Authors: David Bellos

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (19 page)

is to be understood as “I have a big house” unless you also explain that it can be broken down into “At me big house” and use this item-by-item representation of the foreign in English disguise to introduce basic grammatical features—for instance, the fact that Russian doesn’t have a definite or indefinite article; that adjectives agree in number, gender, and case with the nouns they qualify; that there is no place for the verb
to be
in a Russian expression of this kind; and that possession may be expressed by a preposition before a personal pronoun, which has to be put into the appropriate grammatical case. Indeed, the grammar explanation I’ve just given is almost meaningless until you have seen it in action in a written expression and been told what each written item stands for.

Some people call this “literal translation,” but it would be better to adopt a distinct term for the parallel, item-by-item explication of an expression in a foreign language for the purpose of teaching how the foreign language works. “Wording” is invaluable, and I don’t think even the most direct of direct methods can do without it at some point. In fact, language learners taught by other methods always reinvent wording for themselves when grappling with a sentence just beyond the level of competence they have reached.

“Wording” gives you a first approach to the shape and order of the language you are learning. It helps not so much to translate as to produce acceptable expressions in the foreign tongue. To translate into the foreign language, you learn first of all to put the source into foreign dress. You learn that “My father has a big car” must first be translated into “At father big car” before you can even start to slot in the Russian expressions that will add up to the sentence with the stated meaning.

Wording is neither a language nor a translation, just an uncommonly helpful intermediate stage in learning how to read and write in a foreign tongue. School translation into L2 also gives the instructor a means of checking whether students have grasped and remembered the shape and order of the language. It’s not a test of an abstract grammar point but of grammar in a context of use. That’s how I learned languages at school. Given good teachers and keen students, it works.

But often it does not. Worse still, it often leaves ex–school students who failed the test pieces with a horror of doing translations, and sometimes a lingering resentment of those who can.

Since the expansion of education in the nineteenth century down to the present day, facing-page printed translations of standard works in foreign languages have helped countless students improve their grasp of grammar and vocabulary and allowed them also to read foreign works at greater speed and thus to understand them more completely. Some facing-page translation series, particularly of Latin and Greek, use techniques very close to wording and are often called “cribs.” Others aim at a more fluent target text, but the constraint of fitting paragraph to paragraph, if not quite line to line, limits the reorganization of material and rephrasing normally found in a literary translation. Penguin Parallel Texts, in the U.K., and the series currently published by Folio in France are of great use to foreign-language learners of Italian, Spanish, Russian, and so forth, and also to people like me who were taught a language long ago and are glad to have some help when revisiting the key texts of youth.

Wording translation and facing-page translation (which almost always uses matching sentence length) are not “bad” ways to translate. They are language operations with specific finali-ties, serving communicative and educational purposes proper to them and to nothing else. Translation is not just one thing; how best to do it depends on what you are doing it for.

However, wording is not what people mean when they call something a literal translation. The so-called literal translation of