Read Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Online
Authors: David Bellos
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (20 page)
is not “At me big house” but “I have a big house.” That’s to say, all that is actually meant by calling something a literal translation is a version that preserves meaning in grammatical forms appropriate to the language of the translation. Octavio Paz was right to say that there is no such thing as a literal translation! It’s just a translation—a plain, ordinary, actual translation of the source. The left-side player in the long and frustrating game of squash between “literal” and “free” doesn’t really exist. It’s just the shadow of another, more ancient world. But shadows can be quite frightening even when you know they don’t exist.
The Issue of Trust: The Long Shadow of Oral Translation
There used to be many good reasons to mistrust translators. War, diplomacy, trade, and exploration are activities where trust is both crucial and difficult to grant—and also the key fields in which translators work. If you don’t know the language of your enemy or your partner, you depend entirely on the people who do—and there’s nothing like dependency to foster resentment and fear.
The user’s mistrust is a big issue in all kinds of translation, but its role ought to be rather different in the two main branches of language work: oral translation and the translation of written texts. Oral mediation—the translation of live speech, straightaway and in situ—has been around for much longer than writing. In all likelihood it’s been a human language skill since the emergence of speech itself, tens if not hundreds of thousands of years ago. For up to 90 percent of its history, translating, alongside language itself, has been an exclusively spoken affair. The inheritance of oral translating affects how we think about translation even now.
Writing transformed and multiplied the uses of language and naturally affected the ways in which it is possible to think and talk about it. We are now so thoroughly accustomed to the existence and use of script that it’s hard to imagine what life is like for someone who does not know how to read or write. It’s harder still to imagine living and speaking in a society in which nobody has an inkling that anything like writing could exist. But those are the circumstances in which translation first emerged, and where it stayed for tens of thousands of years. Indeed, the archaeological evidence that we have of the origins of script suggests that alphabetic writing emerged in multilingual cities and empires in the Middle East, where translation was already of paramount importance.
1
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The fundamental difference between oral cultures and those that have writing is that only in the latter can an utterance be brought to life a second time. In “primary orality,” language is nothing other than speech, and speech vanishes without a trace the moment it is done.
2
Translation likewise. You can check, evaluate, test, or trust a translation only when you have a means of returning to it later on.
2
Translation likewise. You can check, evaluate, test, or trust a translation only when you have a means of returning to it later on.
This would be of purely antiquarian interest if everything had changed overnight upon the invention of script. But that was obviously not the case. The mental transformation that writing prompted did not happen all at once; in some respects, it did not begin to affect the vast mass of humanity until a few generations ago.
3
Residues of the older oral order persisted for millennia, and persist even now. They affect our feelings and fears about translation quite directly.
3
Residues of the older oral order persisted for millennia, and persist even now. They affect our feelings and fears about translation quite directly.
A clue to the enduring presence of orality in our now thoroughly typographical world is the way we still use the word
word
. It does not always mean the hazy and problematic items you find printed as headwords in dictionaries. In fact, in much of our everyday use of language it means something else.
word
. It does not always mean the hazy and problematic items you find printed as headwords in dictionaries. In fact, in much of our everyday use of language it means something else.
When I “give you my word” that I’ll do the washing-up tonight, I am not giving you a “word” in the dictionary sense. I am making a promise, and grounding your trust in the promise thus made in the fact that the person speaking the promise is me.
“My word” is simply my saying of it. In this usage,
word
means not a unit of speaking but the act of speech itself. Similarly, when I call a friend “a man of his word,” I make no reference to his using some particular lexical item. I mean to say that whatever my friend undertakes to do by an act of speech is to be taken seriously, because it was he who said it.
word
means not a unit of speaking but the act of speech itself. Similarly, when I call a friend “a man of his word,” I make no reference to his using some particular lexical item. I mean to say that whatever my friend undertakes to do by an act of speech is to be taken seriously, because it was he who said it.
In French, the distinction between “word as act” and “word as unit” is made clearer by the general use of
parole
for the first and
mot
for the second. In German, too, there is a trace of the fundamental divide in the meaning of the word
word
in the two different plurals of
Wort
—
Worte
for acts of speech and
Wörter
for entries in a
Wörterbuch
.
parole
for the first and
mot
for the second. In German, too, there is a trace of the fundamental divide in the meaning of the word
word
in the two different plurals of
Wort
—
Worte
for acts of speech and
Wörter
for entries in a
Wörterbuch
.
