Read Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Online
Authors: David Bellos
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (14 page)
Here’s one of the prizewinning entries:
It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
1
Nowadays the expression “colorless green ideas” could perhaps refer to the topics of negotiation at the Copenhagen Climate Summit of December 2009; to say that they “slept furiously” may be no more than to name the paltry outcome of the conference. The point of this is not just to say that people play with language and often make mincemeat of authoritative generalizations about it. It is this: no grammatical sentence in any language can be constructed such that it can never have a context of utterance in which it is meaningful. That also means that everything that can be said or written—even nonsense—can (at some time or another) be translated.
Verdi idee senza colore dormono furiosamente
.
Verdi idee senza colore dormono furiosamente
.
To translate utterances that perform a conventional action by the fact of being uttered—greeting, ordering, commanding, and so on—requires the target language to possess parallel conventions about things you can do with words. But there are significant differences between cultures and languages in how people do things with words. A promise may be a promise the world over, but the conditions of felicity, as well as the forms of language that are appropriate to the making of a promise, may vary greatly between, for example, Japan and the United States. It’s not the linguistic meaning of “I promise, cross my heart and hope to die” that needs to be translated if the aim is to make a similar commitment in the target language. Once again, the expression uttered (in speech or writing) is not the sole or even the primary object of translation when the force of an utterance is what matters, as it always does.
These considerations don’t affect just the set of verbs that Austin called performatives. The range of things you can do with words goes far beyond the promising, warning, knighting, naming, and so on that attracted the philosopher’s attention, and it would be better to see those not-so-special verbs of English as only one way of grasping a more general aspect of language use. When I say “How are you?” to an acquaintance I run across, I am performing the social convention of greeting with an utterance that is conventionally attached to it. Whether I use a performative verb (as in “Salaam, your highness, I greet you most humbly”) or not (as in “Hi!”), the expression that constitutes the action of greeting has a meaning only by virtue of the kind of action I am performing with it. “Greeting” could be thought of as a kind or register or genre of language use. It’s not hard to see that translating “How are you?” into any other language is to translate the convention of greeting, not to translate the individual items
how
,
are
, and
you
. But what is widely understood as appropriate for the kind of language use that tourist phrase books always include is no less appropriate in many other translation contexts. A knitting pattern that does not follow target-language conventions for knitting patterns is completely useless, just as a translated threat of retribution that does not conform to the conventions of threatening in the target culture is not a threat, or a translation.
how
,
are
, and
you
. But what is widely understood as appropriate for the kind of language use that tourist phrase books always include is no less appropriate in many other translation contexts. A knitting pattern that does not follow target-language conventions for knitting patterns is completely useless, just as a translated threat of retribution that does not conform to the conventions of threatening in the target culture is not a threat, or a translation.
In the summer of 2008,
The Wall Street Journal
ran a hot story under the headline GOP VEEP PICK ROILS DEMS. To make sense of this you need a lot of knowledge of American political events in the run-up to the last presidential election, including the conventional nicknames of the two main parties, as well as familiarity with the alphabetical games played by editors on night desks in Manhattan. Should we pity the poor translators the world over who needed to reproduce the bare bones of the story in double-quick time? Not really. The meanings of the words in that headline are not important. What’s important is that it works as a headline. Like any headline in the English-language press, GOP VEEP PICK ROILS DEMS is explained by the story that follows it in less compressed language. The task of the translator—if indeed it is the translator, not the editor, who performs this function—is to understand the story first and only then invent an appropriate headline within the language of headlines holding sway in the target culture.
“Le choix de Madame Palin comme candidate républicaine à la vice-présidence des États-Unis choque le parti démocrate”
conforms quite well to French headline-writing style, for example, and is a plausible counterpart to
The Wall Street Journal
’s nutshell quip. The original and its translation must conform to the general conventions of headline writing in their respective cultures, because headline writing is just as much a genre—a particular kind of language use restricted to particular contexts—as promising, christening, threatening, and so forth.
