Read Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Online
Authors: David Bellos
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (28 page)
Cultural substitution, for example, can at times be used in translating UP, but to different effect. Arthur Waley’s influential translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry and prose give us English-sounding “Lords” and “Ladies” in place of altogether different social ranks in the ancient societies of the Far East. Waley’s reasons for making these substitutions are as complicated as Nida’s approval of
cockatoo
in place of
snow
. On the one hand, “Lords” and “Ladies” protects English-language readers from having to acquire too much arcane information about a culture they don’t especially wish to learn about. On the other hand, the use of domestic markers of high status reinvests the foreign society represented with recognizable signals of prestige, and thus makes it worth learning about. Translators’ strategic decisions are always two-edged swords.
cockatoo
in place of
snow
. On the one hand, “Lords” and “Ladies” protects English-language readers from having to acquire too much arcane information about a culture they don’t especially wish to learn about. On the other hand, the use of domestic markers of high status reinvests the foreign society represented with recognizable signals of prestige, and thus makes it worth learning about. Translators’ strategic decisions are always two-edged swords.
The technique that seems furthest removed from cultural substitution is the intentional alteration of the target language. Bible translation once again provides us with some extreme examples. In the twentieth century, several scholarly Bible retranslation projects have sought to restore the foreignness of the scriptures for readers already familiar with them in more adaptive forms. The Context Group of the Society of Biblical Literature, for example, argues that “the Bible is not a Western Book” and that it was “not written for us.”
6
Members of the group point out that because language cannot be isolated from the social context in which it is embedded, and because the ancient Middle East is a completely alien land, the Hebrew Bible cannot be fully represented in a translation that makes ordinary sense today.
7
Their program of defamiliarizing biblical texts follows in the footsteps of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Jewish theologians who retranslated the Old Testament into German in the 1920s so as to restore what they saw as the poetic, religious, and communal characteristics of their faith as it was in the beginning.
8
To achieve this, they reproduce the word repetitions and patterns of sound found in the Hebrew at the expense of easy legibility. Thus, where Exodus 3:14–15 in a barely updated version of the King James translation of 1611 is fairly accessible—
6
Members of the group point out that because language cannot be isolated from the social context in which it is embedded, and because the ancient Middle East is a completely alien land, the Hebrew Bible cannot be fully represented in a translation that makes ordinary sense today.
7
Their program of defamiliarizing biblical texts follows in the footsteps of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Jewish theologians who retranslated the Old Testament into German in the 1920s so as to restore what they saw as the poetic, religious, and communal characteristics of their faith as it was in the beginning.
8
To achieve this, they reproduce the word repetitions and patterns of sound found in the Hebrew at the expense of easy legibility. Thus, where Exodus 3:14–15 in a barely updated version of the King James translation of 1611 is fairly accessible—
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM; and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations
—the Buber-Rosenzweig translation, which respects the line breaks of the Hebrew, as well as many other features of that ancient tongue, would sound something like this if it were put into English in like manner:
God said to Moshe:
I will be-there howsoever I will be-there.
And he said:
Thus shall you say to the Children of Israel:
I AM THERE sends me to you.
And God said further to Moshe:
This shall you say to the Children of Israel:
HE,
the God of your fathers
the God of Avraham, the God
of Yitzhak, and the God of Yaakov,
sends me to you.
That is my name for the ages,
that is my title
generation unto generation.
9
Both Nida and Buber were concerned with translating from a “language of truth” into a vernacular—both were translating DOWN, as were Luther, Ruyl, and King James’s translators. One major difference among them lies not in the direction of travel but in the broader location of their particular language pairs in the world hierarchy of tongues: Hebrew, German, Dutch, and Malay occupy places that are not interchangeable with one another. But the main difference is what the translators thought their respective audiences needed and desired. For Ruyl, seventeenth-century Sumatrans needed to learn the story and its overall meaning; but in Buber’s mind, what German Jews in the Weimar Republic needed to learn was what the authentic, original community of Jews had believed. These differences produce curious flips and loops in translation history, whose course has been more sinuous than any theory can easily accommodate.
