Authors: David Bellos

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (3 page)

Pastiche and parody notwithstanding, international scientific English serves an important purpose—and it would barely exist if it did not serve well enough the purposes for which it is used. It is, in a sense, an escape from translation (even if in many of its uses it is already translated from the writer’s native tongue). Now, if the natural and social sciences can achieve a world language, however clumsy it may sound, why should we not wish all other kinds of human contact and interchange to arrive at the same degree of linguistic unification? In the middle of the last century, the critic and reformer I. A. Richards believed with great passion that China could become part of the concert of nations only if it adopted an international language, Basic English, standing for “British-American-Scientific-International-Commercial English” (as its name suggests, it consists of a simplified English grammar and a limited vocabulary suited for technical and commercial use). Richards devoted much of his energy in the second half of his life to devising, promoting, teaching, and propagandizing on behalf of this utopian language of contact between East and West. He was in a way following in the footsteps of Lejzer Zamenhof, a Jewish intellectual from Bia-łystok (now in Poland), who had also invented a language of hope, Esperanto, which he believed would rid the world of the muddles and horrors caused by multiple tongues. In the nineteenth century, in fact, international languages were invented in great number, in proportion to the rise of language-based national independence movements in Europe. All have disappeared for practical purposes, except Esperanto, which continues to be used as a language of culture by perhaps a few hundred thousand people scattered across the globe—though what they use it for most of all is not science or commerce but to translate poetry, drama, and fiction from vernacular languages for the benefit of other Esperantists around the world.

Modern Europeans seem to be haunted by a folk memory of the role of Latin in the Middle Ages and beyond. But Latin itself has continued to have a limited use as an international medium for the speakers of “small” European languages. Antanas Smetona, the last president of Lithuania before it was overrun by Soviet and then Nazi armies in 1941, used Latin to make his last unsuccessful appeal for help from the Allies.
⁸From the other side of the Baltic Sea, a daily news bulletin in Latin is broadcast by Web radio from Helsinki even now.

Language unification, if it ever comes, will probably not be achieved by Latin, Esperanto, Volapük, or some yet-to-be-invented “contact vehicle” but by one of the languages that possesses a big head start already. It will probably not be the language with the largest number of native speakers (currently, Mandarin Chinese) but the one with the largest number of nonnative users, which is English at the present time. This prospect terrifies and dismays many people, for a whole variety of reasons. But a world in which all intercultural communication was carried out in a single idiom would not diminish the variety of human tongues. It would just make native speakers of the international medium less sophisticated users of language than all others, since they alone would have only one language with which to think.

Second or vehicular languages are learned more quickly and also forgotten more easily than native tongues. Over the past fifty years, English has been acquired to some degree by countless millions across the continent of Europe and is now the only common language among speakers of the different native languages of Belgium, for example, or on the island of Cyprus. Russian, on the other hand, which was understood and used by the educated class across the entire sphere of influence of the U.S.S.R., from the Baltic to the Balkans and from Berlin to Outer Mongolia until 1989, has been forgotten very fast and, even when not forgotten entirely, is now usually left to one side for contact with foreigners. If language unification does proceed further in the twenty-first century, its course will be mapped not by the qualities or nature of the unifying language or of the languages it displaces; it will hang on the future course of world history.

Beyond multilingualism and language unification, the third path that leads away from translation is to stop fussing about what other cultures have to say and to stick to one’s own. Isolation has been the dream of many societies, and some have come close to achieving it. During the Edo period (1603–1868), Japan restricted contact with foreigners to a handful of adventurous Dutch, who were allowed to maintain a trading station on an island in Nagasaki harbor, and the Chinese. In Europe, Britain often seemed to wallow in “splendid isolation”—
The Times
of October 22, 1957, famously ran the headline FOG IN CHANNEL, CONTINENT CUT OFF—but that was more pose than reality. Not so in the tiny land of Albania. Enver Hoxha, the country’s Communist ruler from 1944 to 1985, first broke off relations with his nearest neighbor, Yugoslavia, in 1948, then with the Soviet Union in 1960, and then with Mao’s China in 1976. Albania remained committed to total isolation for many years thereafter, and at one point in the early 1980s there were no more than a dozen foreigners (including diplomatic staff) in the whole country.
⁹Televisions were tuned so as to disable the reception of broadcasts from outside the state; only those books that confirmed Albania’s own view of its position in the world were translated (and there were not many of those); no foreign books were imported; commercial exchanges were as limited as cultural and linguistic contacts; and no foreign debts were contracted. On the very doorstep of Europe, just a short hop from the tourist sites of Corfu and the swankier resorts of the Italian Adriatic, Albania’s half century of voluntary isolation shows that relatively large groups of people are sometimes prepared to forgo all the supposed benefits of intercultural exchange.

