Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

by David Bellos

  In the summer of 2008, The Wall Street Journal ran a hot story under the headline GOP VEEP PICK ROILS DEMS. To make sense of this you need a lot of knowledge of American political events in the run-up to the last presidential election, including the conventional nicknames of the two main parties, as well as familiarity with the alphabetical games played by editors on night desks in Manhattan. Should we pity the poor translators the world over who needed to reproduce the bare bones of the story in double-quick time? Not really. The meanings of the words in that headline are not important. What’s important is that it works as a headline. Like any headline in the English-language press, GOP VEEP PICK ROILS DEMS is explained by the story that follows it in less compressed language. The task of the translator—if indeed it is the translator, not the editor, who performs this function—is to understand the story first and only then invent an appropriate headline within the language of headlines holding sway in the target culture. “Le choix de Madame Palin comme candidate républicaine à la vice-présidence des États-Unis choque le parti démocrate” conforms quite well to French headline-writing style, for example, and is a plausible counterpart to The Wall Street Journal’s nutshell quip. The original and its translation must conform to the general conventions of headline writing in their respective cultures, because headline writing is just as much a genre—a particular kind of language use restricted to particular contexts—as promising, christening, threatening, and so forth.

  How many genres are there? Uncountably many. How do you know what genre a given written sentence is in? Well, you don’t, and that’s the point. No sentence contains all the information you need to translate it. One of the key levels of information that is always missing from a sentence taken simply as a grammatically well-formed string of lexically acceptable words is knowledge of its genre. You can get that only from the context of utterance. Of course, you know what that is in the case of a spoken sentence—you have to be there, in the context, to hear it spoken. You usually know quite a lot in the case of written texts, too. Translators do not usually agree to work on a text without being told first of all whether it is a railway timetable or a poem, a speech at the UN or a fragment of a novel (and few people read such things in their original languages either without being told by the cover sheet, dust jacket, or other peritextual material what kind of thing they are reading). To do their jobs, translators have to know what job they are doing.

  Translating something “from cold,” “unseen,” “out of the blue,” or, as some literary scholars would put it, “translating a text in and for itself” isn’t technically impossible. After all, students at some universities are asked to do just that in their final examinations. But it is not an honest job. It can be done only by guessing what the context and genre of the utterance are. Even if you guess right, and even granted that guessing right may well be the sign of wide knowledge and a smart mind, you are still only playing a game.

  Many genres have recognizable forms in the majority of languages and cultures: kitchen recipes, fairground hype, greeting people, expressing condolences, pronouncing marriage, court proceedings, the rules of soccer, and haggling can be found almost anywhere on the planet. The linguistic forms through which these genres are conducted vary somewhat, and in some cases vary a great deal, but as long as the translator knows what genre he is translating and is familiar with its forms in the target language, their translation is not a special problem. Problems arise more typically when the users of translation raise objections to the shifts in verbal form that an appropriate translation involves. Translators do not translate Chinese kitchen recipes “into English.” If they are translators, they translate them into kitchen recipes. Similarly, when a film title needs translating, it needs translating into a film title, not an examination answer.

  It’s Complicated is a romantic comedy starring Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep, playing characters who have a romantic fling in sun-drenched Santa Barbara despite having been divorced for some years. The complications alluded to in the title include Baldwin’s slinky and suspicious young wife, her five-year-old son with uncannily acute ears, as well as the three children of the refound lovers’ original marriage, now aged between eighteen and twenty-five. Can the two parents really get back together again? As Baldwin says in his closing lines, in a sentimental scene on the swing seat in the front garden: “It’s complicated.” As a sentence abstracted from any context of utterance, “It’s complicated” can be adequately represented in French by C’est compliqué. That would get full marks in a school quiz.

  In the context of utterance as it occurs in the film, Baldwin’s resigned, evasive, and inconclusive “It’s complicated” can also be plausibly rendered in French by the same sentence: C’est compliqué. But the French release of the movie itself is not titled C’est compliqué. The distributors preferred to call it Pas si simple! (“Not so simple!”).

  It’s not that the meaning is very different. Nor is it because the context of utterance alone changes the meaning: film titles, by virtue of being titles, have, in a sense, no context at all. Titles of new works announce and constitute the context in which the work’s meaning is to be construed. Title making, in other words, is a particular use of language—a genre. As in any other genre, a translated title counts as a translation only if it performs its proper function—that is to say, if it works as a title in the conventions of title making that hold sway in the target language. That’s no different from saying that the most important thing about the translation of a compliment is that it fulfills the function of the kind of language behavior that we call a compliment.

  In languages and societies as close as French and English, it’s often the case that sentences having much the same shape and similar verbal content in the two languages fulfill the same genre functions as well. But not always. The task of the translator is to know when to step outside.

