it just another aspect of the unsolved mystery of how we come to know what someone else means?
This isn’t a book that tells you how to translate, or how I translate. There are plenty of good books of those kinds; there’s no need to add a lesser one to the pile.
Instead, it is made of stories and examples and arguments that circle around what seems to me to be the real issue—understanding what translation does.
I’ve tried to paint a big picture by exploring the role of translation in cultural, social, and human issues of many kinds. To do so, I’ve used scholarly books and articles and exploited many erudite friends, but in many places I’ve also drawn on personal experience.
As I grew up in England and live in the United States, the point of view of this book is located unambiguously in the English-speaking world.
Because English is currently the dominant interlanguage of the world, English speakers who aren’t involved in translation have a harder time than most others in understanding what translation is. That’s my main reason for writing about it.
Finding out what translation has done in the past and does today, finding out what people have said about it and why, finding out whether it is one thing or many—these inquiries take us far and wide, to Sumer, Brussels, and Beijing, to comic books and literary classics, and into the fringes of disciplines as varied as anthropology, linguistics, and computer science. What translation does raises so many answerable questions that we can leave the business of what it is to the side for quite some time.
ONE
What Is a Translation?
Douglas Hofstadter took a great liking to this short poem by the sixteenth-century French wit Clément Marot:
Ma mignonne,
Je vous donne
Le bon jour;
Le séjour
C’est prison.
Guérison
Recouvrez,
Puis ouvrez
Votre porte
Et qu’on sorte
Vitement,
Car Clément
Le vous mande.
Va, friande
De ta bouche,
Qui se couche
En danger
Pour manger
Confitures;
Si tu dures
Trop malade,
Couleur fade
Tu prendras,
Et perdras
L’embonpoint.
Dieu te doint
Santé bonne,
Ma mignonne.
He sent a copy of it to a great number of his friends and acquaintances and asked them to translate it into English, respecting as well as they could the formal properties that he identified in it:
(1) 28 lines (2) of 3 syllables each (3) in rhyming couplets (4) with the last line being the same as the first; (5) midway the poem changes from formal (vous) to informal (tu) and (6) the poet puts his own name directly into the poem.1
Hofstadter, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University, got many dozens of responses over the following months and years. Each one of them was different, yet each one of them was without doubt a translation of Marot’s little poem. By this simple device he demonstrated one of the most awkward and wonderful truths about translation. It is this: any utterance of more than trivial length has no one translation; all utterances have innumerably many acceptable translations.
/> You get the same result with ordinary prose as you do with a poem. Give a hundred competent translators a page to translate, and the chances of any two versions being identical are close to zero. This fact about interlingual communication has persuaded many people that translation is not an interesting topic—because it is always approximate, it is just a second-rate kind of thing. That’s why “translation” isn’t the name of a long-established academic discipline, even though its practitioners have often been academics in some other field. How can you have theories and principles about a process that comes up with no determinate results?
Like Hofstadter, I take the opposite view. The variability of translations is incontrovertible evidence of the limitless flexibility of human minds. There can hardly be a more interesting subject than that.
What is it that translators really do? How many different kinds of translating are there? What do the uses of this mysterious ability tell us about human societies, past and present? How do the facts of translation relate to language use in general—and to what we think a language is?
Those are the kinds of questions I explore in this book. Definitions, theories, and principles can be left aside until we have a better idea of what we are talking about. We shouldn’t use them prematurely to decide whether the following version of Clément Marot’s poem (one of many by Hofstadter himself) is good, bad, or indifferent. It’s the other way around. Until we can explain why the following version counts as a translation, we don’t really know what we’re saying when we utter the word.
Gentle gem,
Diadem,
Ciao! Bonjour!
Heard that you’re
In the rough:
Glum, sub-snuff.
Precious, tone
Down your moan,
And fling wide
Your door; glide
From your oy-
ster bed, coy
Little pearl.
See, blue girl,
Beet-red ru-
by’s your hue.
For your aches,
Carat cakes
Are the cure.
Eat no few’r
Than fourteen,
Silv’ry queen—
But no more
’n twenty-four,
Golden dream.
How you’ll gleam!
Trust old Clem
Gentle gem.
TWO
Is Translation Avoidable?
Translation is everywhere—at the United Nations, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, and many other international bodies that regulate fundamental aspects of modern life. Translation is part and parcel of modern business, and there’s hardly a major industry that doesn’t use and produce translations for its own operations. We find translations on the bookshelves of our homes, on the reading lists for every course in every discipline taught at college; we find them on processed-food labels and on flat-pack furniture instructions. How could we do without translation? It seems pointless to wonder what world we would live in if translation didn’t happen all the time at every level, from bilingual messages on ATM screens to confidential discussions between heads of state, from the guarantee slip on a new watch we’ve just bought to the classics of world literature.
But we could do without it, all the same. Instead of using translation, we could learn the languages of all the different communities we wish to engage with; or we could decide to speak the same language or else adopt a single common language for communicating with other communities. But if we balk at adopting a common tongue and decline to learn the other languages we need, we could simply ignore people who don’t speak the way we do.
These three options seem fairly radical, and it’s likely that none of them figures among the aspirations of the readers of this book. However, they are not imaginary solutions to the many paradoxes of intercultural communication. All three paths away from translation are historically attested. More than that: the refusal of translation, by one or more of the means described, is probably closer to the historical norm on this planet than the culture of translation that seems natural and unavoidable around the world today. One big truth about translation that is often kept under wraps is that many societies did just fine by doing without.
