Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

by David Bellos

  The difficulty with translation is different. Many diverse kinds of text are habitually identified as instances of “a translation”: books, real estate contracts, car maintenance manuals, poems, plays, legal treatises, philosophical tomes, CD notes, and website texts, to list just a few. What common property do they have to make us believe that they are all instances of the same thing that we label “a translation”? Many language professionals will tell you that translating a manufacturer’s catalog is utterly different from translating a poem. Why do we not have different words for these different actions? There are other languages that have no shortage of separate words to name the many things that in English all go by the name of “a translation.” Here, for example, are the main words that you have to talk about them in Japanese:

  If the translation we are discussing is complete, we might call it a zen’yaku or a kan’yaku … A first translation is a shoyaku. A retranslation is a kaiyaku, and the new translation is a shin’yaku that replaces the old translation, or ky yaku. A translation of a translation is a j yaku. A standard translation that seems unlikely to be replaced is a teiyaku; equally unlikely to be replaced is a mei-yaku, or “celebrated translation.” When a celebrated translator speaks of her own work, she may disparage it as setsuyaku, “clumsy translation,” i.e., “my own translation,” which is not to be confused with a genuinely bad translation, disparaged as a dayaku or an akuyaku. A co-translation is a ky yaku or g yaku; a draft translation, or shitayaku, may be polished through a process of “supervising translation” or kan’yaku, without it becoming a ky yaku or g yaku. Translations are given different names depending on the approach they take to the original: they can be chokuyaku (literally, “direct translation”), chikugoyaku (“word-for-word translation”), iyaku (“sense translation”), taiyaku (“translation presented with the original text on facing pages”), or, in the case of translations of works by Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, John Grisham, and other popular American writers, chyaku (“translations that are even better than the originals,” an invention and registered trademark of the Academy Press).1

  English possesses a wide range of names for different kinds of flowers: one way of referring to the relationship between, say, tulip and flower is to call flower a hypernym and tulip, along with rose, hydrangea, camellia, and so on, the hyponyms of the term flower. Hypernym and hyponym refer to relationships between words in a language, not to (botanical or other) relations between the things they refer to. So we could say that Japanese lacks a hypernym for all its various translation terms, whereas English has the hypernym but no readily available set of hyponyms. But the very structure of such an argument takes us into dangerous territory. It sets up English as the “Standard” or the “Thinking Language” because it alone has the general term, and could easily accommodate new coinages to give the meanings of the Japanese terms—uptranslate, downtranslate, newtranslate, retranslate, cotranslate, and so on. But it is not so obvious how we could translate the general or abstract notion of translation into Japanese, and so we would be predisposed to thinking of that language as deficient in precisely the respect in which it is richer than English.

  In practice, Japanese speakers do have a way of translating the English term translation into Japanese. The word hon’yaku is used for that purpose in Japanese translations of English-language works about comparative literature and translation theory, and also in the world of publishing and the international book trade. But its range of uses makes it an imperfect match for the word translation. Hon’yaku covers translation from foreign (non-Japanese) languages into Japanese (or vice versa), sometimes more specifically translations from Europe or the United States, but not most other meanings of translation. According to Michael Emmerich, “Those like myself who attempt to translate ‘translation’ with the word hon’yaku are … subtly carrying out the type of translation known in Japanese as goyaku, or ‘mistranslation.’”2Hon’yaku is more like a term of art, whereas we think that the English term translation names something general of self-evident reality.

  The Word Magic effect of a category term is that it leads unwary users to believe that the category thus named really exists. One way of looking at this is to say that the category or class—any category or class—really does exist as a mental reality if a name for that category exists in the language. But that is not at all the same thing as saying that the category thus created is a reliable, useful, appropriate, or truly meaningful way of talking about the world. The absence of a category term clearly makes it harder (but not necessarily impossible) to think about what a set of entities distinguished by different words have in common. In the case that concerns us, we do have a single, very general word for translation, whereas Japanese has many. That does not mean to say that in Japanese you cannot think about translation in general. But it does mean that European questions about the “true nature of translation” when translated into Japanese tend to ask a question about an aspect of European culture (called “translation,” or hon’yaku), not about what we think the question really is—the nature of “translation itself.”

  You can’t talk about it easily if you don’t have a word for it, and that is why any intellectual inquiry invents a terminology for the things that exist, or need to be held to exist, within that particular field of specialization. But translation is not an invented, technical, or borrowed term like hydrogen, megabyte, or chiaroscuro. It’s a common noun and an ordinary, unmarked term available for general use. What exactly does it name?

  The conventional way of tackling this question is to have recourse to etymology, the history of the word itself. Translate comes from two Latin words, trans, meaning “across,” and the past form latum of the verb ferre, “to bear.” The result of the word history is to give translate the meaning of “bear across” or “bring over.” Several European languages have similar words from similar roots, such as the German übersetzen (“to put across”) or the Russian (“to lead across”). From the etymologies of these words come formula-like proclamations in textbooks on translation, encyclopedias, and so forth of the following familiar kind: “Translation is the transfer of meaning from one language to another.”