  In contemporary spoken French, compliqué has connotations that the English complicated does not. Its sense in some contexts may verge on “oversophisticated” and “perverse.” A more likely way of suspending a decision, of getting off a hook, of lamenting the unstraightforwardness of life, is to say: It’s not so simple. Of course, you could say that in English, too, in the right context. But could it be a film title? “Not so simple!” doesn’t work nearly as well, and that’s no doubt why the original producers of the movie didn’t use it. In French it works just fine and avoids the unwanted additional suggestions of perversity that cloud C’est compliqué. Judgments like these don’t only call for “native-speaker competence” in the translator. They rely on profound familiarity with the genre.

  What it comes down to is this: written and spoken expressions in any language don’t have a meaning just like that, on their own, in themselves. Translation represents the meaning that an utterance has, and in that sense translation is a pretty good way of finding out what the expression used in it may mean. In fact, the only way of being sure whether an utterance has any meaning at all is to get someone to translate it for you.

  EIGHT

  Words Are Even Worse

  In Russian, there are two words, and , that mean “blue,” but they do not have the same meaning. The first is used for light or pale blue hues, the second for darker, navy or ultramarine shades. So both can be translated into English, subject to the addition of words that specify the quality of blueness involved. But you can’t translate plain English blue back into Russian, because whatever you say—whichever of the two adjectives you use—you can’t avoid saying more than the English said. The conventions that hold sway among publishers and the general public do not allow translators to add something that is not in the original text. So if you accept those terms of the trade, you could quickly arrive with impeccable logic at the conclusion that translation is completely impossible.

  Observations of this kind have been used by many eminent scholars to put translation outside of the field of serious thought. Roman Jakobson, a major figure in the history of linguistic
s, pointed out that , the Russian word for “cheese,” cannot be used to refer to cottage cheese, which has another name, , in Russian. As he puts it, “the English word ‘cheese’ cannot be completely identified with its Russian heteronym.”1 As a result, there is no fully adequate Russian translation of something as apparently simple as the word cheese.

  It’s an indisputable fact about languages that the sets of words that each possesses divide up the features of the world in slightly and sometimes radically different ways. Color terms never match up completely, and it’s always a problem for a French speaker to know what an English speaker means by “brown shoes,” since the footwear in question may be marron, bordeaux, even rouge foncé. The names of fishes and birds often come in nonmatching sets of labyrinthine complexity; similarly, fixed formulae for signing-off letters come in graded levels of politeness and servility that have no possible application outside of the culture in which they exist.

  These well-known examples of the “imperfect matching,” or anisomorphism, of languages do not really support the conclusion that translation is impossible. If the translator can see the sky that’s being called blue—either the real one or a representation of it in a painting, for example—then it’s perfectly obvious which Russian color term is appropriate; similarly, if the cheese being bought at the shop is not cottage cheese, the choice of the Russian term is not an issue. If, on the other hand, what’s being translated is a sentence in a novel, then it really doesn’t matter which kind of Russian blue is used to qualify a dress that exists only in the reader’s mental image of it. If the specific shade of blue becomes relevant to some part or level of the story later on, the translator can always go back and adjust the term to fit the later development. The lack of exactly matching terms is not as big a problem for translation as many people think it is.

  Pocket dictionaries contain common, frequently used words, and their larger brethren are fattened up with words used less often. Most of those additional words are nouns with relatively precise and sometimes recondite meanings, such as polyester, recitative, or crankset. It’s trivially easy to translate words of that sort into the language of any community that has occasion to refer to synthetic fibers, Italian opera, or bicycle maintenance. Large authoritative dictionaries thus create the curious illusion that most of the words in a language are automatically translatable by slotting in the matching term from the dictionary. But there’s a huge difference between most of the headwords in a dictionary and the words that occur most often in the use of a language. In fact, just two or three thousand items account for the vast majority of word occurrences in all utterances in any language—and they aren’t words like crankset, recitative, or polyester at all.2

  If translation were a matter of slotting in matching terms, then translation would clearly be impossible for almost everything we say except for our fairly infrequent references to a very large range of specific material things. Conversely, those many people who come up with the false truism that translation is impossible certainly wish that all words were like that. A desire to believe (despite all evidence to the contrary) that words are at bottom the names of things is what makes the translator’s mission seem so impossible.

  The idea that a language is a list of names for the things that exist runs through Western thought from the Hebrews and Greeks to the man in the street by way of many distinguished minds. Leonard Bloomfield, a professor of linguistics who dominated the field in the United States for more than twenty-five years, tackled the problem of meaning in the textbook he wrote in the following way. Let us take the word salt. What does it mean? In Bloomfield’s book, the token salt is said to be the label of sodium chloride, more accurately (or at least, more scientifically) designated by the symbol NaCl. But Bloomfield was obviously aware that not many words of a language are amenable to such simple analysis. You can’t get at the meaning of words such as love or anguish in the same way. And so he concludes:

  In order to give a scientifically accurate definition of meaning for every form of a language we should have to have a scientifically accurate knowledge of everything in the speaker’s world … [and since this is lacking,] the statement of meanings is the weak point in language study.3

  Indeed it is, if you go about it that way.

