Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

by David Bellos

  French continues to play a significant role as a conduit for global translation from less widely spoken languages. France’s proud tradition of openness to other cultures is one of the reasons why this is so. In the twentieth century, many of its leading writers—Romain Gary, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Andreï Makine, and Jorge Semprún, for example—were immigrants who had chosen to write in French. However, a more important reason for the continuing role of French in the circulation of cultural goods is not one that the defenders of French culture really like very much. French has long been the most widely taught foreign language in the English-speaking world, which makes it the main interlanguage for English and American publishers and literary scouts.

  German also remains a crossroads for literature from little-studied languages. Jaan Kross, the Estonian author of The Czar’s Madman, Professor Marten’s Departure, and many other wonderful novels, was first translated into German, and that was what brought him to the attention of international literary scouts. The role of German as medium for exophonic writers has actually been growing strongly in recent years. Alongside several Japanese, Bulgarian, and Turkish novelists who have chosen to write in German, a Mongolian shaman called Galsan Tschinag is translated from his German translations into many other European tongues.5

  In the Middle Ages, Arabic was the pivot language that allowed Greek philosophy to be translated into European tongues—in some cases, written in Hebrew script. In the period from 1880 to 1930, Japanese was the relay language for translations of Russian literature into Chinese.6 Even in the last fifty years, a handful of international literary careers have emerged from translation into languages outside the top three. They include the works of Bernardo Atxaga, first written in Basque, which reached a wider readership initially through their translation into Spanish, and from Spanish into French; and the Chuvash poetry of Gennady Aigui, translated independently into English and French from its Russian translation. But the use of pivot languages can be a risky affair. The Belarusan novelist Vasil Byka, for example, was translated into Russian, which provided first entry to the world concert of books. However, Soviet translators did not dare reproduce his meaning too closely. In Alpijskaja Balada (Alpine Ballad; 1963), the hero tries to explain to a naïve foreigner about his country, saying, “It will get better someday. Things cannot go on being lousy forever.” In Russian translation, the sentence reads: “The collective farm is good.” After such distortions, Byka started to translate his own works into Russian soon after they had been published and also Russianized his name to Vasil Bykov. This allowed the Soviet authorities to present him as a Russian novelist, concealing the fact that his works were originally written in another (related) tongue. In Bykov’s case, translation UP simply absorbed a writer in a “minor” language into the regionally dominant one.7

  However, even in places not afflicted by political appropriation of that kind, the drift away from small languages toward a dominant tongue has been felt again and again. In the late nineteenth century, an editorialist for the Japanese daily newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun opined that his country had much to give to the world beyond Mount Fuji and Lake Biwa—it had magnificent literary works such as Genji Monogatari or Bakin’s Nans Satomi Hakkenden. But the distance between Japanese and the European languages was too great to make translation feasible, in his view:

  However great our future writers may be, their fame will never succeed in crossing beyond our borders … And so I would like to suggest to the public spirited men of the world that they engage themselves in the writing of English … In this day and age, it is self-evident that a man with great ambitions should study English writing. Study it, and strive, by using the language, to make his glory shine abroad. There is nothing great about a fame solely garnered in the context of this pathetic string of islands.8

  Typical in this respect of a culture that feels peripheral to the conversation of the world, the Japanese journalist jumped to a conclusion that many have followed in the last hundred years. Maryse Condé, the distinguished French writer from Guadeloupe, has admitted that were she fifty years younger she would probably have chosen English instead of French as her language of expression. Edwidge Danticat, a French-speaking writer from Haiti who is fifty years younger, has done just that.

  If you do write in a minor language—and all languages, even French, are minor ones now—getting translated into English is the summit of your ambition. If you write in Italian, you’re quite likely to get translated into Spanish, and if you write in Finnish, you’re almost certain to get translated into Swedish for the significant minority of Finnish citizens for whom Swedish is L1. But getting translated into Spanish or Swedish is unlikely to get your work out into the wider world. Whatever language you write in, the translation that counts is the English one.

  English speakers are obviously not directly responsible for the use of English as a pivot, because the only folk for whom English is never a pivot language are the speakers of English themselves. Like all interlanguages of the past, English is made into a pivot by speakers of other tongues. China’s Confucius Institute, for instance, has commissioned an international team of scholars to make the philosophical and literary treasures of classical Chinese accessible to the rest of the planet. The Wu Jing Project aims to translate the Five Classics (a conventional term referring to a large number of separate texts, about twenty-five hundred pages in all) into “the major languages of the world.” However, these difficult works will not be translated into French, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Malay from the original Chinese. The dissemination of The Five Classics into the eight languages selected will be done “on the basis of the English translation,” which will be treated, once it has been done, as the reference text.9

  The position of English-language translators of literary texts from languages that have not been widely taught in the rest of the world is therefore unique. They control their source texts’ access not just to their target audience, but through the international trade in books and sometimes through double translation as well, they may open or shut the door to the rest of the world.