  That seems so obvious as to be not worth commenting upon. But the history of a word does not tell you much about its actual meaning. Knowing, for example, that divorce comes from Latin divortium, “watershed” or “fork in the road,” does not tell you what the word means now. Etymologies obscure essential truths about the way we use language and, among them, truths about translation. So let’s be clear: a translator “carries [something] across [some obstacle]” only because the word that is used to describe what he does meant “bear across” in an ancient language. “Carrying across” is only a metaphor, and its relation to the truth about translation needs to be established, not taken for granted. There are lots of other metaphors available in many languages, including our own, and they have just as much right to our attention as the far from solid conceit of the ferry operator or trucker who carries something from A to B.

  What if we used a word with a different set of historical roots? What if we had lost all trace of the history of the word? Translators would no doubt carry on translating, and the problems and paradoxes of their profession would not be altered one bit. But if we were to change the word we use to talk about translation, large parts of contemporary discourse about the phenomenon would become meaningless and void.

  In Sumerian, the language of ancient Babylon, the word for “translator,” written in cuneiform script, looks like this:

  Pronounced eme-bal, it means “language turner.” In classical Latin, too, what translators did was vertere, “to turn” (Greek) expressions into the language of Rome. We still use the same image in English when we ask a lawyer to turn the small print on a contract into something comprehensible, or when a teacher asks a student to turn a sentence into German. Tanimtok, the word for “translation” in Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea, is also made of the same elements,
“turn” (tanim) and “talk” (tok).3 Of course, “turning” is almost as slippery as “carrying across,” but because you can also turn milk into butter, a frog into a prince, and base metal into gold, the history of translation (as well as the status and pay of translators) might have been significantly different in the West had the job always been thought of as a “turning.”

  There are two verbs in Finnish that translate translate: one, kääntää, being the same as the Finnish word for “to turn” (as in Latin); the other, suomentaa, meaning “to make Finnish” (just as verdeutschen, “to make German,” is one of the German ways of saying “translate” [into German]). A witty Finnish writer took a German sight-poem by Christian Morgenstern titled “The Fish’s Lullaby” and which looks like this:

  Fisches Nachtgesang

  and “turned” it into a Finnish poem that looks like this:

  Kalan yölaulu

  Suom. Reijo Ollinen

  The joke is that the (abbreviated) word used at the bottom to state that it has been “translated by Reijo Ollinen” is not the one meaning “to turn” (over) but the one meaning “to Finnishize,” suggesting that all you need to have a fish dream in Finnish is to be turned upside down.4

  In ancient China, on the other hand, what you were called if you were employed as an official translator depended on which of the empire’s borders you dealt with.

  Those in charge of the regions of the east were called ji (the entrusted; transmitters); in the south, xiang (likeness-renderers); in the west, Didi (they who know the Di tribes); and in the north, yí (translators/interpreters).5

  The division of a translation bureaucracy into geographical parts may sound as if it had been invented by Jorge Luis Borges, but it is not much stranger than our having separate terms such as Sinologist, Arabist, and Africanist for people working at different desks at the State Department. But it seems fairly clear from the source quoted that the use of different names for the offices held by these language people did not give rise to the view that they were each doing something different. That’s to say, before there was anything like a collective noun to describe them, the “northers,” “southers,” “easters,” and “westers” were all understood to be doing the same kind of work.

  However, as Buddhism made its way into China by means of translation, the notions connected to the word yí expanded beyond the original definition relating to government positions dealing with the languages of the north. Here, in chronological order, spread over several centuries of classical Chinese civilization, are explanations of the character yí given in word lists and annotations of ancient texts:

  1. Those who transmit the words of the tribes in the four directions.

  2. To state in an orderly manner and be conversant in the words of the country and those outside the country.

  3. To exchange, that is to say, to change and replace the words of one language by another to achieve mutual understanding.

  4. To exchange, that is to say, to take what one has in exchange for what one does not have.6

  The point here is not to engage with ongoing debates among Sinologists about the history and meaning of the sign now pronounced fanyí (an augmentative form of yí), and which serves as the Chinese translation of translation, but simply this: in a culture more ancient than ours that has engaged with the practical and theoretical problems of translation with subtlety and erudition over several millennia, it occurred to no one to gloss translation as “the transfer of meaning from one language to another.”

  “Turning,” “transmitting,” “speaking after,” “mouthing,” and “exchanging” are not necessarily more revealing or more accurate ways of understanding translation. But if you inherit any of these other ways of naming acts of interlingual communication, you do not even think of defining translation as “the transfer of meaning from one language to another.” That standard English (and French, German, Russian …) definition is simply an extrapolation from the composition of the word that is used to name it. The definition tells us nothing more than the meaning of the word’s etymological roots.

