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Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
By David Bellos Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2011 David Bellos
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-86547-872-5
CHAPTER 1
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.
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.
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Gentle gem,
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Diadem,
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Ciao! Bonjour!
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Heard that you're
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;In the rough:
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Glum, sub-snuff.
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Precious, tone
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Down your moan,
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;And fling wide
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Your door; glide
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;From your oy-
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;ster bed, coy
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Little pearl.
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;See, blue girl,
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Beet-red ru-
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;by's your hue.
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;For your aches,
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Carat cakes
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Are the cure.
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Eat no few'r
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Than fourteen,
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Silv'ry queen —
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;But no more
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;'n twenty-four,
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Golden dream.
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;How you'll gleam!
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Trust old Clem,
&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp;Gentle gem.
CHAPTER 2
Is Translation Avoidable?
Translation is everywhere — at the United Nations, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, and many other international bodies that regulate fundamental aspects of modern life. Translation is part and parcel of modern business, and there's hardly a major industry that doesn't use and produce translations for its own operations. We find translations on the bookshelves of our homes, on the reading lists for every course in every discipline taught at college; we find them on processed-food labels and on flat-pack furniture instructions. How could we do without translation? It seems pointless to wonder what world we would live in if translation didn't happen all the time at every level, from bilingual messages on ATM screens to confidential discussions between heads of state, from the guarantee slip on a new watch we've just bought to the classics of world literature.
But we could do without it, all the same. Instead of using translation, we could learn the languages of all the different communities we wish to engage with; or we could decide to speak the same language or else adopt a single common language for communicating with other communities. But if we balk at adopting a common tongue and decline to learn the other languages we need, we could simply ignore people who don't speak the way we do.
These three options seem fairly radical, and it's likely that none of them figures among the aspirations of the readers of this book. However, they are not imaginary solutions to the many paradoxes of intercultural communication. All three paths away from translation are historically attested. More than that: the refusal of translation, by one or more of the means described, is probably closer to the historical norm on this planet than the culture of translation that seems natural and unavoidable around the world today. One big truth about translation that is often kept under wraps is that many societies did just fine by doing without.
The Indian subcontinent has long been the home of many different groups speaking a great variety of languages. However, there is no tradition of translation in India. Until very recently, nothing was ever translated directly between Urdu, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, and so on. Yet these communities have lived cheek by jowl on a crowded continent for centuries. How did they manage? They learned other languages! Few inhabitants of the subcontinent have ever been monoglot; citizens of India have traditionally spoken three, four, or five tongues.
In the late Middle Ages, the situation was quite similar in many parts of Europe. Traders and poets, sailors and adventurers moved overland and around the inland seas picking up and often mixing more or less distantly related languages as they went, and only the most thoughtful of them even wondered whether they were speaking different "languages" or just adapting to local peculiarities. The great explorer Christopher Columbus provides an unusually well-documented case of the intercomprehensibility and interchangeability of European tongues in the late Middle Ages. He wrote notes in the margins of his copy of Pliny in what we now recognize as an early form of Italian, but he used typically Portuguese place-names — such as Cuba — to label his discoveries in the New World. He wrote his official correspondence in Castilian Spanish but used Latin for the precious journal he kept of his voyages. He made a "secret" copy of the journal in Greek, however, and he also must have known enough Hebrew to use the astronomical tables of Abraham Zacuto, which allowed him to predict a lunar eclipse and impress the indigenous people he encountered in the Caribbean. He must have been familiar with lingua franca — a "contact language" made of simplified Arabic syntax and a vocabulary taken mostly from Italian and Spanish, used by Mediterranean sailors and traders from the Middle Ages to the dawn of the nineteenth century — because he borrowed a few characteristic words from it when writing in Castilian and Italian. How many languages did Columbus know when he sailed the ocean in 1492? As in today's India, where a degree of intercomprehensibility exists among several of its languages, the answer would be somewhat arbitrary. It's unlikely Columbus even conceptualized Italian, Castilian, or Portuguese as distinct languages, for they did not yet have any grammar books. He was a learned man in being able to read and write the three ancient tongues. But beyond that, he was just a Mediterranean sailor, speaking whatever variety of language that he needed to do his job.
There are perhaps as many as seven thousand languages spoken in the world today, and no individual could learn them all. Five to ten languages seem to represent the effective limit in all cultures, however multilingual they may be. Some obsessive individuals have clocked up twenty; a few champion linguists, who spend all their time learning languages, have claimed knowledge of fifty, or even more. But even these brainiacs master only a tiny fraction of all the tongues that there are.