Buber’s “foreignizing” approach is characteristic of those major programs of translations DOWN—from Greek into Syriac, Italian into French, and Latin into most Western languages—that have left lasting imprints on the receiving language. Ruyl’s and Nida’s strongly adaptive approach, on the other hand, is obviously more often found in translations UP—from vernaculars, be they regional or exotic, into central languages that don’t want to know too much about the source. Modern Bible translation has thus produced a reversal of age-old trends.
By insisting on as much respect for the (foreign) target culture as possible, Nida’s recommended style of translating scriptures DOWN applies procedures more commonly found in translations UP; whereas the exoticizing style of Buber (and, after him, of Henri Meschonnic in France), which has been more typically applied to translation DOWN in the last few thousand years, is motivated by scrupulous respect for the radical difference of a now almost inaccessible culture and form of speech.
Both methodologies seek to pay respect where respect is due: there is no conflict in overall motivation. But where Buber has little respect for the linguistic norms of contemporary German, Nida doesn’t think that the specific qualities of snow matter very much when set beside the overriding aim of getting the message across.
The degree to which either of these ideas of translation can affect the receiving language and culture doesn’t really depend on their intrinsic merits as translation methodologies or on the brilliance of their users. It depends on volume. Leaving the special features of Bible translation to the side, we can say that the reciprocal flow of translations between any two languages is never equal and in most cases utterly unbalanced. The direction of flow is the key to understanding which way is UP, and what happens down below.
Translation Impacts
Some Bible translations have had profound and lasting effects on the receiving language. Luther’s Bible is considered the first monument of modern German, and the King James Bible remains an inescapable reference point in the history of English. However, such impacts are not typical of translation in general. Individual translators do not often produce the smallest ripple in the target culture. However, continuing waves of translated works in particular fields always leave the receiving language in a significantly different shape.
That was clear to Friedrich Schleiermacher when he set out to explain how the Greek classics should best be translated into German. It wasn’t any one book that would make the difference, he insisted, but only large-scale translation of Greek philosophy and drama that could help the German language “to flourish and develop its own perfect power through the most varied contacts with what is foreign.”
1
But depending on the relation between the original and the receiving society, the target may get hit in radically different ways.
1
But depending on the relation between the original and the receiving society, the target may get hit in radically different ways.
English-language translations of French critical theory from the 1960s to the 1990s, for example, have made abstract discourse about literature in English sound much more like French than it ever did before. In the reverse direction, the language of celebrity journalism in French has been quite transformed by the mass import of English-language styles:
la presse people
(pronounced
pi-pol
) exhibits unmistakable signs of what is now denounced as the homogenization of tongues.
la presse people
(pronounced
pi-pol
) exhibits unmistakable signs of what is now denounced as the homogenization of tongues.
It’s not just a matter of vocabulary. A small but quite profound change in the way dialogue is introduced in Swedish narrative can be traced back to its source in translations of English-language novels.
2
Constructions of the following type are ten a penny in modern English fiction of all kinds:
2
Constructions of the following type are ten a penny in modern English fiction of all kinds:
1.
“Don’t try,” she said with disdain.2.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said calmly.3.
“And now you must go to sleep,” he said in a tone that was friendly but authoritative.4.
“Get out,” said Frank abruptly.
The grammar of Swedish does not make this kind of construction impossible. However, placing a verb of saying together with a modifier (“with disdain,” “calmly,” “abruptly”) after direct speech is fairly unusual in Swedish novel-writing style. In a representative corpus of thirty novels written originally in Swedish, the construction occurs 64 times, but in a parallel corpus of about the same size consisting of novels translated into Swedish from English, it occurs 484 times. This “fingerprint” of English—of one of the English novel’s habitual “dialogue props”—has now been integrated into original writing in Swedish, where it is characteristic not of literary fiction in general but of detective fiction in particular. It’s one of those small yet significant merg-ings of language and style that are often attacked as unintended results of globalization. But Swedish detective fiction has had sweet revenge. Its language may have been infiltrated by an English-language device for the presentation of dialogue, but hard-boiled Swedish crime fiction by Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson has now conquered the world’s bestseller lists.
