by David Bellos
This schoolboy prank mocks French, French grammar, the school teaching of French, and so forth. But the main thing it demonstrates is Octavio Paz’s point: “literal translation” is not impossible, but it is not a translation. You can only understand the target text if you can do a reverse substitution of the words of the source and read the French through its representation in English. In other words, to make any sense of “The Frog Jumping” you have to know French, whereas the whole purpose of translation of any kind is to make the source available to those readers of the target who do not know the source language. A translation that makes no sense without recourse to the original is not a translation. This axiom incidentally explains why the meaning of cherub will forever remain a speculation.
The term literal also hides other mysteries. It is used to refer not only to a translation style that barely exists but to say something about the way an expression is supposed to be understood.
The distinction between the literal and figurative meanings of words has been at the heart of Western education for more than two millennia. The literal meaning of an expression is supposed to be its meaning prior to any act of interpretation, its natural, given, standard, shared, neutral, plain meaning.
However, when we say, “It was literally raining cats and dogs last night,” we mean the adverb literally in a figurative sense. Studies of large corpora of recorded speech have shown that the majority of the uses of literal and literally in English are figurative; similar results would no doubt be extracted from written texts in all European languages.7 This is a curious irony, because expressions that mean one thing and its opposite were a thorn in the flesh of precisely those Greek thinkers who invented the distinction between literal and figurative in the first place. But language is like putty. The figurative use of literal is one among a thousand cases of expressions meaning this and its opposite, depending on what you use them to mean.
Literal is an adjective formed from the noun littera, meaning “letter” in Latin. A letter in this sense is a written sign that belongs to a set of signs, some subsets of which can be used to communicate meanings. Speech communicates meaning, writing communicates meaning—but letters on their own do not have any meaning. That’s what a letter is—a sign that is meaningless except when used as part of a string. The expression “literal meaning,” taken literally, is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, and a nonsense.
What we probably meant in the distant past when we asserted that something was “literally true” in order to emphasize that it was really true, true to a higher degree than just being true, was that it was among those rare things that were worthy of being “put into letters,” of being written down. All the uses of literal with respect to meaning and translation implicitly value writtenness more highly than oral speech. They are now among the surviving linguistic traces of the fantastic change in social and cultural hierarchies that the invention of writing brought about. They carry the shadow of the early stages of literacy in the Mediterranean basin between the third and first millennia B.C.E., when alphabetic scripts first arose together with the texts that through translation and retranslation have shaped and fed Western civilization ever since. This is presumably why the same words and the same terms still persist in debates about how best to translate.
Yet even in the modern era we do not always know quite what we mean when we claim that something is literally true, and even less when we call a translation a literal one.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a Franco-Egyptian mountebank with a medical degree and a talent for social climbing and free composition in French published a new version of The Arabian Nights. It was a commercial and cultural success, feeding a wave of interest in the Sexy Orient among the elite, and it impressed many writers of the day, including Marcel Proust. The translator, Joseph-Charles Mardrus, knew Arabic, and he used some Arabic texts as the basis of his rewriting of the collection of ancient Eastern tales, which he titled, in a daring Arab-ism in French, Les Mille Nuits et Une Nuit, with a subtitle as clear as can be: Traduction littérale et complète du texte arabe, “The Thousand Nights and One Night: A Complete and Literal Translation of the Arabic Text.”8
The subtitle is less a description than an assertion of status. Calling the work “complete” is obviously intended to give it a higher value than previous versions—but why should “literal” have seemed to Mardrus an effective way of enhancing the status of his work?
It wasn’t a slip: Mardrus’s preface emphasizes and magnifies the meaning of his subtitle:
Only one honest and logical method of translation exists: impersonal, barely modulated literalism … It is the greatest guarantee of truth … The reader will find here a pure, inflexible word-for-word version. The Arabic text has simply changed alphabet: here it is in French writing, that’s all …9
Mardrus was not a conventional translation theorist, and scholars of Middle Eastern languages claimed that he was not a translator, either. A professor of Arabic at the Sorbonne demonstrated that there were no textual sources for many passages and stories in Mardrus’s entertaining and readable compilation. But Mardrus was a personage on the Parisian cultural scene and would not suffer such slings and arrows without returning fire. Friends came to his defense: André Gide argued that despite the demonstrations of Professor Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Mardrus’s work was “more authentic than the original.”10 The translator’s own riposte built on Gide’s extraordinary claim. Academic critics learned Arabic in the classroom, not from living in the Middle East.