The Wall Street Journal
ran a hot story under the headline GOP VEEP PICK ROILS DEMS. To make sense of this you need a lot of knowledge of American political events in the run-up to the last presidential election, including the conventional nicknames of the two main parties, as well as familiarity with the alphabetical games played by editors on night desks in Manhattan. Should we pity the poor translators the world over who needed to reproduce the bare bones of the story in double-quick time? Not really. The meanings of the words in that headline are not important. What’s important is that it works as a headline. Like any headline in the English-language press, GOP VEEP PICK ROILS DEMS is explained by the story that follows it in less compressed language. The task of the translator—if indeed it is the translator, not the editor, who performs this function—is to understand the story first and only then invent an appropriate headline within the language of headlines holding sway in the target culture.
“Le choix de Madame Palin comme candidate républicaine à la vice-présidence des États-Unis choque le parti démocrate”
conforms quite well to French headline-writing style, for example, and is a plausible counterpart to
The Wall Street Journal
’s nutshell quip. The original and its translation must conform to the general conventions of headline writing in their respective cultures, because headline writing is just as much a genre—a particular kind of language use restricted to particular contexts—as promising, christening, threatening, and so forth.
How many genres are there? Uncountably many. How do you know what genre a given written sentence is in? Well, you don’t, and that’s the point. No sentence contains all the information you need to translate it. One of the key levels of information that is always missing from a sentence taken simply as a grammatically well-formed string of lexically acceptable words is knowledge of its genre. You can get that only from the context of utterance. Of course, you know what that is in the case of a spoken sentence—you have to be there, in the context, to hear it spoken. You usually know quite a lot in the case of written texts, too. Translators do not usually agree to work on a text without being told first of all whether it is a railway timetable or a poem, a speech at the UN or a fragment of a novel (and few people read such things in their original languages either without being told by the cover sheet, dust jacket, or other peritextual material what kind of thing they are reading). To do their jobs, translators have to know what job they are doing.
Translating something “from cold,” “unseen,” “out of the blue,” or, as some literary scholars would put it, “translating a text in and for itself” isn’t technically impossible. After all, students at some universities are asked to do just that in their final examinations. But it is not an honest job. It can be done only by guessing what the context and genre of the utterance are. Even if you guess right, and even granted that guessing right may well be the sign of wide knowledge and a smart mind, you are still only playing a game.
Many genres have recognizable forms in the majority of languages and cultures: kitchen recipes, fairground hype, greeting people, expressing condolences, pronouncing marriage, court proceedings, the rules of soccer, and haggling can be found almost anywhere on the planet. The linguistic forms through which these genres are conducted vary somewhat, and in some cases vary a great deal, but as long as the translator knows what genre he is translating and is familiar with its forms in the target language, their translation is not a special problem. Problems arise more typically when the users of translation raise objections to the shifts in verbal form that an appropriate translation involves. Translators do not translate Chinese kitchen recipes “into English.” If they are translators, they translate them into kitchen recipes. Similarly, when a film title needs translating, it needs translating into a film title, not an examination answer.
It’s Complicated
is a romantic comedy starring Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep, playing characters who have a romantic fling in sun-drenched Santa Barbara despite having been divorced for some years. The complications alluded to in the title include Baldwin’s slinky and suspicious young wife, her five-year-old son with uncannily acute ears, as well as the three children of the refound lovers’ original marriage, now aged between eighteen and twenty-five. Can the two parents really get back together again? As Baldwin says in his closing lines, in a sentimental scene on the swing seat in the front garden: “It’s complicated.” As a sentence abstracted from any context of utterance, “It’s complicated” can be adequately represented in French by
C’est compliqué
. That would get full marks in a school quiz.
is a romantic comedy starring Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep, playing characters who have a romantic fling in sun-drenched Santa Barbara despite having been divorced for some years. The complications alluded to in the title include Baldwin’s slinky and suspicious young wife, her five-year-old son with uncannily acute ears, as well as the three children of the refound lovers’ original marriage, now aged between eighteen and twenty-five. Can the two parents really get back together again? As Baldwin says in his closing lines, in a sentimental scene on the swing seat in the front garden: “It’s complicated.” As a sentence abstracted from any context of utterance, “It’s complicated” can be adequately represented in French by
C’est compliqué
. That would get full marks in a school quiz.
In the context of utterance as it occurs in the film, Baldwin’s resigned, evasive, and inconclusive “It’s complicated” can also be plausibly rendered in French by the same sentence:
C’est compliqué
. But the French release of the movie itself is not titled
C’est compliqué
. The distributors preferred to call it
Pas si simple!
(“Not so simple!”).