Merging of another kind has been vigorously proposed by the American lawyer Preston Torbert. In his work for U.S. companies doing business in China, he has had to deal with hundreds of contracts that had to be written in two languages—English and Chinese—and have equal validity and force in two jurisdictions. It’s a tall order because their legal traditions have grown up in isolation over many centuries and don’t have many matching terms.
3
3
One difficulty arises from what is called the “class presumption” in American law. If a contract says that one of its clauses applies to “any house, apartment, cottage, or other building” on some piece of land, for example, that “other building” means, by the force of the class presumption, only another building of the class constituted by “house, apartment, cottage”—that is to say, a residential building. This construction of the sentence is contrary to English usage in a nonlegal context, where “other building” may plausibly refer to a factory, a space station, or a folly.
Chinese does not have a term for “class presumption,” and its legal culture does not allow for it, either. If the restriction expressed in English is translated without additional modification, the Chinese characters for
other building
refer equally plausibly to a factory or a workshop as to a residential building, a meaning that the “class presumption” of American legal English specifically excludes. You could, of course, insert additional Chinese characters to say “or any other
similar
building,” “or any other building
of the same class
,” “or any other
residential
construction.” But if it came to a dispute in court, a smart lawyer might be able to claim that the two versions of the contract were not exactly equivalent, since the English contains no words that correspond to the added characters.
other building
refer equally plausibly to a factory or a workshop as to a residential building, a meaning that the “class presumption” of American legal English specifically excludes. You could, of course, insert additional Chinese characters to say “or any other
similar
building,” “or any other building
of the same class
,” “or any other
residential
construction.” But if it came to a dispute in court, a smart lawyer might be able to claim that the two versions of the contract were not exactly equivalent, since the English contains no words that correspond to the added characters.
The solution proposed by Torbert is to draft the English in such a way that its Chinese translation is not a problem—that is to say, to modify the source-language text to make it better suited to translation into the target language. Moreover, such a change would make American legalese less arcane, which is of benefit to everybody. The solution is so simple that it makes you wonder why American contracts have not always said “house, apartment, cottage, or other
similar
building.” Torbert’s answer is that it is because legal drafters have not had Chinese to help them until now. Chinese can teach English-language lawyers how to say what they mean.
similar
building.” Torbert’s answer is that it is because legal drafters have not had Chinese to help them until now. Chinese can teach English-language lawyers how to say what they mean.
Translation impacts such as these are obviously tiny. French, English, Swedish, and Chinese have not been altered by them, just lightly massaged at the edges—at least, so far. But the translation of the Gospels into Bosavi, a language spoken by small communities of rain-forest dwellers on the Great Papuan Plateau, has had much more far-reaching effects.
4
4
Before the Bosavi were converted to Christianity in the 1970s, their culture (somewhat like that of ancient Rome) did not recognize sincerity as a concept. It was what people said in public that was taken seriously; private thoughts and the conformity of outward behavior with inner states was not a concern. But sincerity—the correspondence between saying something and meaning it—is integral to the message that Christian missionaries brought. The Asia Pacific Christian Mission regarded vernacular languages as “the shrine of a people’s soul” and was therefore committed to teaching the gospels in Bosavi. However, none of the missionaries was a field linguist, and none became fluent in the language. In addition, Bosavi people in general spoke no other tongue: for trade contacts, they had always relied on speakers in bordering villages who could translate through a neighboring language and, in more recent times, on the regional contact language, Tok Pisin.
The missionaries used the
Nupela Testamen
, the New Testament translated into Tok Pisin—not from Latin or Greek but from the simplified English text called the American Good News Bible, first published in 1966, aimed at children and uneducated adults. Use of the intermediary language limited the mission’s initial contact to a small group of young Bosavi men who had worked outside the area and acquired some Tok Pisin. The missionaries taught them basic literacy and then set them on the road as missionizers themselves. At the rudimentary services these new converts organized in the small villages, they read aloud from the
Nupela Testamen
, then improvised an oral translation into Bosavi, either in small sections or after a whole passage. Given the translation method, it’s not surprising that they introduced many Tok Pisin words and ways of saying into Bosavi as they went along. But the true impact of these “language turners” lies at a deeper level than that.
