Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (45 page)

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Authors: David Bellos

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This visual representation of linguistic interaction does not, in fact, require A and B to be speaking the same language. As long as both A and B know languages L1 and L2, then the process of understanding speech that is displayed—translating a sound stream into a mental image, then producing a sound stream to represent a mental image for the interlocutor to translate inwardly in turn—would be exactly the same. You come to the same conclusion that language is thought in translation and thought is language translated if you extend the diagram to introduce person C, a translator mediating between A and B speaking in different tongues. C would look exactly the same, with identical lines of transmission between mouth, ear, and brain. Adding translation makes no difference to the model because the model already says that everything is translation already. As a consequence, Saussure’s
Course
, as well as the bulk of work on language that has taken place in its shadow, pays no attention to translation between languages at all.
I don’t know whether language is possible without thought—on the face of it, it must be, since so many people speak without thinking—and I wouldn’t dare contribute to the unending argument about whether thought is possible without words. The sole contribution I feel confident of making is to say that assimilating all uses of language to translation on the grounds that all speech is a mental translation of thought seriously diminishes our capacity to understand what the practice of translation between languages is about.
To avoid such objections, some scholars use the term
transcoding
to refer to the transformation of work in one medium into an altogether different thing (a play into a movie, a musical into a film, but most often a novel into anything else). It’s a tactic that has even more damaging effects, since it leads people into thinking that all expressions can be treated as instances of some kind of code. Codes are clever and useful things, but as early adventures in machine translation proved without appeal, languages don’t behave like codes at all. Turning a play into a movie has not the slightest analogy to or connection with turning a coded message into another code, and to call it transcoding is to use a figure of speech based on not bothering to think what you might mean by “code.”
1
The fellows of Oxford colleges inspect the properties the colleges own in various parts of the country by annual outings when (in principle if not in fact) they process around the perimeter. It’s called “beating the bounds,” and that’s what we’ve now done with translation.
One of its sides is as unbounded as the line of a shore—tides rise and fall, and coasts can change shape. But other boundaries are clearly marked. Translation does not extend in every direction. Its own field is quite large enough.
 
