Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

by David Bellos

  Ibid.

  Bambi B. Schieffelin, “Found in Translating: Reflexive Language Across Time and Texts in Bosavi,” in Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies, eds. Miki Makihara and Bambi B. Schieffelin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 141–65.

  From Andrew Chesterman, Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997), 61.

  From The Book of Rites, after 206 B.C.E., as quoted by Martha Cheung in Target 17, 1 (2005): 29.

  Taken respectively from the first Chinese dictionary, second century C.E.; Kong Yingda, seventh century C.E.; Jia Gongyan, also seventh century; and a Buddhist monk, Zan Ning, as quoted (and translated) by Martha Cheung in ibid., 33, 34.

  For the time being, I am using translation to refer to interlingual communication of all kinds, spoken and written. Interpreting, which deals exclusively with speech, is the subject of chapter 24.

  “A small man’s son is astounded by the food market,” from Luis d’Antin van Rooten, Mots d’heures: Gousses, Rames (New York: Grossman, 1967).

  4. THINGS PEOPLE SAY ABOUT TRANSLATION

  See Leo Spitzer, Essays on Seventeenth- Century French Literature, trans. and ed. David Bellos (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 253–84, for the whole story.

  Quoted in Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1984), 78.

  Lev Loseff, “The Persistent Life of James Clifford: The Return of a Mystification,” Zvezda (January 2001), in Russian.

  5. FICTIONS OF THE FOREIGN

  Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995), 20 and passim.

  Jean Rond d’Alembert, “Observations sur l’art de traduire,” in Mélanges de littérature . . . (Amsterdam: Chatelain, 1763), 3:18. My translation.

  M. C**** de L***, Dangerous connections: or, letters collected in a society, and published for the instruction of other societies (London, 1784).

  Fred Vargas, Have Mercy on Us All, trans. David Bellos (London: Harvill, 2003).

  Directed by David Ka-Shing for the Yellow Earth Theatre and Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, performed in Stratford-upon-Avon, London, and Shanghai in 2006.

  Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Über-setzens,” a paper read in 1813 to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin, in a new translation by Susan Bernofsky, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004). An earlier and more widely available translation by Waltraud Bartscht omits several passages.

  From chapter 2 of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

  Mariagrazia Margarito, “Une valise pour bien voyager … avec les ital-ianismes du français,” Synergies 4 (2008): 63–73.

  Antoine Volodine, “Écrire en français une littérature étrangère,” chaoïd 6 (2002).

  David Remnick, “The Translation Wars,” The New Yorker, November 7, 2005.

  Ibid. See also Gary Saul Morton, “The Pevearsion of Russian Literature,” Commentary (July–August 2010), which takes a much harsher line.

  Mariusz Wilk, The Journals of a White Sea Wolf, trans. Daniusa Stok (London: Harvill, 2003), uses the device to great effect.

  6. NATIVE COMMAND

  In some countries the children of immigrant parents are not even granted a nationality. Statelessness can be seen as the “zero condition” of what is acquired by the fact of being born—and also an infringement of international conventions on fundamental rights.

  G. T. Chernov, Osnovy sinkhronnogo perevoda (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1987), 5–8.

  Lynn Visson, Sinkhronni perevod s russkogo na angliiskii (Moscow, 2007), 15–16; summary version in English in Lynn Visson, “Teaching Simultaneous Interpretation into a Foreign Language,” Mosty 2, 22 (2009): 57–59.

  7. MEANING IS NO SIMPLE THING

  From LINGUIST List 2.457, September 3, 1991, available at http://linguistlist.org/issues/2/2-457.html.

  8. WORDS ARE EVEN WORSE

  Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in On Translation, ed. Reuben Brower (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 232.

  This is just a simple explanation of Zipf’s law, which says that the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word and three times as often as the third most frequent word. As a result, just 135 different words account for half of all the word occurrences in an English-language corpus of about one million words.

  Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1933), 140.

  It may not be arbitrary at all from a historical point of view: the two words light come from quite different origins, whereas all the meanings of head come from a single source.

  Additional subrules apply to alphabetic sequences that include the symbols - and * (as in “back-up” and the proprietary name “E*Trade”); in some languages there are additional typographical marks such as ¿ or ¡, but these and other features found in languages with alphabetical or syllabic scripts don’t alter the structure of the rules or the basic idea of what a word is—for a computer.

  Hayley G. Davis, Words: An Integrational Approach (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2001), has many hilarious examples of English speakers’ utter confusion about what a word is.

  Anna Morpurgo Davies, “Folk-Linguistics and the Greek Word,” in Fest-schrift for Henry Hoenigswald, eds. George Cardon and Norman Zide (Tübingen: Narr, 1987), 263–80.

  9. UNDERSTANDING DICTIONARIES

  Jonathon Green, Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), 40–41.

  Jan Assmann, “Translating Gods: Religion as a Factor of Cultural (Un) Translatability,” in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, eds. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 25–36.