  The solar structure of the global book world wasn’t designed by anyone. With its all-powerful English sun, major planets called French and German, outer elliptical rings where Russian occasionally crosses the path of Spanish and Italian, and its myriad distant satellites no weightier than stardust, the system is all the more remarkable for being in stark contradiction to the weblike network of cross-cultural relations that most people would like to see. But the orbital image of translation flows is only a metaphor. The structure of global translation is not a natural phenomenon but a cultural one. If enough people really want it to change—it will.

  TWENTY

  A Question of Human Rights: Translation and the Spread of International Law

  Translation studies as currently practiced in the academy concentrates heavily on the circulation of books, especially books of literary merit. But despite the six-figure numbers bandied about in our survey of global translation, literary works make up only a small part of translation in the world today.

  Legal texts are translated in vaster quantities than books and in more varied directions. Dreary as it may seem to all but legal eagles, the translation of law is a prerequisite for the construction and maintenance of a global society. Without it, business and diplomacy would come to a stop. But there’s something quite important to learn from it. Law is the very model of an untranslatable text, because the language of law is self-enclosed and refers to nothing outside of itself. In practice, however, laws do get translated, because they must.

  In France you can say impossible n’est pas français when you want to assert that something hard can nonetheless be done. “Impossible” doesn’t exist in other languages, either, when it comes to translation. Translation is a voluntary act.

  Layfolk the world over know why the law is untranslatable. It’s written in a language of its own that is almost impossible to understan
d, and what can’t be understood can’t be translated. We pay our lawyers good money just to reassure us that they understand the small print on the contract we’re about to sign without reading it through to the end.

  The words of law often look like words of the language you speak, but when they are legal terms, they are not. They don’t refer to anything outside of the social institution and intellectual system that the law constructs. You may have a pretty good idea what murder means when you use it in an English sentence, but what looks like murder to you may be first degree, second degree, manslaughter, homicide, or even collateral damage in a legal description of the event. The offense committed is determined by the legal system in force in the place where the killing occurred, and within that system it is determined only by the definitions of the offenses that the system distinguishes—by the words of the law as it has come to be written down.

  In the first years of the twentieth century, a professor of linguistics at the University of Geneva gave a course of lectures about the nature of human languages. Ferdinand de Saussure never wrote the lectures down, but after his early death in 1913 students put their notes together and produced a Course in General Linguistics, which has served as a breviary for much of the thinking about language that has gone on since then. Whether or not Saussure’s teaching should be regarded as the last word on what language is overall, it’s an excellent tool for getting at the reasons why the language of law is such a tricky thing to translate.1

  Saussure was already very learned in the history of languages, but in his lectures on general linguistics he sought to explain what a language is as a whole and systematic entity at any given point in time. His account was grounded in what was then a revolutionary new definition of the linguistic sign. A sign possesses both a material existence as a string of sounds or written marks, which he called the “signifier” (in French, signifiant); but it necessarily also has a power to mean—a “significandum,” or sig-nifié. The sign is neither a signifier nor a significandum, but their combination, in a pairing so tight that the one can no more be separated from the other than the two sides of a single sheet. However, unlike a piece of paper, the two sides of the sign are attached to each other for no necessary reason—they just are attached that way. A sign in Saussure’s teaching has five special qualities. It has to be inherited, because the signs of a language can never be invented on the spot. It has to be shared, because signs mean what we agree they should mean, not just what some individual thinks they mean. It has to be unchangeable, because nobody can turn table into cable just for fun and still be using the same sign. It has to be free to be combined with other signs in an act of speech or writing. Finally, the inner relationship between signifier and signified that makes the two together coalesce as a sign has to be arbitrary: you can’t explain why the letters T-A-B-L-E as distinct from any others can be used to refer to a “table” except by saying they just do.

  What, then, allows us to know that this sign is not that sign? That table and cable represent two different signs? Because they differ in respect of something that is a structural part not of “language” in any abstract sense but of the language called English. That is to say, the difference between the sounds represented by t and c is a basic element of the structure of the English language—and the entire structure that is the English language consists exclusively of sets of differences or oppositions of this fundamental kind. A language is then nothing other than a system of differences, because a sign in any language is exhaustively defined by all the things that it is not. What makes English not French or Chinese, for example, is the specific set of differences on which it is built. Rising and falling tones, for example, exist in any act of speech, but they are not parts of English. On the other hand, tones are signs in Chinese. Similarly, the difference between the sounds usually written as l and r is part of English but not of Japanese. To map the differences that are made use of in a language is to map the structure of the language itself.