The Indian subcontinent has long been the home of many different groups speaking a great variety of languages. However, there is no tradition of translation in India. Until very recently, nothing was ever translated directly between Urdu, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, and so on. Yet these communities have lived cheek by jowl on a crowded continent for centuries. How did they manage? They learned other languages! Few inhabitants of the subcontinent have ever been monoglot; citizens of India have traditionally spoken three, four, or five tongues.1
In the late Middle Ages, the situation was quite similar in many parts of Europe. Traders and poets, sailors and adventurers moved overland and around the inland seas picking up and often mixing more or less distantly related languages as they went, and only the most thoughtful of them even wondered whether they were speaking different “languages” or just adapting to local peculiarities. The great explorer Christopher Columbus provides an unusually well-documented case of the intercomprehensibility and interchangeability of European tongues in the late Middle Ages. He wrote notes in the margins of his copy of Pliny in what we now recognize as an early form of Italian, but he used typically Portuguese place-names—such as Cuba—to label his discoveries in the New World. He wrote his official correspondence in Castilian Spanish but used Latin for the precious journal he kept of his voyages. He made a “secret” copy of the journal in Greek, however, and he also must have known enough Hebrew to use the astronomical tables of Abraham Zacuto, which allowed him to predict a lunar eclipse and impress the indigenous people he encountered in the Caribbean. He must have been familiar with lingua franca—a “contact language” made of simplified Arabic syntax and a vocabulary taken mostly from Italian and Spanish, used by Mediterranean sailors and traders from the Middle Ages to the dawn of the nineteenth century—because he borrowed a few characteristic words from it when writing in Castilian and Italian.2 How many languages did Columbus know when he sailed the ocean in 1492? As in today’s India, where a degree of intercomprehensibility exists among several of its languages, the answer would be somewhat arbitrary. It’s unlikely Columbus even conceptualized Italian, Castilian, or Portuguese as distinct languages, for they did not yet have any grammar books. He was a learned man in being able to read and write the three ancient tongues. But beyond that, he was just a Mediterranean sailor, speaking whatever variety of language that he needed to do his job.
There are perhaps as many as seven thousand languages spoken in the world today,3 and no individual could learn them all. Five to ten languages seem to represent the effective limit in all cultures, however multilingual they may be. Some obsessive individuals have clocked up twenty; a few champion linguists, who spend all their time learning languages, have claimed knowledge of fifty, or even more. But even these brainiacs master only a tiny fraction of all the tongues that there are.
Most of the world’s languages are spoken by very small groups, which is the main reason why a great number of them are near the point of collapse. However, outside the handful of countries speaking one of the half-dozen “major” world languages, few people on this planet have only one tongue. Within the Russian Federation, for example, hundreds of languages are spoken—belonging to the Slavic, Turkic, Caucasian, Altaic, and other language families. But hardly a member of any of the communities speaking these very diverse tongues does not also speak Russian. Similarly, in India, there aren’t many people who don’t also have either Hindi or Urdu or Bengali or English or one of the half-dozen other interlanguages of the subcontinent. To engage with all but a tiny fraction of people in the world, you definitely do not need to learn all their first languages. You need to learn all their vehicular languages—languages learned by nonnative speakers for the purpose of communicating with
native speakers of a third tongue. There are about eighty languages used in this way in some part of the world. But because vehicular languages are also native to some (usually very large) groups, and because many people speak more than one vehicular language (of which one may or may not be native to them), you do not need to learn all eighty vehicular languages to communicate with most people on the planet. Knowing just nine of them—Chinese (with 1.3 billion users), Hindi (800 million), Arabic (530 million), Spanish (350 million), Russian (278 million), Urdu (180 million), French (175 million), Japanese (130 million), and English (somewhere between 800 million and 1.8 billion)—would permit effective everyday conversation, though probably not detailed negotiation or serious intellectual debate, with at least 4.5 billion and maybe up to 5.5 billion people, that is to say, around 90 percent of the world’s population. (The startlingly wide range of estimates of the number of people who “speak English” reflects the difficulty we have in saying what “speaking English” means.) Add Indonesian (250 million), German (185 million), Turkish (63 million), and Swahili (50 million) to make a baker’s dozen,4 and you have at your feet the entire American landmass, most of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, the great crescent of Islam from Morocco to Pakistan, a good part of India, a swath of Africa, and most of the densely populated parts of East Asia, too. What more could you want?5 Exeunt translators! Enter the language trainers! The cast would be more or less identical, so the net loss of jobs worldwide would most likely be nil.
If thirteen languages seem too hard to handle, why not have everyone learn the same one? The plan seemed obvious to the Romans, who made little attempt to learn the languages of the many peoples they conquered, with the sole but major exception of the Greeks. Barely a trace of interest has been found among ancient Romans in learning Etruscan, Umbrian, the Celtic languages of what is now France and Britain, the Germanic languages of the tribes on the northeastern borders of the empire, or the Semitic languages of the Carthage they deleted from the map and the colonies in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea area. If you got taken over by Rome, you learned Latin and that was that. The long-term result of the linguistic unification of the empire was that the written version of the Romans’ language remained the main vehicle of intercultural communication in Europe for more than a thousand years after the end of the empire. Imperial blindness to the difference of others did a huge favor to Europe.6
