by David Bellos
Quoted by Scott L. Montgomery, Science in Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 68.
17. THE THIRD CODE
Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Sara Laviosa, Corpus-Based Translation Studies: Theory, Findings, Applications (New York: Rodopi, 2002).
Mairi McLaughlin, “(In)visibility: Dislocation in French and the Voice of the Translator,” French Studies 61:2 (2008): 53–64.
Exceptions include Rosemary Edmonds’s translation of War and Peace (London: Penguin Books, 1957), in which Platon Karataev speaks a generic folk dialect of English vaguely indebted to Yorkshire.
See Ineke Wallaert, “The Translation of Sociolects: A Paradigm of Ideological Issues in Translation?,” in Language Across Boundaries, eds. Janet Cotterill and Anne Ife (London: Continuum in association with British Association for Applied Linguistics, 2001), 171–84.
18. NO LANGUAGE IS AN ISLAND
Simon Gaunt, “Translating the Diversity of the Middle Ages: Marco Polo and John Mandeville as ‘French’ Writers,” Australian Journal of French Studies XLVI.3 (2009): 235–48.
Claude Lanzmann and Simone de Beauvoir, Shoah: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film (New York: Da Capo, 1995), provides an English translation of the subtitles only. Crosslinguistic interactions can be studied only by watching the film.
Cyril Aslanov, Le Français au Levant (Paris: Champion, 2006), resurrects the often-forgotten “Empire of French” that spread from Sicily and Cyprus to the (French-speaking) Kingdom of Jerusalem between 1100 and 1400 C.E.
Gaunt, “Translating the Diversity,” 237.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Penguin Books, 1957), 417.
19. GLOBAL FLOWS
The figure is remarkably stable for other major or central languages. Gisele Sapiro (“Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market,” Poetics 38:4 [2010]: 419–39) logs forty-two source languages for literary translations published in France between 1984 and 2002. A relatively new American adventure in literary translation on the Web—WordsWithoutBorders.org—has widened the net to include more than seventy source languages, but it has yet to affect book publishing in traditional form to any significant degree.
For a brief exposition of the dollar delusion, see Michel Onfray’s article “Les deux bouts de la langue,” Le Monde, July 10, 2010.
See Gideon Toury, “Enhancing Cultural Change by Means of Fictitious Translations,” available at spinoza.tau.ac.il/~toury/works.
Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Tijariyya al-Kubra, 1928), III:152, quoted in Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 31.
Katharina Rout, “Fragments of a Greater Language,” in Beyond Words: Translating the World, ed. Susan Ouriou (Banff, AB: Banff Center Press, 2010), 33–37.
Jessica Ka Yee Chan, “Translating Russia into China: Lu Xun’s Fashioning of an Antithesis to Western Europe,” paper given at the MLA Conference, Philadelphia, 2009.
Arnold B. McMillin, “Small Is Sometimes Beautiful: Studying ‘Minor Languages’ at a University with Particular Reference to Belarus,” Modern Language Review 101:4 (October 2006): xxxii–xliii.
Anonymous editorial, Yomiuri Shimbun, June 23, 1888, translated by Michael Emmerich.
“The Wu Jing Project: A New Translation of the Five Chinese Classics into the Major Languages of the World; an International Project Sponsored by the Confucius Institute Headquarters, Beijing, China,” project description kindly supplied by Martin Kern.
20. A QUESTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
There are two English translations: Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin and Peter Owen (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960); and Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983). The second is to be preferred.
See Rosemary Moeketsi, “Intervention in Court Interpreting: South Africa,” in Translation as Intervention, ed. Jeremy Munday (London/New York: Continuum, 2007), 97–117.
Like Japanese, however, it does have unofficial status. The German Translation Section, funded jointly by the German, Swiss, Lichtenstein, and Austrian governments, provides German-language services at UN headquarters in New York.
Quoted in Sir Frederick Pollock, A First Book of Jurisprudence for Students of the Common Law (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1896), 283.
Karen McAuliffe, “Translation at the Court of Justice of the European Communities,” in Translation Issues in Language and Law, eds. Frances Olsen, Alexander Lorz, and Dieter Stein (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 99–115 (specifically, See Here). Emphasis is mine.
21. CECI N’EST PAS UNE TRADUCTION
The separate Directorate-General for Interpretation also has a huge budget—it is the largest interpreting service in the world by far.
Karen McAuliffe, “Translation at the Court of Justice of the European Communities of the European Communities,” in Translation Issues in Language and Law, eds. Frances Olsen, Alexander Lorz, and Dieter Stein (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 105.
Lubella v. Hauptzollamt Cottbus, quoted in Lawrence Solan, “Statutory Interpretation in the EU: The Augustinian Approach,” in Olsen, Lorz, and Stein, Translation Issues, 49.
Ibid., 35–53.