There is of course a real connection between these two divergent associations of
word
. Both of them name the smallest handy unit of speech. It’s just that since the invention of alphabetic script we’ve grown completely accustomed to thinking that the true form of what we say is the way it looks when written down. “Scriptism,” as Roy Harris called the illusion that a language consists of things called words, has served us well for a few thousand years, but it has a downside as well. It makes it harder to understand what translation does.
word
. Both of them name the smallest handy unit of speech. It’s just that since the invention of alphabetic script we’ve grown completely accustomed to thinking that the true form of what we say is the way it looks when written down. “Scriptism,” as Roy Harris called the illusion that a language consists of things called words, has served us well for a few thousand years, but it has a downside as well. It makes it harder to understand what translation does.
The uses in many Western languages of words meaning “word” to refer to acts of speech are perseverating traces of primary orality. The status of any utterance in a mental world without script derives mainly from the identity of the speaker, much less from the “meanings” of the “words” that are spoken. The concepts in scare quotes are probably not even thinkable without writing. The indeterminacy of the flow of speech and the dependence of meaning on the human context in an oral culture are pinpointed with affection and insight by Tolstoy in his portrait of the illiterate peasant-philosopher Platon Karatayev, in
War and Peace
:
War and Peace
:
Platon could never recall what he had said a moment before, just as he could never tell Pierre [Bezukhov] the words of his favourite song … He did not understand and could not grasp the meaning of words apart from their context … His words and actions flowed from him as smoothly, as inevitably and as spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value or significance of any word or deed taken separately.
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“Translating” in this kind of cultural circumstance calls for a special kind of trust. If the force of an utterance is intimately linked to the identity of the speaker, then it can’t be conveyed by any other speaker. That fundamental rule has to be suspended for oral translation to come into existence, since it requires the listener to take the words of the translator as if they had been uttered by the speaker of a foreign tongue. Oral translation in a world without writing creates and relies on a fiction—perhaps the earliest fictional invention of all. The first great leap forward in the history of translation must have been when some two communities found a way of agreeing that the speech of the translator was to be taken as having the same force as the immediately prior speech of the principal.
It’s not hard to account for the existence of bilinguals in early human societies: taking brides from different communities and taking slaves from vanquished enemies are ancient practices, and both of them can easily result in people who understand two different languages. But there’s a great difference between bilingualism and translation. For the latter to exist, huge intellectual and emotional obstacles to taking the word of another for the word of the source have to be overcome. They can be overcome only by a shared willingness to enter a realm in which meaning cannot be completely guaranteed. That kind of trust is perhaps the foundation of all culture.
But that trust is never granted without reservation. To conduct negotiation or trade between two communities speaking mutually incomprehensible tongues, the principal relies on the translator and is in his power, just as the translator serves one master only and is entirely in his power. The situation is guaranteed to create anxiety, suspicion, and mistrust.
The fear of imperfect or deceptive performance by an oral translator affects the translation protocols for private meetings between world leaders today. Each side brings along his or her own oral translator. When the British prime minister talks to the French president in confidential, face-to-face encounters, the person employed by Her Majesty’s Government speaks in French on behalf of the prime minister, and the French translator similarly speaks back the French president’s words in English. Such two-handed, one-way speech translation, out of the mother tongue and into the foreign, is never seen in public.
5
These arrangements hark back directly to the issue of trust in oral translation. Translators are no longer slaves, but states still have greater recourse against employees who have signed confidentiality agreements than against a translator hired by the other side.
5
These arrangements hark back directly to the issue of trust in oral translation. Translators are no longer slaves, but states still have greater recourse against employees who have signed confidentiality agreements than against a translator hired by the other side.
This costly double dose of oral interpreting is rare, but not solely because it is expensive. Outside of private head-of-state encounters, almost all speech by politicians, diplomats, and public figures begins and ends its life on the page. Delegates at the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council, for example, read from prepared texts, and often the interpreters translating the speech simultaneously into (any five out of) English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic have the original text in front of them. All six language versions are recorded on tape and these recordings are used by the UN Documentation Division to produce the “Verbatim,” the official written record of what was said. This allows translation errors to be trapped and corrected, but, more significantly, it allows delegates to correct what they
actually
said. The “Verbatim,” the final official repository of UN proceedings, is not actually verbatim at all—it’s a rewritten version of a written text that passed through an untrusted oral stage in the interim. In large areas of national and international affairs, speech has now become a secondary medium, a by-product of writing. But this is a very recent state of affairs. Our thoughts and feelings about language and translation, together with many of the things we say about it, have much older sources.
actually
said. The “Verbatim,” the final official repository of UN proceedings, is not actually verbatim at all—it’s a rewritten version of a written text that passed through an untrusted oral stage in the interim. In large areas of national and international affairs, speech has now become a secondary medium, a by-product of writing. But this is a very recent state of affairs. Our thoughts and feelings about language and translation, together with many of the things we say about it, have much older sources.