  The metaphor of “bearing across” has generated a wide range of words, thoughts, sayings, and banalities that may have no more reality than the idea that translation “transfers meaning” from A to B. Would we have ever thought up the idea of a “language barrier” if our word for translator did not imply something like “truck driver”? Would we have ever asked what it is that a translator “carries across” the “language barrier” if he or she were called a “turner,” “tongue man,” or “exchanger”? Probably not. The common terms of translation studies are metaphorical extensions—elaborations of the metaphor—of the etymological meaning of the term translation itself.

  But we cannot escape our own world. We do say translate, and we do think transfer, and because we think transfer, we have to find the complement or object of that verb. And in the mainstream tradition of Western thought about language, only one candidate has ever been thought suitable for the role: meaning.

  However, “meaning” is not the only component of an utterance that can in principle and in practice be “turned” into something else. Far from it. Things said are always said in some tone of voice, with some pattern of pitch, in some real context, with some kind of associated body use (gestures, posture, movement) … Written language is always presented in a particular layout, in some font or hand, in some physical medium (poster, book, back panel, or newspaper) … However, most of the dimensions that an utterance necessarily possesses are not often treated as part of the translator’s task. Like so much else, the boundaries of translation are best illuminated by a good joke.

  Spanglish is a sentimental comedy film directed by James Brooks that depicts a language situation that is no doubt familiar to many readers of this book and probably as old as the history of human society itself. The heroine is a Mexican single mother who works as a maid for a prosperous American family. She speaks no English—but her ten-year-old daughter does. At a crucial moment, the mother needs to express her thoughts and strong feelings to her employers, so she enlists her daughter to act as translator.7 The girl is linguistically well equipped to perform the task but has no knowledge of current translation conventions. Instead of just translating the meanings of what her mother says, she replicates with gusto her mother’s theatrical body movements, in a time-lapse pas de deux. Speaking perfect English, she waves her arms, stamps her foot, and raises the volume of her voice and modulates its pitch to imitate her mother’s performance in Spanish. The sketch makes us laugh wholeheartedly. Why? Because only an intelligent but ill-educated child could imagine that’s what translation is—for us.

  Despite this, there are ways of reenacting in another language some of the dimensions of an utterance that don’t fall within the rather limited idea of meaning that makes translation less complex than it would otherwise be, but also much less fun. For example, take the sounds—and not the word meanings—of a familiar rhyme:

  Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

  and try to say those sounds—not their meanings—in French. Obviously, you can’t do that exactly because French uses a different set of language sounds. But we can re-say them using those French sounds that most nearly approximate the English sounds represented. We can then write them in a way that those approximately equivalent sounds would be written in French if they were the sounds of French words:

  Un petit d’un petit

  S’étonne aux Halles8

  Is this a translation? Well, it might be if instead of “translation” we said “mouthing” or “after-speaking.” Sound translation (also called homophonic translation), of which this is an example, may have few practical uses at present, but in historical terms it is one of the main ways in which our vocabulary has grown. English speakers have had contact over the centuries with dozens of other cultures, have listened to the words that they used, then said them again using the sound system of English, creating new words such as bungalow, cocoa, tomato, potato, an
d so on. Similarly, speakers of other languages having fruitful commercial and cultural contact with English-speaking peoples currently sound-translate all sorts of English terms, producing new words in Chinese ( kù, “fashionable”), French (le footing, “jogging”), Japanese (smto, “svelte”), German (Handy, “mobile phone”), and so forth that English speakers understand imperfectly or not at all.

  Loanwords (and, more generally, the leakage of vocabulary, syntax, and sounds between languages whose speakers are in contact with one another) are not usually thought of as relevant to the study of translation. Indeed, from a conventional point of view the probably universal device of repeating with approximation what you do not properly understand is the opposite of translation—which is to say something else in the place of what you do understand. On the other hand, linguistic borrowing between cultures in contact with one another is a fundamental fact of intercultural communication—and that is the very field of translation.

  In reality, professional translators have frequent recourse to sound translation. The translator of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s unprecedented exposé of the Soviet gulag experience, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, had to decide what to say to refer to the inmates of the camps, who were called, and also called themselves, (singular: , from , “locked up”) in Russian. He decided to call them zeks. Zeks is not a possible word of Russian. It is a sound translation of a Russian stem, altered in a way that marks it as an English plural. If translation is just the transfer of meaning from one language to another, then zeks is not a translation at all, and it is not English, either. But that clearly will not do. Translation involves many things that don’t fit common definitions. It is much more interesting to expand our understanding of translation than to reject the work of Solzhenitsyn’s translator on the grounds that it is incompatible with the dictionary. That would be to throw out the baby instead of the bathwater.