Under Fire: Sniping at Translation
 
By always saying some other thing a second time, and saying it in a different way, an act of translation inevitably makes the new utterance your own. A journalist rephrasing an agency wire, a lawyer-linguist readjusting the expression of an opinion given by a judge at the European Court of Justice, a writer putting Pushkin into English verse or prose—translators of these and all other kinds possess the outcome of their work in a personal way. Translation cannot but be, in some measure, an appropriation of the source.
Possession
,
appropriation
,
making something your own
—these are words from the language of the passions. What then of
desire
and its natural companions,
jealousy
and
hurt
?
It’s a curious fact that much translation commentary in Western languages contains unmistakable signs of anger and hurt. Schoolmasters, book critics, even theorists routinely disparage other translators—bad translators, “servile,” “mechanical,” second-rate translators—with a range of insults that could easily be thrown about in a lovers’ tiff. You have a tin ear! You write dull, wooden, clunky prose! You have taken one liberty too many! What makes you think such license is allowed? What you have done, young man, is called betrayal! Ignoramus! Cheat! Commoner! Thief!
In 1680, John Dryden, in his thoughtful translator’s preface to Ovid’s
Epistles
, cast anathema on a rival translator, Spence, for having replaced “the fine raillery and Attic salt of Lucian” with the “gross expressions of Billingsgate.”
1
How uncouth!
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer denigrated those “people of limited intellectual abilities” who “use only worn-out patterns of speech in their own language, which they put together so awkwardly that one realizes how imperfectly they understand the meaning of what they are saying … so that [their translations are] not much more than mindless parrotry.”
2
Oafs!
“One of the main troubles with would-be translators is their ignorance,” sniped Vladimir Nabokov. Examples he quotes are introduced by him as “dreadful,” “incredibly coy,” and “grotesquely trite.”
3
José Ortega y Gasset summed up a view that has been expressed without serious interruption since the beginning of the whole debate: “Almost all translations done until now are bad ones.”
4
It seems implausible that anyone would ever make such a statement about any other human skill or trade. Let’s just try it out: “Almost all firefighters up to now have been bad ones.” “Almost all mathematical proofs devised up to now are bad ones.” “Almost all novels written before mine are second rate.” “Almost all the women I met before you were dreadful.” If you said any of these things except the last, you would be out of your mind—and the exception is granted only because we permit a degree of insanity in what we say about affairs of the heart. Translators, whose working lives are not sexy in the least, use the language of love to talk about their work. How strange!
But these circumstances make it not strange at all that laypeople don’t have a high regard for translators. When it comes to defending the profession, translation commentators lead the field in throwing most of its work in the direction of the garbage dump.
Most people encounter translation at school in foreign-language lessons. Success in learning a foreign tongue comes at that gratifying moment when, all of a sudden, you find you are able to read and perhaps even think in the foreign tongue without the need to translate in your head. At that point you leave translation behind. It’s a second-rate support for those who’ve not studied hard enough. And if you go on to study the classical or foreign languages at a higher level, using translations becomes almost taboo.
It’s a curious paradox. The disparagement of translation emanates most powerfully from those very circles where the ability to translate (at least in the technical sense) is most likely to be found. It is reinforced in many universities by departments of modern languages that grudgingly permit the teaching of literature in translation only if it’s restricted to a separate program in comparative literature. Of course, their colleagues in history, English, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and even mathematics use translated works all the time. But modern-language departments don’t seem to notice that at all.
Not all translation commentary is negative, but the range of terms available for complimenting a translator on her work is remarkably small. When book reviews pay any attention at all to the translation of a translated work under review and don’t use the opportunity to trot out one or more of the false platitudes we’ve tried to demolish in other chapters of this book, they recycle one of a small set of standard words of praise:
fluent
,
witty
,
racy
,
accurate
,
brilliant
,
competent
, and
stylish
. You would have to comb through a great quantity of book reviews to find any nods toward translators that step outside of this set and its quasi-synonyms. Translation-quality evaluation criteria are hard to establish, as we pointed out; critical language to express such evaluations seems even harder to find.
When you are using translation as a language-learning device, what you want to know when you’ve done one is whether you got it right. Since few members of the English-speaking community ever get much further than that in acquiring a foreign language, what most people want to know when they have a translation in front of them is the same as what they needed to know at school. We are taught to value “rightness” very highly when we are young, and teachers exploit the competitive spirit to make children internalize the concept. Being wrong is a shameful thing, and the aspiration toward getting the right answer stays with us for a long time. It acts as a focus for self-esteem, and for many other feelings, often passionately held. When a lay reader asks of a translation, “But is it right?” a question of almost moral importance is implied. But it is the wrong question. If it could be abandoned entirely, then many of the passions that make translation commentary such a vituperative business would abate and maybe one day disappear.
A translation can’t be right or wrong in the manner of a school quiz or a bank statement. A translation is more like a portrait in oils. The artist may add a pearl earring, give an extra flush to the cheek, or miss out the gray hairs in the sideburns—and still give us a good likeness. It’s hard to say just what it is that allows viewers to agree that a portrait captures the important things—the overall shape as well as that special look in the eye. The mysterious abilities we have for recognizing good matches in the visual sphere lie near to what it takes to judge that a translation is good. But the users of a translation, unlike the friends of a portraitist’s sitter, don’t have full access to the model (they would barely need the translation if they did). That’s probably why translation raises such passionate responses. There’s no choice but to trust the translator. When it comes to speech and writing, and for reasons that are by now, I hope, quite clear, people are an untrusting lot.
 