To carry out a translation of this kind properly, to give a definitive reflection of the Arabic mind and its genius … you must be born and you must have lived in the Arabic world; … to translate decently the spirit and the letter of stories of this kind, you must have heard them spoken out loud in a local accent, with ethnic gestures and appropriate intonation by storytellers in full possession of their material.11
Mardrus’s translation was therefore the “literal” version of an essentially oral source. His written word in French stands for the spoken word of Arabic culture. If academic critics insist on having a textual source for the authentic Arabian Nights, which he wrote, well, no problem: “One day, in order to please M. Demombynes, I want to settle once and for all the Arabic text of The Arabian Nights by translating my French translation into Arabic.”
What stands out from this literary squabble is that the idea of what a literal translation consists of is culturally conditioned to a high degree. Mardrus wanted to say that his work was authentic, that it gave the true voice of the Arabic culture that he rightly or wrongly regarded as his special native privilege to possess. His solution to the argument—to manufacture a source to give textual scholars the evidence they demanded—may appear quite nutty, but it is not illogical from Mardrus’s point of view.
What all other Western commentators mean by “literal translation,” on the other hand, is unrelated to authenticity, truthfulness, or plainness of expression. It really refers only to the written form of words, and even more particularly to the representation of words in an alphabetic script. When that technology for the preservation of thought was still relatively new, and for those many centuries when it was not widely shared and was used for a restricted range of needs and pursuits (law, religion, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and, occasionally, the entertainment of the elite), it made sense to attach high prestige to the writtenness of written texts.
But in a world of near-universal literacy, that’s to say, for the last two or three generations, where alphabetic script is used for entirely ordinary tasks (to label packaged food; to advertise underwear; and to write blogs, horror comics, and pulp fiction), the fact that something is worthy of being written down in letters gives it no added value at all. “Literal” isn’t “Word Magic” anymore, it’s just a hangover from the past. The terms of debate about translation and meaning need to be updated, and the long-lasting scrap between literal and free should now be laid to rest.
However, there is one important area where the transposition of meanings at the level of individual words is a valuable, inescapable tool: in school and, more particularly, in foreign-language lessons.
There are many different ways of teaching languages. The Ottomans rounded up youngsters in conquered lands and brought them back as slaves to be trained as dil olan, or “language boys,” in Istanbul. Modern direct methods are gentler but rely on the same understanding of how languages are best learned—through total immersion in a bain linguistique, a kind of baptism of the brain.
Throughout the period of learned Latin in Western Europe, immersion was not an option. There was no environment in which everybody spoke Latin as a native tongue, and so the language had to be taught by teachers, in classrooms, through writing. Reprising Roman methods in the teaching of Greek, the European language-teaching tradition was heavily skewed toward the use of translation as the means of imparting written skills in the foreign tongue, and also as a means of assessing students’ progress toward that aim. The teaching of modern European languages in schools and universities got off the ground toward the end of the nineteenth century and borrowed its methods from the translation-based traditions in the teaching of Latin and Greek. It is generally reckoned to have been a disaster. However, if the aim of learning Latin (or French, or German) is to be able to read texts in that language fluently and also perhaps to be able to compose and thus to correspond with other users of Latin or French or German (whose native languages may be quite varied), then translation and composition skills are quite appropriate educational aims.
Translation-based language teaching is no longer in fashion, but its ghost still inhabits a number of misconceptions about what translation is or should be.
Teaching a foreign language when an actual linguistic environment is not available and in the absence of technologies that allow a linguistic environment to be simulated (television, radio, film, sound recording, and the Web) was obliged to rely on writing—on slates or on chalkboards, in exercise books or in print. With only those tools available it’s not obvious how to explain that the expression y is to be understood as “I have a big house” unless you also explain that it can be broken down into “At me big house” and use this item-by-item representation of the foreign in English disguise to introduce basic grammatical features—for instance, the fact that Russian doesn’t have a definite or indefinite article; that adjectives agree in number, gender, and case with the nouns they qualify; that there is no place for the verb to be in a Russian expression of this kind; and that possession may be expressed by a preposition before a personal pronoun, which has to be put into the appropriate grammatical case. Indeed, the grammar explanation I’ve just given is almost meaningless until you have seen it in action in a written expression and been told what each written item stands for.
Some people call this “literal translation,” but it would be better to adopt a distinct term for the parallel, item-by-item explication of an expression in a foreign language for the purpose of teaching how the foreign language works. “Wording” is invaluable, and I don’t think even the most direct of direct methods can do without it at some point. In fact, language learners taught by other methods always reinvent wording for themselves when grappling with a sentence just beyond the level of competence they have reached.
“Wording” gives you a first approach to the shape and order of the language you are learning. It helps not so much to translate as to produce acceptable expressions in the foreign tongue. To translate into the foreign language, you learn first of all to put the source into foreign dress. You learn that “My father has a big car” must first be translated into “At father big car” before you can even start to slot in the Russian expressions that will add up to the sentence with the stated meaning.