Nupela Testamen
, the New Testament translated into Tok Pisin—not from Latin or Greek but from the simplified English text called the American Good News Bible, first published in 1966, aimed at children and uneducated adults. Use of the intermediary language limited the mission’s initial contact to a small group of young Bosavi men who had worked outside the area and acquired some Tok Pisin. The missionaries taught them basic literacy and then set them on the road as missionizers themselves. At the rudimentary services these new converts organized in the small villages, they read aloud from the
Nupela Testamen
, then improvised an oral translation into Bosavi, either in small sections or after a whole passage. Given the translation method, it’s not surprising that they introduced many Tok Pisin words and ways of saying into Bosavi as they went along. But the true impact of these “language turners” lies at a deeper level than that.
Bosavi is one of the many languages that possess
evidentials
, grammatical forms that indicate how something is known—by sight, by hearsay, or by deduction (
see here
). Tok Pisin, by contrast, does not. So when it came to improvising a Bosavi version of the Tok Pisin version of the Good News version of a Bible story focused on the difference between what people thought and what they said, the newly minted Papuan missionaries had a huge problem, exemplified by the phrases in italics below:
evidentials
, grammatical forms that indicate how something is known—by sight, by hearsay, or by deduction (
see here
). Tok Pisin, by contrast, does not. So when it came to improvising a Bosavi version of the Tok Pisin version of the Good News version of a Bible story focused on the difference between what people thought and what they said, the newly minted Papuan missionaries had a huge problem, exemplified by the phrases in italics below:
Jesus said to the paralyzed man, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” Some teachers of the law who were sitting there
thought to themselves
, “How does he dare talk like this? This is blasphemy!” God is the only one who can forgive sins. At once Jesus
knew what they were thinking
, so he said to them, “
Why do you think
such things? Is it easier to say this to a paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say ‘Get up, pick up your mat, and walk’? I will prove to you then, that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, “I tell you, get up, pick up your mat, and go home!”
Tok Pisin uses
na long bel belong
, literally “in belly of them,” to express “in their hearts” or “in their minds,” and in the
Nupela Testamen
this phrase stands together with
tingting
, “think,” to express the fact that the teachers of the law “thought” something without saying so. The Bosavi oral translators couldn’t say anything quite so ungrounded in evidence. One recorded version has Jesus knowing by direct visual evidence what the men of law were thinking—the evidential suffix
-lo: b
is added to the verb for “think.” Also, it adds a tag,
a: la: sa: lab
, to the whole line, meaning something like “it says,” or at any rate grounding the source of the knowledge not in the actual speaker but in some external authority. But versions varied among different preachers and occasions quite considerably, until a formal borrowing (a syntactic calque) from Tok Pisin became accepted as a new way of referring to “inner thought,” thought not evidenced by words spoken aloud:
kufa
, literally, “of belly,” prefixed to the verb for “think.” The effort of translation has altered the language of Bosavi, and with it, a whole mental world. “Private thoughts” are now “belly-think” in Bosavi, or, to put it the other way around, thanks to frontline and improvised language mediation, what a speaker of Bosavi can now do with his belly has undergone a huge change.
na long bel belong
, literally “in belly of them,” to express “in their hearts” or “in their minds,” and in the
Nupela Testamen
this phrase stands together with
tingting
, “think,” to express the fact that the teachers of the law “thought” something without saying so. The Bosavi oral translators couldn’t say anything quite so ungrounded in evidence. One recorded version has Jesus knowing by direct visual evidence what the men of law were thinking—the evidential suffix
-lo: b
is added to the verb for “think.” Also, it adds a tag,
a: la: sa: lab
, to the whole line, meaning something like “it says,” or at any rate grounding the source of the knowledge not in the actual speaker but in some external authority. But versions varied among different preachers and occasions quite considerably, until a formal borrowing (a syntactic calque) from Tok Pisin became accepted as a new way of referring to “inner thought,” thought not evidenced by words spoken aloud:
kufa
, literally, “of belly,” prefixed to the verb for “think.” The effort of translation has altered the language of Bosavi, and with it, a whole mental world. “Private thoughts” are now “belly-think” in Bosavi, or, to put it the other way around, thanks to frontline and improvised language mediation, what a speaker of Bosavi can now do with his belly has undergone a huge change.