C’est compliqué
. But the French release of the movie itself is not titled
C’est compliqué
. The distributors preferred to call it
Pas si simple!
(“Not so simple!”).
It’s not that the meaning is very different. Nor is it because the context of utterance alone changes the meaning: film titles, by virtue of being titles, have, in a sense, no context at all. Titles of new works announce and constitute the context in which the work’s meaning is to be construed. Title making, in other words, is a particular use of language—a genre. As in any other genre, a translated title counts as a translation only if it performs its proper function—that is to say, if it works as a title in the conventions of title making that hold sway in the target language. That’s no different from saying that the most important thing about the translation of a compliment is that it fulfills the function of the kind of language behavior that we call a compliment.
In languages and societies as close as French and English, it’s often the case that sentences having much the same shape and similar verbal content in the two languages fulfill the same genre functions as well. But not always. The task of the translator is to know when to step outside.
In contemporary spoken French,
compliqué
has connotations that the English
complicated
does not. Its sense in some contexts may verge on “oversophisticated” and “perverse.” A more likely way of suspending a decision, of getting off a hook, of lamenting the unstraightforwardness of life, is to say: It’s not so simple. Of course, you could say that in English, too, in the right context. But could it be a film title? “Not so simple!” doesn’t work nearly as well, and that’s no doubt why the original producers of the movie didn’t use it. In French it works just fine and avoids the unwanted additional suggestions of perversity that cloud
C’est compliqué
. Judgments like these don’t only call for “native-speaker competence” in the translator. They rely on profound familiarity with the genre.
compliqué
has connotations that the English
complicated
does not. Its sense in some contexts may verge on “oversophisticated” and “perverse.” A more likely way of suspending a decision, of getting off a hook, of lamenting the unstraightforwardness of life, is to say: It’s not so simple. Of course, you could say that in English, too, in the right context. But could it be a film title? “Not so simple!” doesn’t work nearly as well, and that’s no doubt why the original producers of the movie didn’t use it. In French it works just fine and avoids the unwanted additional suggestions of perversity that cloud
C’est compliqué
. Judgments like these don’t only call for “native-speaker competence” in the translator. They rely on profound familiarity with the genre.
What it comes down to is this: written and spoken expressions in any language don’t have a meaning just like that, on their own, in themselves. Translation represents the meaning that an utterance has, and in that sense translation is a pretty good way of finding out what the expression used in it may mean. In fact, the only way of being sure whether an utterance has any meaning at all is to get someone to translate it for you.
Words Are Even Worse
In Russian, there are two words,
and
, that mean “blue,” but they do not have the same meaning. The first is used for light or pale blue hues, the second for darker, navy or ultramarine shades. So both can be translated into English, subject to the addition of words that specify the quality of blueness involved. But you can’t translate plain English
blue
back into Russian, because whatever you say—whichever of the two adjectives you use—you can’t avoid saying more than the English said. The conventions that hold sway among publishers and the general public do not allow translators to add something that is not in the original text. So if you accept those terms of the trade, you could quickly arrive with impeccable logic at the conclusion that translation is completely impossible.
and, that mean “blue,” but they do not have the same meaning. The first is used for light or pale blue hues, the second for darker, navy or ultramarine shades. So both can be translated into English, subject to the addition of words that specify the quality of blueness involved. But you can’t translate plain Englishblue
back into Russian, because whatever you say—whichever of the two adjectives you use—you can’t avoid saying more than the English said. The conventions that hold sway among publishers and the general public do not allow translators to add something that is not in the original text. So if you accept those terms of the trade, you could quickly arrive with impeccable logic at the conclusion that translation is completely impossible.
Observations of this kind have been used by many eminent scholars to put translation outside of the field of serious thought. Roman Jakobson, a major figure in the history of linguistics, pointed out that
, the Russian word for “cheese,” cannot be used to refer to cottage cheese, which has another name,
, in Russian. As he puts it, “the English word ‘cheese’ cannot be completely identified with its Russian heteronym.”
1
As a result, there is no fully adequate Russian translation of something as apparently simple as the word
cheese
.
, the Russian word for “cheese,” cannot be used to refer to cottage cheese, which has another name,, in Russian. As he puts it, “the English word ‘cheese’ cannot be completely identified with its Russian heteronym.”1
As a result, there is no fully adequate Russian translation of something as apparently simple as the word
cheese
.
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