  Information from Christoph Harbsmeier, Language and Logic in Traditional China, forming volume VII.1 of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 65–84; and Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual (Harvard University Press, 1998), 62–94.

  Philitas of Cos, Átaktoi glôssai, or “Disorderly Words,” explains the meanings of rare Homeric and other literary words; the oldest surviving full Homeric lexicon is by Apollonius the Sophist, from the first century C.E. The first Sanskrit word list, Amarakoa, was written by Amara Sinha in the fourth century C.E.

  Georges Perec, Life A User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David R. Godine, 2009), 327.

  10. THE MYTH OF LITERAL TRANSLATION

  According to Naomi Seidman, “One would be hard put to name a major defence of word-for-word translation before the modern period.” Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 75.

  George Steiner, After Babel, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 251.

  Nicolas Herberay des Essarts, translator’s preface to Amadis de Gaule (1540), ed. Michel Bideaux (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006), 168. My translation.

  Octavio Paz, Un poema di John Donne: Traducción literaria y literali-dad (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1990), 13.

  Quoted by one of Kelly’s former colleagues at Ottawa University on Unprofessional Translation (blog).

  Mark Twain, The Jumping Frog, in English, then in French, then clawed back into a civilized language once more by patient, unremunerated toil (New York: Harper & Bros., 1903), 39–40.

  Michael Israel, “The Rhetoric of ‘Literal Meaning,’” in The Literal and Non-Literal in Language and Thought, eds. Sean Coulson and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 147�
��238.

  See Dominique Jullien, Les Amoureux de Schéhérézade: Variations sur les Mille et Une Nuits (Geneva: Droz, 2009), for a discussion of the cultural issues surrounding Mardrus’s translation.

  Quoted in ibid., 107. My translation.

  André Gide, in La Revue blanche, XXI:475 (January 1900), quoted in Jullien, Amoureux de Schéhérézade, 110.

  J.-C. Mardrus, letter to the editor in Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature XLI.26:515 (June 1900), quoted in Jullien, Amoureux de Schéhérézade, 85.

  11. THE ISSUE OF TRUST

  Roy Harris, The Origin of Writing (London: Duckworth, 1986), 177. Writing has been invented four times: by the Maya, in pre-Columbian America; in China; in ancient Egypt; and in Mesopotamia. All modern writing systems derive from just two of these inventions, and all alphabetic scripts from just one.

  The term primary orality was coined by Walter J. Ong. See his Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982).

  Universal literacy was first achieved in most Western European countries at some point between 1860 and 1920. In other parts of the world it is even more recent than that; and in many of them it remains a long way off.

  Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Penguin Books, 1957), 1153.

  In practice, when relations are cordial, the ancient protocol is often abandoned, and the two translators take it in turn to translate both ways in twenty-minute shifts, just as they would when working in more public encounters. But for discussions on major topics between heads of state and of government, there can be no question of having only one translator present.

  Ismail Kadare’s Palace of Dreams (New York: William Morrow, 1993) is an ironic fiction about Ottoman dream records with some basis in historical fact.

  See E. Natalie Rothman, “Interpreting Dragomans: Boundaries and Crossings in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51:4 (2009): 771–800, for far more detail than is possible here.

  Ziggurat (a pyramidal temple) is generally reckoned to be the only other word of Akkadian in English, but it came into the language only in the nineteenth century.

  The Three-Arched Bridge (New York: Arcade, 1997) and “The Blinding Order” (published in Agamemnon’s Daughter, New York: Arcade, 2006) complement The Palace of Dreams in this respect.

  French started to be used in this role in the seventeenth century, and in the nineteenth it displaced Italian entirely.

  The example is from Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 29.

  Ibid., 27.

  George Abbott, Under the Turk in Constantinople (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 46, quoted in Judy Laffan, “Navigating Empires: ‘British’ Dragomans and Changing Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Levant,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Queensland, Australia.

  Ibid.

  Preface to Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache, trans. Douglas Hofstadter (New York: Basic Books, 2009).

  See Allan Cunningham, “Dragomania: The Dragomans of the British Embassy in Turkey,” Middle Eastern Affairs 2 (1961): 81–100.

  12. CUSTOM CUTS

  Stephen Owen, “World Poetry,” a review of Bei Dao’s The August Sleepwalker, trans. Bonnie McDougall, New Republic, November 1990.

  For a list of foreign film stars and their established German voices, see the Deutsche Synchronsprecher website, www.deutsche-synchronsprecher.de.

  Le Monde, August 7, 2010: 14.

  Vladimir Nabokov, “Introduction,” in Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin (New York: Routledge, 1964), I:vii–ix.

  Vladimir Nabokov, “The Servile Path,” in On Translation, ed. Reuben Brewer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 97–110.

  Georges Perec, letter to Denise Getzler (circa 1963), Littératures (Toulouse) 6 (spring 1983): 63.

  13. WHAT CAN’T BE SAID CAN’T BE TRANSLATED

  See www.packingtownreview.com/blog, post dated December 2, 2007.