  Saussure’s approach to language makes each actual language sui generis, “of its own kind,” that is to say, an internally coherent system that can never be satisfactorily mapped onto any other. The automatic consequence is that no sign in any one language is fully identifiable with any sign in any other equally unique system of signs. Throughout the twentieth century, the Saussurean doctrine of the sign provided a reason for disregarding translation and ignoring the resources it gives for understanding how languages are used.

  Saussure certainly didn’t have law in mind when he pursued this rich train of thought, but his doctrine of the sign is directly applicable to it. Law is a systematic use of language that relies for its coherence on the precise distinctions it makes between its own constituent terms. In any given legal language, “murder” is what the book of statutes and the records of cases judged have said it is—not what the ordinary language sign murder might be taken to mean among layfolk. Law is a system of signs.

  Legal systems have different histories, different norms, different distinctions and ways of doing things. Even when the languages of different legal systems look the same—as in English and Scottish law, for example—the terms they use are not interchangeable. Each one is truly sui generis, constituted exclusively by the particular distinctions it makes. That’s the reason you can’t translate legal language—except that you must.

  Defendants in many parts of the world are entitled to understand their own trial, and courts are obliged to find translators and interpreters for whatever languages are involved. They often have to scour far and wide. A request for an English–Hungarian interpreter for a murder trial in rural Scotland landed on my doorstep thirty years ago. The brave person who took on this awesome responsibility in the end had never seen a courtroom before and was barely more aware of the meaning of what was going on than the defendant herself. In the state of New Jersey today, the courts service employs many hundreds of mostly parttime interpreters, predominantly in Spanish, at low rates of pay and with little supervision. In New York City, where no fewer than 140 languages are represented, finding language intermediaries for court cases is a huge administrative task. In South Africa, too, where eleven languages now have official status, court interpreting is often a lamentable mess.2 The language rights of linguistic minorities are important achievements, but their implementation often leaves a lot to be desired.

  Court interpreting of this kind is internal to a single system of law: where the minority language does not have a strictly equivalent term—for prosecutor, attorney, or QC, for example—the source-language term is mostly used, as it is indeed the proper term for the individual or instance that matters at that point. But the interpreter may also have to add explanations or rephrase what is said in altogether different terms in order to make sure that what are understood are not just the words but the force and real-world consequences of the expression used. It is an extremely difficult and responsible job. It is rarely recognized as such.

  Legal translation between the official languages of countries that have more than one—Canada, Belgium, or Finland, for example—is not exactly easy, but it is usually better rewarded and less stressful, partly because the translators often have legal training themselves. The issue of the incommensurability of legal systems does not really affect this kind of work, since it is the same language of law that is being expressed in both tongues. All the same, it is crucial that the two versions be construed in exactly the same way. Given the natural anisomorphism of languages, that is often very difficult to achieve. Law translation in such circumstances tends toward a homogenization of tongues—creating similar-sounding formal equivalents in the two versions of the law—to reduce the risk of a clever lawyer exploiting an apparent verbal discrepancy between two versions of the same text.

  The trend toward making legal languages look the same when put into a different tongue seems to be driven on the one hand by a rather naïve idea of how languages work and on the other by an overriding concern that laws be seen as the s
ame by all who fall under their sway. An illustration of the seemingly irresistible drift toward homogenized transnational legalese is provided by the history of the words used to express the broadest and least national juridical principle of all—the notion of fundamental human rights.

  In 1789, the new revolutionary regime in France drew up its famous declaration of the rights of man and called it the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. Its purpose was to sweep away the religious and feudal underpinnings of the legal system inherited from the monarchy and to establish, under the authority of a Supreme Being who could not be called God lest that be seen as a sop to the Catholic Church, the basic rights of the citizen in his relationship to the new French state.

  There was no question of these rights being accorded to any who were not fully emancipated citizens. As no one had yet thought of enfranchising women, the use of a masculine term, homme, was not just a convenience of language—it was what the declaration meant to say. It established and made explicit the rights of male subjects who were also citizens.

  Unlike French or English, German has a noun for “human being” that covers men and women without distinction—ein Mensch is just any member of the human race. The other word for “man,” Mann, refers exclusively to a male, and in many contexts it also means “husband” or “married man.” That’s why Männerrechte can’t serve as a translation of droits de l’homme—it could too easily be taken to cover conjugal and domestic affairs, which “human rights” obviously do not. So French droits de l’homme was quite naturally represented by Menschenrechte in German translation. In fact, the declaration needed translating into German within a few years of its drafting, because large parts of what is now Germany were conquered by France and incorporated into the republic and then the empire, where they stayed until 1814.