Between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Ottoman Empire held in its not always steady sway mostly illiterate populations speaking a great number of different languages. Throughout these five centuries, the administration of this vast and elaborate state was carried out in Ottoman Turkish—a partly artificial hybrid of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic vocabulary held together by Turkish grammar, with some Persian syntax added on, written in an adapted Arabic script that was not particularly well suited to it. It was the official language of the court at Istanbul, but outside the circle of imperial grandees and civil servants Ottoman Turkish did not have many speakers. Its written form was of course used for the state’s labyrinthine archives—by some accounts, the Ottomans even kept records of people’s dreams.
6
However, one characteristic of Ottoman society was a paranoid suspicion of forgery, and as a result writing was not used for all purposes of state. Strong residues of orality—of a trust in personal speech over the impersonal technology of writing—affected the management of public affairs and, most especially, its use of translators.
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However, one characteristic of Ottoman society was a paranoid suspicion of forgery, and as a result writing was not used for all purposes of state. Strong residues of orality—of a trust in personal speech over the impersonal technology of writing—affected the management of public affairs and, most especially, its use of translators.
Ottoman society, like those of the Greeks and the Romans, made slaves of a significant proportion of its subjects, and it recruited translators from among the young boys sent back from the provinces to Istanbul as obligatory payment for the protection the empire provided. Most of these enforced bilinguals served the internal needs of the empire, since they spoke one of its regional languages and received an education in Ottoman Turkish. Its external translation needs for trade, war, and diplomacy were served mostly by other means.
The Ottomans were Muslims and could therefore communicate with many of the peoples on the southern and eastern borders of the empire in Arabic, which was either a native or a vehicular tongue over a wide area. But contact with Western Europe was not so easy. In no region of the empire were any of the Western languages taught. Initially, therefore, the training of cadres who could handle relations with the West was farmed out to the Republic of Venice, which had long-standing ties with many parts of the Mediterranean that had fallen into Ottoman hands.
From the late fifteenth century on, Venice dispatched plenipotentiaries on two-year postings to Istanbul to run the
bailo
, which was something like a translator’s school. It recruited adolescent apprentices called “language boys”—
giovani di lingua
, a translation of the Turkish
dil o
lan
—across the Venetian and Ottoman territories and turned them into loyal, Italian-speaking Venetian subjects capable of talking to the Turks. Many of the recruits came from the Greek-speaking Roman Catholic community that had settled in a quarter of Istanbul called Pera, or Phanari in Greek, and Phanariots eventually became a hereditary “translation caste” within the stratified world of Ottoman society. By the early seventeenth century, the whole business of translation at the highest levels of the Ottoman state was in the hands of closely linked families of Phanariots, whose status was partly protected by the fact that many of them also held Venetian citizenship by inheritance. But they did not translate very much into or out of Greek: they were trained to translate Ottoman Turkish into Italian, and sometimes Arabic as well. They became richly rewarded grandees. Based in Istanbul, they sent their sons to Italian universities before bringing them back to continue the family trade.
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bailo
, which was something like a translator’s school. It recruited adolescent apprentices called “language boys”—
giovani di lingua
, a translation of the Turkish
dil o
lan—across the Venetian and Ottoman territories and turned them into loyal, Italian-speaking Venetian subjects capable of talking to the Turks. Many of the recruits came from the Greek-speaking Roman Catholic community that had settled in a quarter of Istanbul called Pera, or Phanari in Greek, and Phanariots eventually became a hereditary “translation caste” within the stratified world of Ottoman society. By the early seventeenth century, the whole business of translation at the highest levels of the Ottoman state was in the hands of closely linked families of Phanariots, whose status was partly protected by the fact that many of them also held Venetian citizenship by inheritance. But they did not translate very much into or out of Greek: they were trained to translate Ottoman Turkish into Italian, and sometimes Arabic as well. They became richly rewarded grandees. Based in Istanbul, they sent their sons to Italian universities before bringing them back to continue the family trade.
7
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