  I still find it bewildering that a man of Bloomfield’s vast knowledge and intelligence should ever have thought that “NaCl” or “sodium chloride” constitute the meaning of the word salt. What they are is obvious: they are translations of salt into different registers of language. But even if we revise Bloomfieldian naïveté in this way, we are still trapped inside the idea that words (translated into whatever other register or language you like) are the names of things.

  One well-known reason so many people believe words to be the names of things is because that’s what they’ve been told by the Hebrew Bible:

  And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. (Genesis 2:19)

  This short verse has had long-lasting effects on the way language has been imagined in Western cultures. It says that language was, to begin with, and in principle still is, a list of words; and that words are the names of things (more particularly, the names of living things). Also, it says very succinctly that language is not among the things that God created but an arbitrary invention of humankind, sanctioned by divine assent.

  Nomenclaturism—the notion that words are essentially names—has thus had a long history; surreptitiously it still pervades much of the discourse about the nature of translation between languages, which have words that “name” different things or that name the same things in different ways. The problem, however, doesn’t really lie in translation but in nomenclaturism itself, for it provides a very unsatisfactory account of how a language works. A simple term such as head, for example, can’t be counted as the “name” of any particular thing. It figures in all kinds of expressions. It can be used to refer to a rocky promontory (“Beachy Head,” in Sussex), a layer of froth (“a nice head of beer”), or a particular role in a bureaucratic hierarchy (“head of department”). What connects these disparate things? How do we know which meaning head has in these different contexts? What does it mean, in fact, to say that we know the meaning of the word head? That we know all the different things that it means? Or that we know its real meaning but can also cope with it when it means something else?

  One solution proposed to the conundrum of words and meanings is to tell a story about how a word has come to mean all the things for which it serves. The story of the word head, for example, as told in many dictionaries, is that once upon a time it had a central, basic, or original reference to that part of the anatomy which sits on top of the neck. Its meaning was subsequently extended to cover other kinds of things that sit on top of something else—a head of beer and a head of department would represent extensions of that kind. But as familiar animals with four feet instead of two have their anatomical heads not at the top but at the front, head was extended in a different direction to cover things that stick out (Beachy Head; the head of a procession).

  Some such stories can be supported with historical evidence, from written texts representing an earlier state of the same language. The study of how words have in fact or must be supposed to have altered or extended their meanings is the field of historical semantics. But however elaborate the story, however subtle the storyteller, and however copious the documentary evidence, historical semantics can never tell you how any ordinary user of English just knows (a) that head is a word and (b) all of the things that head means.

  From this it follows that the word head cannot be translated as a word into any other language. But the meaning it has in any particular usage can easily be represented in another language. In French, for example, you would use cap for “Beachy Head,” mousse for “head of beer,” and chef, patron, or supérieu
r hiérarchique to say “head of department.” Translation is in fact a very handy way of solving the conundrum of words and meanings. That’s not to say that anyone can tell you what the word means in French or any other language. But what you can say by means of translation is what the word means in the context in which it occurs. That’s a very significant fact. It demonstrates a wonderful capacity of human minds. Translation is meaning.

  Linguists and philosophers have nonetheless devised Houdini-like ways of extricating themselves from the self-imposed dilemma of having to account for what words mean qua words. Head is considered a single word with a range of transferred or figurative meanings and can serve as an example of polysemy. Yet equally common words such as light are treated as a pair of homonyms—two different words having the same form in speech and writing—one of them referring to weight (as in “a light suitcase”), the other to luminosity (as in “the light of day”). The distinction between polysemy and homonymy is completely arbitrary from the point of view of language use.4 Where the spelling is different but the sound the same, as in beat and beet, linguists switch terms and give them as examples of homophony. Yet more subdivisions can be made in the tendencies of words to drift from one meaning to another. A part can stand for a whole when you have fifty head in a flock, or the whole can stand for the part, as when you refer to a sailor walking into a bar as the arrival of the fleet. Sometimes there is or is said to be a visual analogy between the central meaning of a word and one of its extensions, as when you nose your car into a parking slot, and this is called metaphor; sometimes the extension of meaning is the supposed fruit of contiguity or physical connection, as when you knock on doors in your attempt to get a job, and this is called metonymy. The machinery of “figures of meaning,” taught for centuries as part of the now-lost tradition of rhetoric, is fun to play with, but at bottom it’s eyewash. Polysemy, homonymy, homophony, metaphor, and metonymy aren’t terms that help to understand how words mean, they’re just fuzzy ways of holding down the irresistible desire of words to mean something else. It would take a very imaginative language maven indeed to explain satisfactorily why the part of a car that covers either the engine or the luggage compartment is called a “bonnet” in the U.K. and a “hood” in the United States. Despite the enthusiasm of the large throng of hobbyists who contribute to it, the semantics of words is an intellectual mess.