Changes brought about in the life of the Bosavi by the missionary effort obviously go far beyond the grammar and vocabulary of their language. However, the change in the way speakers of Bosavi can now conceptualize and refer to “inner life” is not only an effect of conversion to Christianity but also a direct impact of translation—the translation of the gospels from Tok Pisin into the Bosavi tongue.
Most commentaries on the effects of translation on receiving cultures of the remote or recent past use words such as
enrich
,
extend
, and
improve
to describe how the target was hit. But when we can see and hear it happening in our own present time, quite other metaphors crop up:
distort
,
mangle
, and
homogenize
come to mind. The role of evidentials in Bosavi grammar has been irreparably diminished by the improvised calques from Tok Pisin that provide a way of talking about things that have no evidential status at all. From some points of view that has mangled a unique and irreplaceable mental world. Similarly, we could say that the mass import of English-style celebrity gossip into French media has produced a stylistic monstrosity that cheapens the language itself. However, in other times and places, much greater lexical and stylistic changes of the same nature have given rise not to lamentation but to feelings of the opposite kind. For example, Japanese translators imported many scientific terms from European languages in the late nineteenth century, and most users of those new terms considered their language had been enriched by them. Similarly, in the fourth to eighth centuries C.E., Syriac (a Semitic language closely related to Aramaic) is said to have flowered in the hands of Severus Sebokht, a bishop, scholar, and translator who imported quantities of Greek words and expressions together with the mathematical, medical, and astronomical knowledge of the ancient Greeks that the Latin West had ignored (and would not rediscover for centuries, until Arabic translations of those Syriac translations of Greek science were translated once again in the middle of the twelfth century C.E., in Toledo [Spain], by Gerard of Cremona, into Latin, for wider distribution throughout Europe).
5
enrich
,
extend
, and
improve
to describe how the target was hit. But when we can see and hear it happening in our own present time, quite other metaphors crop up:
distort
,
mangle
, and
homogenize
come to mind. The role of evidentials in Bosavi grammar has been irreparably diminished by the improvised calques from Tok Pisin that provide a way of talking about things that have no evidential status at all. From some points of view that has mangled a unique and irreplaceable mental world. Similarly, we could say that the mass import of English-style celebrity gossip into French media has produced a stylistic monstrosity that cheapens the language itself. However, in other times and places, much greater lexical and stylistic changes of the same nature have given rise not to lamentation but to feelings of the opposite kind. For example, Japanese translators imported many scientific terms from European languages in the late nineteenth century, and most users of those new terms considered their language had been enriched by them. Similarly, in the fourth to eighth centuries C.E., Syriac (a Semitic language closely related to Aramaic) is said to have flowered in the hands of Severus Sebokht, a bishop, scholar, and translator who imported quantities of Greek words and expressions together with the mathematical, medical, and astronomical knowledge of the ancient Greeks that the Latin West had ignored (and would not rediscover for centuries, until Arabic translations of those Syriac translations of Greek science were translated once again in the middle of the twelfth century C.E., in Toledo [Spain], by Gerard of Cremona, into Latin, for wider distribution throughout Europe).
5
The Christian fundamentalists who converted the Bosavi people may indeed believe they enriched the language of the souls they have saved; and I suppose there may have been Syrian naysayers all those years ago who thought the mass import of Greek terms had wrecked their own ancient tongue. But the fact is that attitudes toward language change induced or accelerated by translation are not motivated exclusively by feelings about language or about translation. They arise from deeply seated and far less tractable ideas.
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