22. TRANSLATING NEWS
Susan Bassnett and Esperanca Bielsa, Translation in Global News (New York: Routledge, 2009), is the principal source of information and examples given in this chapter.
23. THE ADVENTURE OF AUTOMATED LANGUAGE-TRANSLATION MACHINES
See Michael Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), for a well-documented account of the intelligence-gathering machinery of the period.
Warren Weaver, “Translation,” in Machine Translation of Languages: Fourteen Essays, eds. W. N. Locke and A. D. Booth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1955), 15.
Weaver, quoted in MT News International 22 (July 1999): 6.
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, “A Demonstration of the Nonfeasibility of Fully Automatic High-Quality Translation” (1960), in Language and Information (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1964), 174.
See www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GdSC1Z1Kzs.
Available at www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/nec/StrategyforAmericanInnovation, section 3.D.
24. A FISH IN YOUR EAR
Martine Behr and Maike Corpataux, Die Nürnberger Prozesse: Zur Be-deutung der Dolmetscher für die Prozesse and der Prozesse für die Dolmetscher (Munich: Meidenbauer, 2006), 25–30.
Richard W. Sonnenfeldt, Witness to Nuremberg (New York: Arcade, 2006), 51.
Francesca Gaiba, The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation: The Nuremberg Trial (Ottowa: University of Ottawa Press, 1998), 110.
Provisional Rules of Procedure of the Security Council (1946), Rule 42.
Annelise Riles, “Models and Documents: Artefacts of International Legal Knowledge,” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 48:4 (October 1999): 819.
Denis Peiron, “La France à court d’interprètes,” Le Monde, March 8, 2010, raised a cry of alarm at the shortage of French candidates for language jobs in the European Union; Brigitte Perucca, in “Un monde sans interprètes,” Le Monde, March 19, 2010, reports that barely 30 percent of candidates for interpreter posts in all international organizations pass the first-stage tests.
The Council of Europe is distinct from the European Parliament, though it also sits in Strasbourg. Its official languages are English and French, but it provides German, Italian, and Russian interpreting as “additional working languages” at its own expense.
25. MATCH ME IF YOU CAN
Arvo Krikmann, Netinalju Stalinist—- —Internet Humour About Stalin (Tartu, Estonia: Eesti Kir-jandusmuuseum, 2004), joke no. 11, quoted by Alexandra Arkhipova in “Laughing About Stalin,” paper given at a conference, Totalitarian Laughter, Princeton, NJ, May 2009.
For a fuller di
scussion of this thorny field of study, see W. D. Hart, “On Self-Reference,” Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 523–28.
26. STYLE AND TRANSLATION
Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties, trans. David Bellos [1965] (Boston: David R. Godine, 1990), takes his exercise in Flaubert to an unusual pitch of intensity by incorporating a dozen or so sentences that really are by Flaubert.
Jean Rouaud, Fields of Glory, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Arcade, 1998), is a good example of how an imitation of Proust’s “inimitable” French style can be represented as such in another language.
Adam Thirlwell, The Delighted States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
Henri Godin, Les Ressources stylistiques du français contemporain (1948; 2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1964), 2, 3.
R. A. Sayce, Style in French Prose: A Method of Analysis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 5.
27. TRANSLATING LITERARY TEXTS
Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. De-Bevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Spanish could plausibly take over the role of “first interlanguage” in literary translation, but I see no sign of that happening yet.
See www.penguinclassics.co.uk/static/penguinclassicsaboutus/index.html.
Ibid.
English-language rights may be acquired for the entire world and they are then called WELR (World English Language Rights) or else, for one or another of its territories, “U.K. and Commonwealth” or “North America,” sometimes further subdivided into “U.S.A.” and “Canada.”
See Mark Solms, “Controversies in Freud Translation,” Psychoanalysis and History 1 (1999): 28–43.
Elisabeth Roudinesco, “Freud, une passion publique,” Le Monde, January 7, 2010.
28. WHAT TRANSLATORS DO
Eurostar Metropolitan, June 2010: 5. The changes make it clear that this sentence was translated from English into French, and not vice versa. A back-translation of the French would probably give “Top speed reached in July 2003 by a Eurostar train during testing of a high-speed line in the U.K.”
29. BEATING THE BOUNDS
Roman Jakobson and Abraham Moles proposed an influential Communication Model in which the role of natural language is played by something they called a “code.” They didn’t really mean a code as such, but the metaphor has stuck.
30. UNDER FIRE
John Dryden, “On Translation,” in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, eds. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 31.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena (1800), extract translated by Peter Mollenhauer as “On Language and Words,” in Schulte and Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation, 34.
Vladimir Nabokov, “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English,” Partisan Review 22:5 (Fall 1955), reprinted in Schulte and Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation, 137, 140.
