Authors: David Bellos

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (48 page)

BOOK: Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

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Babel tells the wrong story. The most likely original use of human speech was to be different, not the same.

In parts of the world that are sparsely populated and where travel is made perilous by physical obstacles—high mountains, waterless deserts, or thick jungle—linguistic diversity is extremely high. That is because the various indigenous communities of Papua New Guinea, the great Australian plains, and the Amazon basin do not often come into contact with one another. Even in a wealthy country such as Switzerland, the physical obstacles to contact between its many high valleys over the centuries have left their mark in the continued cohabitation of four main languages. But in other parts of the world where geography is more conducive to travel, and thus to contact, interchange, trade, and war, linguistic diversity is much reduced. Languages merge when people do.

Let us therefore abandon the old image of linguistic diversity as a picture of rivulets splitting and dividing as they course down the mountainside from a single glacier tip. We should see it rather as the always provisional result of a multiplicity of springs, wells, ponds, and snowmelts furrowing down into valleys to meet and merge in broader, deeper rivers. English is once again a fairly extreme example—its identifiable sources include the Germanic language of the Angles and Saxons, the French learned by the Norman soldiers who overran the island in 1066, together with ample helpings of Latin, a dash of Danish, a sprinkling of Celtic, and bits and bobs from at least a hundred languages around the world. Just at the moment it seems to be bursting its already wide banks and spilling into many other streams. But it’s not really anything to worry about. There is no greater likelihood of all languages being gobbled up by English than of the Amazon and the Volga flowing into the same sea. In any case, as we have seen, the primordial mechanism of linguistic differentiation makes English no less a tool for marking difference than any other tongue.

It follows from this that translation does not come “After Babel.” It comes when some human group has the bright idea that the kids on the next block or the people on the other side of the hill might be worth talking to. Translating is a first step toward civilization.

Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of years elapsed between the emergence of speech sounds to perform the social bonding functions of grooming and the invention of alphabetic script. In the course of that forever-hidden eon, human communities found that they could do vastly more things with speech than just keep their families, clans, and tribes in good order.

Translation deals with most of those other things. It does not and cannot attempt to perform or mimic or replicate the interpersonal functions of human speech. As we noted in an earlier chapter, translators do not match dialect for dialect when translating between established languages. “Hallo, darling,” “Howzitgaun?” and “Wotcha, mate” are forms of greeting that declare the speaker to be, respectively, a fashionista, a Glaswegian, and a Londoner. They may serve as translations of
bonjour, monsieur
, but the task they perform, involuntarily and obligatorily, is to claim membership of
that
community and not any other. It makes no sense to imagine transporting the ethnic, self-identifying dimension of any utterance. Absolutely any other formulation of the expression, in the same or any other dialect or language, constructs a different identity.

If you’re looking for the ineffable, stop here. It’s blindingly obvious. It’s not poetry but community that is lost in translation. The community-building role of actual language use is simply not part of what translation does.

But translation does almost everything else. It is translation, more than speech itself, that provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought.

We should do more of it.

ALSO BY DAVID BELLOS

Balzac Criticism in France, 1950–1900:

The Making of a Reputation

Georges Perec: A Life in Words

Jacques Tati: His Life and Art

Romain Gary: A Tall Story

EDITOR AND TRANSLATOR

Essays on Seventeenth-Century French Literature
, by Leo Spitzer

Notes

1. WHAT IS A TRANSLATION?

Douglas Hofstadter,
Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language
(New York: Basic Books, 1997), 1a.

2. IS TRANSLATION AVOIDABLE?

Harish Trivedi, “In Our Own Time, on Our Own Terms: ‘Translation’ in India,” in
Translating Others
, ed. Theo Hermans (Manchester, U.K.: St. Jerome, 2006), 1:102–19.

Claire Blanche-Benveniste, “Comment retrouver l’expérience des anciens voyageurs en terres de langues romanes?” in
S’entendre entre langues voisines: vers l’intercompréhension
, eds. Virginie Conti and François Grin (Chêne-Bourg, Switzerland: Georg, 2008), 34–51. On lingua franca, see John Holm,
An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Different authorities give different figures, ranging from five to seven thousand. We’re using the higher estimate, but the actual figure doesn’t really matter for the argument of this book.

These figures, taken from Wikipedia, include nonnative users of the languages concerned. Because many people speak two or more of the world’s major languages, the total population of the “top thirteen” may exceed the total population of the world. Figures for total native or first-language speakers show a different picture: Mandarin Chinese, 863 million; Hindi, 680 million; English, 400 million; Spanish, 350 million; Arabic, 280 million; Russian, 164 million; Japanese, 130 million; German, 105 million; French, 80 million; Turkish, 63 million; Urdu, 60 million; Indonesian, 17 million; Swahili, 10 million—a total of 3.2 billion, or just over half the world’s population.

One obvious answer is: Portuguese. But despite its importance for large and far-flung communities in Europe, South America, and Africa, its role as a vehicular language is minimal.

J. N. Adams,
Bilingualism and the Latin Language
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), gives a detailed portrait of the relations between Latin and the other languages of Rome and its possessions. Many texts discussed by Adams show Latin in contact with other languages, but none of his material could be classed even approximately as a Latin translation of a non-Latin text.

Georges Perec, “Experimental Demonstration of the Tomatotopic Organization in the Soprano,” in
Cantatrix Sopranica et autres écrits scientifiques
(Paris: Seuil, 1991).

According to Claude Hagège,
Dictionnaire amoureux des langues
(Paris: Plon, 2009), 109, Konstantin Päts, the last president of independent Estonia, also made a broadcast in Latin in August 1939, for the same reasons.

Elisabeth and Jean-Paul Champseix,
57, Boulevard Staline. Chroniques albanaises
(Paris: La Découverte, 1990).

Adapted from Georges Perec,
Life A User’s Manual
, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David R. Godine, 2009), 125.

3. WHY DO WE CALL IT “TRANSLATION”?

Michael Emmerich, “Beyond Between: Translation, Ghosts, Metaphors,” posted online at
www.wordswithoutborders.org
, April 2009.

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,
Amarako