Authors: David Bellos

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (50 page)

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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.

Quoted by Scott L. Montgomery,
Science in Translation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 68.

17. THE THIRD CODE

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

Sara Laviosa,
Corpus-Based Translation Studies: Theory, Findings, Applications
(New York: Rodopi, 2002).

Mairi McLaughlin, “(In)visibility: Dislocation in French and the Voice of the Translator,”
French Studies
61:2 (2008): 53–64.

Exceptions include Rosemary Edmonds’s translation of
War and Peace
(London: Penguin Books, 1957), in which Platon Karataev speaks a generic folk dialect of English vaguely indebted to Yorkshire.

See Ineke Wallaert, “The Translation of Sociolects: A Paradigm of Ideological Issues in Translation?,” in
Language Across Boundaries
, eds. Janet Cotterill and Anne Ife (London: Continuum in association with British Association for Applied Linguistics, 2001), 171–84.

18. NO LANGUAGE IS AN ISLAND

Simon Gaunt, “Translating the Diversity of the Middle Ages: Marco Polo and John Mandeville as ‘French’ Writers,”
Australian Journal of French Studies
XLVI.3 (2009): 235–48.

Claude Lanzmann and Simone de Beauvoir,
Shoah
:
The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film
(New York: Da Capo, 1995), provides an English translation of the subtitles only. Crosslinguistic interactions can be studied only by watching the film.

Cyril Aslanov,
Le Français au Levant
(Paris: Champion, 2006), resurrects the often-forgotten “Empire of French” that spread from Sicily and Cyprus to the (French-speaking) Kingdom of Jerusalem between 1100 and 1400 C.E.

Gaunt, “Translating the Diversity,” 237.

Leo Tolstoy,
War and Peace
, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Penguin Books, 1957), 417.

19. GLOBAL FLOWS

The figure is remarkably stable for other major or central languages. Gisele Sapiro (“Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market,”
Poetics
38:4 [2010]: 419–39) logs forty-two source languages for literary translations published in France between 1984 and 2002. A relatively new American adventure in literary translation on the Web—
WordsWithoutBorders.org
—has widened the net to include more than seventy source languages, but it has yet to affect book publishing in traditional form to any significant degree.

For a brief exposition of the dollar delusion, see Michel Onfray’s article “Les deux bouts de la langue,”
Le Monde
, July 10, 2010.

See Gideon Toury, “Enhancing Cultural Change by Means of Fictitious Translations,” available at
spinoza.tau.ac.il/~toury/works
.

Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa
(Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Tijariyya al-Kubra, 1928), III:152, quoted in Bernard Lewis,
From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 31.

Katharina Rout, “Fragments of a Greater Language,” in
Beyond Words: Translating the World
, ed. Susan Ouriou (Banff, AB: Banff Center Press, 2010), 33–37.

Jessica Ka Yee Chan, “Translating Russia into China: Lu Xun’s Fashioning of an Antithesis to Western Europe,” paper given at the MLA Conference, Philadelphia, 2009.

Arnold B. McMillin, “Small Is Sometimes Beautiful: Studying ‘Minor Languages’ at a University with Particular Reference to Belarus,”
Modern Language Review
101:4 (October 2006): xxxii–xliii.

Anonymous editorial,
Yomiuri Shimbun
, June 23, 1888, translated by Michael Emmerich.

“The Wu Jing Project: A New Translation of the Five Chinese Classics into the Major Languages of the World; an International Project Sponsored by the Confucius Institute Headquarters, Beijing, China,” project description kindly supplied by Martin Kern.

20. A QUESTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

There are two English translations:
Course in General Linguistics
, trans. Wade Baskin and Peter Owen (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960); and
Course in General Linguistics
, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983). The second is to be preferred.

See Rosemary Moeketsi, “Intervention in Court Interpreting: South Africa,” in
Translation as Intervention
, ed. Jeremy Munday (London/New York: Continuum, 2007), 97–117.

Like Japanese, however, it does have unofficial status. The German Translation Section, funded jointly by the German, Swiss, Lichtenstein, and Austrian governments, provides German-language services at UN headquarters in New York.

Quoted in Sir Frederick Pollock,
A First Book of Jurisprudence for Students of the Common Law
(New York: Macmillan & Co., 1896), 283.

Karen McAuliffe, “Translation at the Court of Justice of the European Communities,” in
Translation Issues in Language and Law
, eds. Frances Olsen, Alexander Lorz, and Dieter Stein (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 99–115 (specifically,
See Here
). Emphasis is mine.

21.
CECI N’EST PAS UNE TRADUCTION

The separate Directorate-General for Interpretation also has a huge budget—it is the largest interpreting service in the world by far.

Karen McAuliffe, “Translation at the Court of Justice of the European Communities of the European Communities,” in
Translation Issues in Language and Law
, eds. Frances Olsen, Alexander Lorz, and Dieter Stein (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 105.

Lubella v. Hauptzollamt Cottbus
, quoted in Lawrence Solan, “Statutory Interpretation in the EU: The Augustinian Approach,” in Olsen, Lorz, and Stein,
Translation Issues
, 49.

Ibid., 35–53.

22. TRANSLATING NEWS

Susan Bassnett and Esperanca Bielsa,
Translation in Global News
(New York: Routledge, 2009), is the principal source of information and examples given in this chapter.

23. THE ADVENTURE OF AUTOMATED LANGUAGE-TRANSLATION MACHINES

See Michael Gordin,
Red Cloud at Dawn
:
Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), for a well-documented account of the intelligence-gathering machinery of the period.

Warren Weaver, “Translation,” in
Machine Translation of Languages: Fourteen Essays
, eds. W. N. Locke and A. D. Booth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1955), 15.

Weaver, quoted in
MT News International
22 (July 1999): 6.

Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, “A Demonstration of the Nonfeasibility of Fully Automatic High-Quality Translation” (1960), in
Language and Information
(New York: Addison-Wesley, 1964), 174.

See
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GdSC1Z1Kzs
.

Available at
www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/nec/StrategyforAmericanInnovation
, section 3.D.

24. A FISH IN YOUR EAR

Martine Behr and Maike Corpataux,
Die Nürnberger Prozesse: Zur Be-deutung der Dolmetscher für die Prozesse and der Prozesse für die Dolmetscher
(Munich: Meidenbauer, 2006), 25–30.

Richard W. Sonnenfeldt,
Witness to Nuremberg
(New York: Arcade, 2006), 51.

Francesca Gaiba,
The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation: The Nuremberg Trial
(Ottowa: University of Ottawa Press, 1998), 110.

Provisional Rules of Procedure of the Security Council (1946), Rule 42.

Annelise Riles, “Models and Documents: Artefacts of International Legal Knowledge,”
The International and Comparative Law Quarterly
48:4 (October 1999): 819.

Denis Peiron, “La France à court d’interprètes,”
Le Monde
, March 8, 2010, raised a cry of alarm at the shortage of French candidates for language jobs in the European Union; Brigitte Perucca, in “Un monde sans interprètes,”
Le Monde
, March 19, 2010, reports that barely 30 percent of candidates for interpreter posts in all international organizations pass the first-stage tests.

The Council of Europe is distinct from the European Parliament, though it also sits in Strasbourg. Its official languages are English and French, but it provides German, Italian, and Russian interpreting as “additional working languages” at its own expense.

25. MATCH ME IF YOU CAN

Arvo Krikmann,
Netinalju Stalinist—