José Ortega y Gasset, “La Miseria y el esplendor de la traducción,” La Nación (Buenos Aires) (June 1937), trans. Elisabeth Gamble Miller, in Schulte and Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation, 98.
31. SAMENESS, LIKENESS, AND MATCH
For a counterexample where the character count is respected in translation line by line, see chapter 51 of Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David R. Godine, 2009); and chapter 12 of this book, See Here, version 11.
AFTERBABBLE
A small selection: Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (1923), in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, eds. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); George Steiner, After Babel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Paul Zumthor, Babel ou l’inachèvement (Paris: Seuil, 1997); Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” in Psyché: L’Invention de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 2007).
For example, François Ost, Traduire: Défense et illustration du multilin-guisme (Paris: Fayard, 2009). Ost’s long first chapter runs through many of the possible interpretations of the Babel story.
See Arika Okrent, In the World of Constructed Languages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), for a witty and accessible account of the long history of language-improvement schemes.
That is not to say that neogrammarians have been wasting their time. The epic adventure of transformational grammar that began in 1957 remains for many people more stimulating than all the legends of the Arthurian Cycle put together.
For a fuller discussion of gesture in the evolution of language, see Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (New York: Penguin, 2007), 123–38.
The classic statement of the evolutionary relationship between grooming and language is Robin Dunbar’s Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (London: Faber, 1996). Although Dunbar remains committed to monogenesis (a single origin for all varieties of speech), his work provides numerous valuable insights that have been borrowed in simplified form in various places in this book.
Caveats and Thanks
As I’ve tried to write about translation between natural languages, I’ve not mentioned the use of the word as a technical term in mathematics, logic, and some branches of computer science. That would be a different book.
I’ve also failed to say anything about the uses and pitfalls of translation in the military, in war zones, and in hospitals. I plead ignorance. There is surely a lot to be learned from the courageous language mediators who work in these fields.
Readers familiar with translation studies may notice other omissions. Some of them are intentional. George Steiner’s After Babel is still in print, and my reasons for not commenting further on Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” can be found in Cambridge Literary Review 3 (June, 2010): 194–206.
Many of the brains I have picked are mentioned in footnotes and references, but other people and institutions have given me hints, memories, insights, and material in less formal ways. I hope I have not missed out any of my treasured and sometimes involuntary helpers, present and alas in some cases past, who receive here the expression of my sincerest thanks: Ruth Adler, Valerie Aguilar, Esther Allen, Srinavas Bangalore, Alex Bellos, Nat Bellos, George Bermann, Susan Bernofsky, Jim Brogden, Olivia Coghlan, Karen Emmerich, Michael Emmerich, Denis Feeney, Michael Gordin, Jane Grayson, Tom Hare, Roy Harris, Susan Harris, James Hodson, Douglas Hofstadter, Susan Ingram, Adriana Jacobs, David Jones, Graham Jones, Patrick Jospin, Joshua Katz, Sarah Kay, Carine Kennedy, Martin Kern, Judy Laffan, Ella Laszlo, Andrew Lendrum, Perry Link, Simone Marchesi, Heather Mawhinney, Ilona Morison, Sergey Oushakine, Claire Paterson, Georges Perec, Katy Pinke, Mr. Pryce, Kurt Riechenberg, Anti Saar, Kim Scheppele, Bambi Schieffelin, “Froggy” Smith, Jonathan Charles Smith, Lawrence Venuti, Lynn Visson, Kerim Yasar, Froma Zeitlin; the Library of the École de Traduction et d’Interprétation (ETI), University of Geneva; the staff and resources of the Firestone Library, Princeton, New Jersey; the speakers and listeners at the Translation Lunches at Princeton since their inception in 2008; and the four cohorts of students from the classes of 2008 through 2013 who by taking the TRA 200 Thinking Translation course obliged me to think, a lot.
Index
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages of your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Abkhaz
abstract thought
Académie Française
Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart
Adair, Gilbert
adjectives
Afghanistan
Africa
African American vernacular
Agence France-Press (AFP)
Aigui, Gennady
AIIC
Akkadian
> Albania
Albanian
Alexander the Great
Alexandria
alien language
Al Jazeera
alphabet
Alsatian
American Good News Bible
Amharic
Amoritic
Anadalams
analogy-based substitutions
Anglo-Saxon
animal language
anisomorphism
Apollonius the Sophist
Arabian Nights, The
Arabic; as UN language
Arad, Maya; Another Place, a Foreign City
Aramaic
Aristarchi, Stavraki
Armenian
Ashbery, John, “Rivers and Mountains,”
Asia
Asmat
Associated Press (AP)
Assyrian
Astérix
astronomy
asymmetrical language regime
atomic bomb
Atxaga, Bernardo
Augustine, Saint
Austin, J. L.
Austro-Hungarian Empire
Avatar (film)
axioms: of effability; of grammaticality
Azeri
Babelfish
Babel story
Babylon
bailo