The dream of isolation comes in many forms, but its recurrent shadow falls over the many stories that anthropologists have told us about preliterate societies living in remote parts of the world. Barely pastiching scientific work of this kind, Georges Perec uses chapter 25 of
Life A User’s Manual
to narrate the life of Marcel Appenzzell, a fictional pupil of the real Marcel Mauss, who set off to the jungle of Sumatra to establish contact with the Anadalams. After a debilitating journey through tropical forests, Appenzzell finally encounters the tribe. They say nothing. He leaves out what he believes to be traditional gifts and falls asleep. When he awakes, the Anadalams have disappeared. They have left his gifts, upended their huts, and walked away. He tracks them through the jungle, catches up with them, and repeats his procedure, believing it to be the right way to establish communication with these “precontact” people. But the result is the same. They leave. And so it goes on, week after terrible week, until the ethnographer grasps that the Anadalams do not want to engage in communication with him, or with anybody else. That is indeed their privilege. A people may choose autarchy in place of contact. Who are we to say that is wrong?

However, in Perec’s telling of this story, the Anadalams exemplify not only pride and self-sufficiency but also linguistic and cultural entropy. They possess a few metal tools they are no
longer capable of fabricating themselves, suggesting they are dropouts from a more developed civilization. Their language also appears to have had a large part of its vocabulary cut away:

One consequence of this … was that the same word came to refer to an ever-increasing number of objects. Thus the Malay word for “hunting,”
Pekee
, meant indifferently to hunt, to walk, to carry, spear, gazelle, antelope, peccary,
my’am
—a type of very hot spice used in meat dishes—as well as forest, tomorrow, dawn, etc. Similarly,
sinuya
, a word which Appenzzell put alongside the Malay
usi
, “banana,” and
nuya
, “coconut,” meant to eat, meal, soup, gourd, spatula, plait, evening, house, pot, fire, silex (the Anadalams made fire by rubbing two flints), fibula, comb, hair,
hoja’
(a hair-dye made from coconut milk mixed with various soils and plants), etc.

The reader can of course jump straight from this description of lexical entropy to the almost moral conviction that isolation is bad, for it leads (as the story shows) to the impoverishment and death of a language and the culture it supports, and ultimately to the extinction of a whole people. But Perec catches such sentimentality on the hop:

Of all the characteristics of the Anadalams, these linguistic habits are the best known, because Appenzzell described them in detail in a long letter to the Swedish philologist Hambo Taskerson … He pointed out in an aside that these characteristics could perfectly well apply to a Western carpenter using tools with precise names—gauge, tonguing plane, moulding plane, jointer, mortise, jack plane, rabbet, etc.—but asking his apprentice to pass them to him by saying just “Gimme the thingummy.”
¹⁰

Perec’s tight-lipped carpenter may serve as a warning for people who too loudly lament the loss of language proficiency among (for example) today’s teenagers and students. The carpenter’s skill as a carpenter is unaffected by the form of words he uses to go about his trade, because there is no relationship of cause and effect between linguistic entropy and cultural riches of most other kinds. The loss of a vocabulary, or its replacement by a less refined one, has no generalized impact on what people can do.

It would similarly be unwise to think that isolation causes languages to wither and die. Indeed, isolation may be the most fertile ground for the diversification and enrichment of forms of speech—the innumerable distinctive jargons created by clannish teenagers in every culture provide a good example of that.