  Thom Satterlee, “Robert Frost’s Views on Translation,” Delos (1996): 46–52; Satterlee finds a kind of source in an essay by Ezra Pound, “How I Began” (1913), but which claims the opposite: “I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry was ‘indestructible,’ what part could not be lost in translation.”

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921), Proposition 74: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, davon muß man schweigen.

  English-language philosophers since Willard Van Orman Quine have treated this issue at length. My position reflects that of Donald Davidson as I understand it from the commentary provided by J. E. Malpas in “The Intertranslatability of Natural Languages,” Synthese 78 (1989), 233–64.

  Romain Gary, White Dog (1970; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5.

  Marshall Sahlins, The Western Illusion of Human Nature (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2008), takes this argument much further. Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (New York: Penguin, 2007), gives an up-to-date report on current research that is fast undermining the distinction between “language” and “signal” and between human and nonhuman communication.

  Mark E. Laidre and Jessica L. Yorzinski, “The Silent Bared-Teeth Face and the Crest-Raise of the Mandrill (Mandrillus sphinx): A Contextual Analysis of Signal Function,” Ethology 111 (2005): 143–57. A standard introduction to the field of animal sign systems is Thomas A. Sebeok, How Animals Communicate (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977).

  14. HOW MANY WORDS DO WE HAVE FOR COFFEE?

  Laura Martin, “‘Eskimo Words for Snow’: A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example,” American Anthropologist 88:2 (1986): 418–23, explained and defended by Geoffrey Pullum in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 159–73.

  Inuit languages are agglutinative and typically express what would be complex expressions in English by suffixes and prefixes added to the stem word. As a result, Inuits have uncountably many “words” for everything. Each word form contains indicators of qualities and roles that in English would be expressed by many separate words. It’s as pointless to say that some Inuit language has twenty or sixty or eighty words for “snow” as to say that Hungarian has seventeen words for “Anna.”

  Published in The Works of Sir William Jones (London: Robinson and Evans, 1799).

  Wilhelm Freiherr von Humboldt, Prüfung der Untersuchungen über die Urbewohner Hispaniens vermittelst der vaskischen Sprache (Berlin: Dümmler, 1821).

  Wilhelm Freiherr von Humboldt, Über die Entstehung der gramma-tischen Formen und ihren Einfluss auf die Ideenentwicklung (Berlin: König. Akad. der Wissenschaften, 1823).

  See Lera Boroditsky’s report on this language at www.edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html.

  Edward Sapir, “Abnormal Types of Speech in Nootka” (1915), in Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality, ed. David G. Mandel-baum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 179–96.

  Hilary Henson, British Social Anthropologists and Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 11.

  Mildred L. Larson, Meaning-Based Translation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 158.

  E. J. Payne, History of the New World Called America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), II:103, quoted in Henson, British Social Anthropologists, 10.

  See Michael Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999).

  15. BIBLES AND BANANAS

  Figures from Philip Noss, ed., A History of Bible Translation (Rome: Edizioni di Storia et letteratura, 2007), 24.

  Jan de Waard and Eugene A. Nida, From One Language to Another: Functional Equivalence in Bible Translating (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 1986).

  Edesio Sánchez-Cetina, “Word of God, Word of the People,” in Noss, History, 395.

  Daud
Soeslo, “Bible Translation in Asia–Pacific and the Americas,” in Noss, History, 165–66, 175.

  Eugene Nida, Fascinated by Languages (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003).

  Richard Rohrbaugh, The New Testament in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2007), quoted in The Social Sciences and Biblical Translation, ed. Dietmar Neufeld (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), ix.

  Neufeld, Social Sciences, 3.

  Leora Batnitsky, “Translation as Transcendence: A Glimpse into the Workshop of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible Translation,” New German Critique 70 (1997): 87–116.

  Gott sprach zu Mosche / Ich werde dasein, als der ich dasein werde. / Und sprach: / So sollst du zu den Söhnen Jifsraels sprechen: / ICH BIN DA schickt mich zu euch / Und weiter sprach Gott zu Mosche: / So sollst du den Söhnen Jifsraels sprechen: / ER, / der Gott eurer Väter / der Gott Abrahams, der Gott / Jitzchaks, der Gott Jakobs / schickt mich zu euch. / Das ist mein Name in Weltzeit / das mein Gendenken, Geschlecht für / Geschlecht.

  16. TRANSLATION IMPACTS

  Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Über-setzens,” trans. Susan Bernofsky, in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2004).

  Martha Gellerstam, “Fingerprints in Translation,” in In and Out of English: For Better, for Worse, ed. Gunilla Anderman (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2005), from whom the following material is taken.

  Preston M. Torbert, “Globalizing Legal Drafting: What the Chinese Can Teach Us About Ejusdem Generis and All That,” The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing (2007): 41–50.

  All the information in the following paragraphs is borrowed and summarized from Bambi Schieffelin, “Found in Translating: Reflexive Language Across Time and Texts in Bosavi,” in Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies, ed. Miki Makihara and Bambi B. Schieffelin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 141–65.