Sameness, Likeness, and Match: Truths About Translation
 
For a repeated utterance in a different natural language to count as a translation of the source, it must give the same information and have the same force. It may make explicit information that is unstated in the source (by inserting it into the text or by adding footnotes); and it may also, but less frequently, omit information because it is assumed to be too widely known among intended readers to merit the same prominence given to it in the source. But within these areas of tolerance, sameness of information and force is a widely respected norm for the translator’s art.
It’s worth remembering that these are not the only features of an utterance that could in principle be preserved in a repetition of it in some other tongue. It would not be hard to reproduce the exact pattern of commas and periods when moving a text between, say, English and French, but nobody bothers to do that. (I did once work briefly with an author who insisted that his punctuation was an inalienable feature of his style, but this only confirmed my initial impression that he was slightly mad.) A competent translator with a lot of time on her hands could easily preserve the word and character count of a source by paragraph, sentence, or line, but these kinds of sameness are not considered relevant to the translator’s task.
1
Nor does the notion of sameness extend to the selection or distribution of the letters of the source—though there is an exception in Douglas Hofstadter’s replacement of the title of Françoise Sagan’s
La Chamade
by
That Mad Ache
. In the translation of poetry and song lyrics, sameness in the syllable count, line by line, may be accepted as a constraint, and approximate sameness in length of script is a requirement for strip cartoon legends, for road signage, and for museum and exhibition captions. But these are all regarded as special cases. Everywhere else, the requirement of sameness stops at information and force.
In speech translation, tone, pitch, gestures of the face and hands, and the stamping of feet are thrown to the winds, even though they transmit major clues as to how the speech is to be understood.
In all the many other dimensions and levels of an utterance in speech or writing the criterion of translation is not to be the same but to be like.
A is like B only in respect of C. This is a way of saying that when a thing is compared with some other thing, the act of comparing rests on a third term that is neither A nor B. What makes
soupe de poisson
like “chowder”? The comparator (called
ter-tium comparationis
in the old rhetoric) could be “soup” (but that would be a poor kind of likeness), or “seafood” (that’s richer, both are soups made from fish), or the fact that they are both eaten hot, or that they are both available in cans, or that there are cans of both on that shelf. The “likeness” of
soupe de poisson
and “chowder” is a variable, and its value varies in accordance with the comparator used or implied in any given context of use.
The dimensions of an utterance where likeness is the relevant criterion of translation are of many different kinds. Register, tone, rhythm, style, and wit can only ever be said to be like one another in respect of something external to the text itself. For example, to judge that writing iambic pentameters in English is like Racine’s use of the twelve-syllable line is to base likeness on the social and cultural values of poetic forms in two different environments. In both English and French verse, these are the commonest, most frequently used forms, and thus like each other in that respect. But they are not like each other in any other way. Writing twelve-syllable lines in English to represent French verse, on the other hand, is like the original only in respect of the number 12, but quite unlike it in respect of the underlying rhythms of English, which is a stress-timed language, and of French, which is not.
By choosing which dimensions to connect in a relationship of likeness and the extent to which the likeness is made visible, a translation hierarchizes the interlocking, overlaying features of the original. To that extent at least, translations always provide an interpretation of the source. It’s more obvious in literary texts with relatively few practical constraints, but the same underlying situation holds for all acts of translation between languages.
The nub of the question is this: Given that a translation preserves the information and the general force of the original, in what respect is it possible to say that its manner or style or tone is like those features of its source?
Georges Perec wrote in a wide variety of styles, but a characteristic feature of all his writing is that important information is placed at the very end, making you realize that up to that point you hadn’t understood the main import of the sentence or paragraph—or even the novel. At the level of sentences and paragraphs it is easier to do this in French than in English literary prose, which typically introduces new information in a different manner. Nonetheless, by exploiting the notorious flexibility of English sentence structure and bending it a fair bit, I respected Perec’s “late release” technique as far as I could. By the very fact of doing so I offered an interpretation of Perec’s style, but the likeness of my prose to his is a tightly focused and fragile thing. Because I had to take greater liberties with English than he did with French, my writing is not “like” Perec’s at all in respect of linguistic norms.
No translation is the same as its source, and no translation can be expected to be like its source in more than a few selected ways. Which dimensions are selected depends on the conventions of the receiving culture, the nature of the field involved, or even the whim of the commissioner of the translation. But any utterance is such a multidimensional and many-faceted thing that no translator is ever short of a little elbow room. To put it the other way around, no set of social, practical, linguistic, or generic constraints ever determines completely how a translation is to be done.
If meaning and force are kept the same and if in a limited set of other respects a translation is seen to be like its source, then we have a match. Translators are matchmakers of a particular kind. It’s not as simple as the marriage of content and form. Just as when we match faces and portraits, we rely on multiple dimensions and qualities to judge when a translation has occurred.
Children’s puzzle books exploit and psychologists study our ability to recognize and manipulate the distinct but overlapping relations I’ve called same, like, and match.
Translators use that ability in the specific fields of speech and writing in a foreign tongue. Not all of them are great at their job, and not many have the time and leisure to wait for the best match to come. But when we say that a translation is an acceptable one, what we name is an overall relationship between source and target that is neither identity, nor equivalence, nor analogy—just that complex thing called a good match.
That’s the truth about translation.

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