Wording is neither a language nor a translation, just an uncommonly helpful intermediate stage in learning how to read and write in a foreign tongue. School translation into L2 also gives the instructor a means of checking whether students have grasped and remembered the shape and order of the language. It’s not a test of an abstract grammar point but of grammar in a context of use. That’s how I learned languages at school. Given good teachers and keen students, it works.
But often it does not. Worse still, it often leaves ex–school students who failed the test pieces with a horror of doing translations, and sometimes a lingering resentment of those who can.
Since the expansion of education in the nineteenth century down to the present day, facing-page printed translations of standard works in foreign languages have helped countless students improve their grasp of grammar and vocabulary and allowed them also to read foreign works at greater speed and thus to understand them more completely. Some facing-page translation series, particularly of Latin and Greek, use techniques very close to wording and are often called “cribs.” Others aim at a more fluent target text, but the constraint of fitting paragraph to paragraph, if not quite line to line, limits the reorganization of material and rephrasing normally found in a literary translation. Penguin Parallel Texts, in the U.K., and the series currently published by Folio in France are of great use to foreign-language learners of Italian, Spanish, Russian, and so forth, and also to people like me who were taught a language long ago and are glad to have some help when revisiting the key texts of youth.
Wording translation and facing-page translation (which almost always uses matching sentence length) are not “bad” ways to translate. They are language operations with specific finali-ties, serving communicative and educational purposes proper to them and to nothing else. Translation is not just one thing; how best to do it depends on what you are doing it for.
However, wording is not what people mean when they call something a literal translation. The so-called literal translation of is not “At me big house” but “I have a big house.” That’s to say, all that is actually meant by calling something a literal translation is a version that preserves meaning in grammatical forms appropriate to the language of the translation. Octavio Paz was right to say that there is no such thing as a literal translation! It’s just a translation—a plain, ordinary, actual translation of the source. The left-side player in the long and frustrating game of squash between “literal” and “free” doesn’t really exist. It’s just the shadow of another, more ancient world. But shadows can be quite frightening even when you know they don’t exist.
ELEVEN
The Issue of Trust: The Long Shadow of Oral Translation
There used to be many good reasons to mistrust translators. War, diplomacy, trade, and exploration are activities where trust is both crucial and difficult to grant—and also the key fields in which translators work. If you don’t know the language of your enemy or your partner, you depend entirely on the people who do—and there’s nothing like dependency to foster resentment and fear.
The user’s mistrust is a big issue in all kinds of translation, but its role ought to be rather different in the two main branches of language work: oral translation and the translation of written texts. Oral mediation—the translation of live speech, straightaway and in situ—has been around for much longer than writing. In all likelihood it’s been a human language skill since the emergence of speech itself, tens if not hundreds of thousands of years ago. For up to 90 percent of its history, translating, alongside language itself, has been an exclusively spoken affair. The inheritance of oral translating affects how we think about translation even now.
Writing transformed and multiplied the uses of language and naturally affected the ways in which it is possible to think and talk about it. We are now so thoroughly accustomed to the existence and use of script that it’s hard to imagine what life is like for someone who does not know how to read or write. It’s harder still to imagine living and speaking in a society in which nobody has an inkling that anything like writing could exist. But those are the circumstances in which translation first emerged, and where it stayed for tens of thousands of yea
rs. Indeed, the archaeological evidence that we have of the origins of script suggests that alphabetic writing emerged in multilingual cities and empires in the Middle East, where translation was already of paramount importance.1
The fundamental difference between oral cultures and those that have writing is that only in the latter can an utterance be brought to life a second time. In “primary orality,” language is nothing other than speech, and speech vanishes without a trace the moment it is done.2 Translation likewise. You can check, evaluate, test, or trust a translation only when you have a means of returning to it later on.
This would be of purely antiquarian interest if everything had changed overnight upon the invention of script. But that was obviously not the case. The mental transformation that writing prompted did not happen all at once; in some respects, it did not begin to affect the vast mass of humanity until a few generations ago.3 Residues of the older oral order persisted for millennia, and persist even now. They affect our feelings and fears about translation quite directly.
A clue to the enduring presence of orality in our now thoroughly typographical world is the way we still use the word word. It does not always mean the hazy and problematic items you find printed as headwords in dictionaries. In fact, in much of our everyday use of language it means something else.
When I “give you my word” that I’ll do the washing-up tonight, I am not giving you a “word” in the dictionary sense. I am making a promise, and grounding your trust in the promise thus made in the fact that the person speaking the promise is me.