Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

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Authors: David Bellos

BOOK: Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
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In memory of my teachers
Table of Contents
 
Title Page
Prologue
ONE
-
What Is a Translation?
TWO
-
Is Translation Avoidable?
THREE
-
Why Do We Call It “Translation”?
FOUR
-
Things People Say About Translation
FIVE
-
Fictions of the Foreign: The Paradox of “Foreign-Soundingness”
SIX
-
Native Command: Is Your Language Really Yours?
SEVEN
-
Meaning Is No Simple Thing
EIGHT
-
Words Are Even Worse
NINE
-
Understanding Dictionaries
TEN
-
The Myth of Literal Translation
ELEVEN
-
The Issue of Trust: The Long Shadow of Oral Translation
TWELVE
-
Custom Cuts: Making Forms Fit
THIRTEEN
-
What Can’t Be Said Can’t Be Translated: The Axiom of Effability
FOURTEEN
-
How Many Words Do We Have for Coffee?
FIFTEEN
-
Bibles and Bananas: The Vertical Axis of Translation Relations
SIXTEEN
-
Translation Impacts
SEVENTEEN
-
The Third Code: Translation as a Dialect
EIGHTEEN
-
No Language Is an Island: The Awkward Issue of L3
NINETEEN
-
Global Flows: Center and Periphery in the Translation of Books
TWENTY
-
A Question of Human Rights: Translation and the Spread of International Law
TWENTY-ONE
- Ceci n’est pas une traduction
: Language Parity in the European Union
TWENTY-TWO
-
Translating News
TWENTY-THREE
-
The Adventure of Automated Language-Translation Machines
TWENTY-FOUR
-
A Fish in Your Ear: The Short History of Simultaneous Interpreting
TWENTY-FIVE
-
Match Me If You Can: Translating Humor
TWENTY-SIX
-
Style and Translation
TWENTY-SEVEN
-
Translating Literary Texts
TWENTY-EIGHT
-
What Translators Do
TWENTY-NINE
-
Beating the Bounds: What Translation Is Not
THIRTY
-
Under Fire: Sniping at Translation
THIRTY-ONE
-
Sameness, Likeness, and Match: Truths About Translation
THIRTY-TWO
- Avatar
: A Parable of Translation
Afterbabble: In Lieu of an Epilogue
ALSO BY DAVID BELLOS
Notes
Caveats and Thanks
Index
Permissions
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
 
When I was an undergraduate, a story went around among students in my college that a fellow called Harris had refused to teach translation classes on the grounds that he did not know what “translation” was.
He’d challenged the faculty board to tell him what it was he was being asked to teach. Everyone knows what it is! they said. Translation has been taught here for centuries. But knowing how to perpetuate an academic tradition is not the same thing as knowing what you’re doing. Harris could not possibly teach a subject his seniors were unable to define.
We thought it a great giggle: a junior don had used a philosophical conundrum to get out of a chore and tied the fuddy-duddies into knots.
Despite the tantalizing puzzle set by Roy Harris at the start of my adult life, I have dared to teach translation for several decades since then. I have also translated many books and become the director of a program in translation and intercultural communication. So it’s about time I tried to answer his question.
However, answers are best found when the question itself is well put. “What is … ?” doesn’t normally provide a good prompt. It usually leads you headlong into hairsplitting disputes about the meanings of words.
The meaning of the word
translation
is not without interest, of course, and I’ve devoted one chapter of this book to the issue. But it isn’t as important as many other questions that arise just the same, whatever word we use.
Here are some of those other questions: What can we learn from translation? What does it teach us?
Many others then spring to mind: What do we actually know about translation? What is it about translation that we still need to find out?
We also have to ask: What do people mean when they offer opinions and precepts about the best way to translate? Are all translations the same kind of thing, or are there different operations involved in different kinds of translating? Is translating fundamentally different from writing and speaking, or is it just another aspect of the unsolved mystery of how we come to know what someone else means?
This isn’t a book that tells you how to translate, or how I translate. There are plenty of good books of those kinds; there’s no need to add a lesser one to the pile.
Instead, it is made of stories and examples and arguments that circle around what seems to me to be the real issue—understanding what translation
does
.
I’ve tried to paint a big picture by exploring the role of translation in cultural, social, and human issues of many kinds. To do so, I’ve used scholarly books and articles and exploited many erudite friends, but in many places I’ve also drawn on personal experience.
As I grew up in England and live in the United States, the point of view of this book is located unambiguously in the English-speaking world.
Because English is currently the dominant interlanguage of the world, English speakers who aren’t involved in translation have a harder time than most others in understanding what translation is. That’s my main reason for writing about it.
Finding out what translation has done in the past and does today, finding out what people have said about it and why, finding out whether it is one thing or many—these inquiries take us far and wide, to Sumer, Brussels, and Beijing, to comic books and literary classics, and into the fringes of disciplines as varied as anthropology, linguistics, and computer science. What translation does raises so many answerable questions that we can leave the business of what it is to the side for quite some time.
 