Most of the world's languages are spoken by very small groups, which is the main reason why a great number of them are near the point of collapse. However, outside the handful of countries speaking one of the half-dozen "major" world languages, few people on this planet have only one tongue. Within the Russian Federation, for example, hundreds of languages are spoken — belonging to the Slavic, Turkic, Caucasian, Altaic, and other language families. But hardly a member of any of the communities speaking these very diverse tongues does not also speak Russian. Similarly, in India, there aren't many people who don't also have either Hindi or Urdu or Bengali or English or one of the half-dozen other interlanguages of the subcontinent. To engage with all but a tiny fraction of people in the world, you definitely do not need to learn all their first languages. You need to learn all their vehicular languages — languages learned by nonnative speakers for the purpose of communicating with native speakers of a third tongue. There are about eighty languages used in this way in some part of the world. But because vehicular languages are also native to some (usually very large) groups, and because many people speak more than one vehicular language (of which one may or may not be native to them), you do not need to learn all eighty vehicular languages to communicate with most people on the planet. Knowing just nine of them — Chinese (with 1.3 billion users), Hindi (800 million), Arabic (530 million), Spanish (350 million), Russian (278 million), Urdu (180 million), French (175 million), Japanese (130 million), and English (somewhere between 800 million and 1.8 billion) — would permit effective everyday conversation, though probably not detailed negotiation or serious intellectual debate, with at least 4.5 billion and maybe up to 5.5 billion people, that is to say, around 90 percent of the world's population. (The startlingly wide range of estimates of the number of people who "speak English" reflects the difficulty we have in saying what "speaking English" means.) Add Indonesian (250 million), German (185 million), Turkish (63 million), and Swahili (50 million) to make a baker's dozen, and you have at your feet the entire American landmass, most of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, the great crescent of Islam from Morocco to Pakistan, a good part of India, a swath of Africa, and most of the densely populated parts of East Asia, too. What more could you want? Exeunt translators! Enter the language trainers! The cast would be more or less identical, so the net loss of jobs worldwide would most likely be nil.
If thirteen languages seem too hard to handle, why not have everyone learn the same one? The plan seemed obvious to the Romans, who made little attempt to learn the languages of the many peoples they conquered, with the sole but major exception of the Greeks. Barely a trace of interest has been found among ancient Romans in learning Etruscan, Umbrian, the Celtic languages of what is now France and Britain, the Germanic languages of the tribes on the northeastern borders of the empire, or the Semitic languages of the Carthage they deleted from the map and the colonies in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea area. If you got taken over by Rome, you learned Latin and that was that. The long-term result of the linguistic unification of the empire was that the written version of the Romans' language remained the main vehicle of intercultural communication in Europe for more than a thousand years after the end of the empire. Imperial blindness to the difference of others did a huge favor to Europe.
Linguistic unification of the same order of magnitude has taken place in the last fifty years in most branches of science. Many languages have served at different times as vehicles of scientific advance: Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Syriac, Latin, and Arabic from ancient times to the Middle Ages; then Italian and French in the European Renaissance and early modern period. Between 1760 and 1840, the writings of the two "fathers of organic chemistry," Torbern Olof Bergman and Jöns Jacob Berzelius, made Swedish a language of science, and for about a hundred years it kept a respected place. English and French continued to be used for numerous disciplines, but German burst onto the scene in the nineteenth century with the new chemistry invented by Liebig and others; and Dmitri Mendeleyev, who created the periodic table of elements, helped to put Russian among the international languages of science before the end of the nineteenth century. Between 1900 and 1940, new scientific research continued to be published, often in intense rivalry, in Russian, French, German, and English (Swedish having dropped off the map by then). But the Nazis' abuse of science between 1933 and 1945 discredited the language they used. German began to lose its status as a world science language with the fall of Berlin in 1945 — and many leading German scientists were of course whisked off to America and Britain in short order and functioned thereafter as English speakers. French entered a slow decline, and Russian, which expanded in use after the Second World War and continued to be cultivated for political reasons during the remaining years of the U.S.S.R., dropped out of the science scene in 1989. So we are left with English. English is the language of science worldwide; learned journals published in Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, Berlin, and Paris are now either entirely in English or else carry English translations alongside foreign-language texts. Academic advancement everywhere is dependent on publication in English. Indeed, in Israel it is said that God himself would not get promotion in any science department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Why not? Because he has only one publication — and it was not written in English. (I do not really believe this story. The fact that the publication in question has been translated into English and is even available in paperback would surely overrule the promotion committee's misgivings.)
Despite this, efforts are being made to allow some languages to serve once again as local science dialects. A U.S.-government-sponsored Web service, for example, WorldWideScience.org, now offers searches of non-English-language databases in China, Russia, France, and some South American countries together with automatic retranslation of the results into Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. The asymmetry of sources and targets in this new arrangement gives an interesting map of where science is now done.
The reasons for English having made a clean sweep of the sciences are not straightforward. Among them we cannot possibly include the unfortunate but widespread idea that English is simpler than other languages.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos. Copyright © 2011 David Bellos. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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