Indeed, there are many richly rewarding activities we perform in contact with others, including others who speak different languages, that don’t need any words at all.

My father once took a trip to Portugal. On unpacking his suitcase he realized he had forgotten to bring his bedroom slippers. He went out, found a shoe shop, selected the footwear he was lacking, got the assistant to find the right size (39E), paid for his purchase, checked the change, expressed his thanks and gestured farewell, and went back to his hotel—all without uttering a word in any language. Every user of a human language must have had or been close to having a language-free intercultural communication of a similar kind. We do use language to communicate, and the language that we use certainly has some bearing on what, with whom, and how we communicate. But that’s only part of the picture. It would be as artificial to limit our grasp of communication to written or even spoken language as it would be to restrict a study of human nutrition to the menus of restaurants in the Michelin Guide.

THREE

Why Do We Call It “Translation”?

Like speech and communication, words and things don’t fill exactly the same space. But there’s worse to come. Not all words have a meaningful relationship to things at all.

C.K. Ogden, the famously eccentric co-author of
The Meaning of Meaning
, believed that much of the world’s troubles could be ascribed to the illusion that a thing exists just because we have a word for it. He called this phenomenon “Word Magic.” Candidates for the label include “levitation,” “real existing socialism,” and “safe investment.” These aren’t outright fictions but illusions licensed and created by the lexicon. In Ogden’s view, Word Magic is what makes us lazy. It stops us from questioning the assumptions that are hidden in words and leads us to allow words to manipulate our minds. It is in this sense that we need to ask: Does “translation” exist? That is to say, is “translation” an actual thing we can identify, define, explore, and understand—or is it just a word?

In English and many other languages the word for translation is a two-headed beast.
A translation
names a product—any work translated from some other language; whereas
translation
, without an article, names a process—the process by which “a translation” comes to exist. This kind of double meaning is not a problem for speakers of languages that possess regular sets of terms referring both to a process and to the product of that process
(as do most Western European languages). Speakers of English, French, and so forth are quite accustomed to negotiating such duplicity and can play games with it, as when they say
walk the walk
and
talk the talk
. More specifically, words derived from Latin that end in English in
-tion
nearly always name a process and a result of that process:
abstraction
(the process of abstracting something) alongside
an abstraction
,
construction
(the business of building structures) alongside
a construction
(something built), and so on. In a related kind of word use, the teacher of a cordon bleu cookery lesson hardly needs to explain that the French use
cuisine
to name both the place where food is prepared (the kitchen) and the results of such preparation (
haute cuisine
,
cuisine bourgeoise
, etc.). Handling the different meanings of
translation
and
a translation
is therefore not a real problem. We should nonetheless keep in mind that they are not the same thing and always be wary of taking one for the other.

The difficulty with
translation
is different. Many diverse kinds of text are habitually identified as instances of “a translation”: books, real estate contracts, car maintenance manuals, poems, plays, legal treatises, philosophical tomes, CD notes, and website texts, to list just a few. What common property do they have to make us believe that they are all instances of the same thing that we label “a translation”? Many language professionals will tell you that translating a manufacturer’s catalog is utterly different from translating a poem. Why do we not have different words for these different actions? There are other languages that have no shortage of separate words to name the many things that in English all go by the name of “a translation.” Here, for example, are the main words that you have to talk about them in Japanese:

If the translation we are discussing is complete, we might call it a
zen’yaku
or a
kan’yaku
… A first translation is a
shoyaku
. A retranslation is a
kaiyaku
, and the new translation is a
shin’yaku
that replaces the old translation, or
ky
yaku
. A translation of a translation is a
j
yaku
. A standard translation that seems unlikely to be replaced is a
teiyaku
; equally unlikely to be replaced is a
mei-yaku
, or “celebrated translation.” When a celebrated translator speaks of her own work, she may disparage it as
setsuyaku
, “clumsy translation,” i.e., “my own translation,” which is not to be confused with a genuinely bad translation, disparaged as a
dayaku
or an