What Is a Translation?
 
Douglas Hofstadter took a great liking to this short poem by the sixteenth-century French wit Clément Marot:
Ma mignonne,
Je vous donne
Le bon jour;
Le séjour
C’est prison.
Guérison
Recouvrez,
Puis ouvrez
Votre porte
Et qu’on sorte
Vitement,
Car Clément
Le vous mande.
Va, friande
De ta bouche,
Qui se couche
En danger
Pour manger
Confitures;
Si tu dures
Trop malade,
Couleur fade
Tu prendras,
Et perdras
L’embonpoint.
Dieu te doint
Santé bonne,
Ma mignonne.
 
He sent a copy of it to a great number of his friends and acquaintances and asked them to translate it into English, respecting as well as they could the formal properties that he identified in it:
(1) 28 lines (2) of 3 syllables each (3) in rhyming couplets (4) with the last line being the same as the first; (5) midway the poem changes from formal (
vous
) to informal (
tu
) and (6) the poet puts his own name directly into the poem.
1
 
Hofstadter, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University, got many dozens of responses over the following months and years. Each one of them was different, yet each one of them was without doubt a translation of Marot’s little poem. By this simple device he demonstrated one of the most awkward and wonderful truths about translation. It is this: any utterance of more than trivial length has no one translation; all utterances have innumerably many acceptable translations.
You get the same result with ordinary prose as you do with a poem. Give a hundred competent translators a page to translate, and the chances of any two versions being identical are close to zero. This fact about interlingual communication has persuaded many people that translation is not an interesting topic—
because it is always approximate, it is just a second-rate kind of thing. That’s why “translation” isn’t the name of a long-established academic discipline, even though its practitioners have often been academics in some other field. How can you have theories and principles about a process that comes up with no determinate results?
Like Hofstadter, I take the opposite view. The variability of translations is incontrovertible evidence of the limitless flexibility of human minds. There can hardly be a more interesting subject than that.
What is it that translators really do? How many different kinds of translating are there? What do the uses of this mysterious ability tell us about human societies, past and present? How do the facts of translation relate to language use in general—and to what we think a language is?
Those are the kinds of questions I explore in this book. Definitions, theories, and principles can be left aside until we have a better idea of what we are talking about. We shouldn’t use them prematurely to decide whether the following version of Clément Marot’s poem (one of many by Hofstadter himself) is good, bad, or indifferent. It’s the other way around. Until we can explain why the following version counts as a translation, we don’t really know what we’re saying when we utter the word.
Gentle gem,
Diadem,
Ciao! Bonjour!
Heard that you’re
In the rough:
Glum, sub-snuff.
Precious, tone
Down your moan,
And fling wide
Your door; glide
From your oy-
ster bed, coy
Little pearl.
See, blue girl,
Beet-red ru-
by’s your hue.
For your aches,
Carat cakes
Are the cure.
Eat no few’r
Than fourteen,
Silv’ry queen—
But no more
’n twenty-four,
Golden dream.
How you’ll gleam!
Trust old Clem
Gentle gem.
 

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