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Authors: David Bellos

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In the French booth: two interpreters, one listening in Spanish and English, the other listening in Russian and English, and giving out in French
In the English booth: two interpreters, one listening in French and Russian, the other listening in Spanish and French, and giving out in English
In the Spanish booth: two interpreters, both listening in English and French, and giving out in Spanish
In the Russian booth: two interpreters, both listening in either Spanish or French as well as English, and giving out in Russian
In the Chinese booth: three interpreters working shifts, taking in English and Chinese and giving out in Chinese and English
In the Arabic booth: three interpreters working shifts, taking in French or English and Arabic and giving out in Arabic and English or French
 
In other words, Chinese gets into Spanish, French, and Russian by relay from the English channel, and Arabic gets into Spanish and Russian by relay either from English or, most often, from French; Spanish and Russian get into Chinese by relay from the English channel, and into Arabic by relay from French. If the Russian interpreter in the English booth has gone to the bathroom, then the Russian channel also gets into English by relay from the French booth; similarly, if the Spanish interpreter in the French booth has a nosebleed, Spanish gets into French by relay from English.
Relay, or double translation, is in principle a bad idea, as the possibility of error is increased, as is the time lag between the delegate’s speech and the output in listeners’ headphones. Also, the fact that Chinese and Arabic interpreters work both into their A language and from it into English is not a good idea—working both ways at once more than doubles the mental stress involved. But the devices of relay (double translation) and
retour
(one interpreter working in two directions) are godsends for the UN officials whose task is to ensure the smooth running of the meetings. Without relay and
retour
the whole system would be vastly more expensive—and it’s not exactly cheap as it is.
In the European Union, further refinements are used to ensure that meetings of a body with twenty-four official languages can be coped with. Full symmetrical interpreting under Nuremberg rules—that’s to say, each translation direction being supplied by a single dedicated interpreter—would require a team of 552 interpreters, exceeding by far the number of delegates taking part in any meeting, and that’s clearly not feasible. The system works like this:
When all participants in a meeting understand at least one of the EU’s working languages (English, French, German, and Italian)—and this is nearly always the case—then an asymmetrical language regime is used. “Asymmetry” means that participants may speak in any of the official languages (as long as they let the interpreting service know which one ahead of time), but may listen in only one of the four working languages. Such a meeting would be said to have a “24:4” language regime. If each translation direction were served by a dedicated individual, that would require up to eighty interpreters per session, which is still far too many.
The number is further reduced by interpreters with two A languages who can work into both, a device called
cheval
, but also, most crucially, by
retour
—interpreters who work into their B language as well. The greatest economy of all is of course made by relay. When the Lithuanian delegate speaks, an interpreter with Lithuanian B provides a simultaneous German translation, which the German–English, German–French, and German–Italian interpreters use for their versions in the working languages (and in a 24:4 regime, no further language versions are required). In this example, the hub or pivot language is German; for other languages at the same imaginary meeting, the hub may be English, French, or Italian, bringing the total number of actual bodies needed to service a meeting under 24:4 to a maximum of twenty-eight, and quite a lot fewer if (for example) the Portuguese–French interpreter also does Spanish when French is the hub language, or the Swedish–German interpreter also does Danish when German is the pivot. Because all EU interpreters must have two B languages, the use of asymmetric regimes together with
cheval
,
retour
, and relay suffice to provide just about affordable simultaneous interpreting in Brussels and Luxembourg, and at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
7
At the UN, the system is often invisible to users. Interpreters are placed at the rear or the side of the assembly hall behind soundproofed and tinted glass screens. You can attend a dozen meetings without even realizing the interpreters are physically present—so it’s only natural they should get taken for granted. What’s more insidious than the occlusion of the interpreting magic, however, is the impression that anything you say can be simultaneously heard in all other tongues. Conference interpreting, glamorous though it is, buries the real difficulties—and the real interest—of language transfer beneath sophisticated, almost circuslike tricks of the language trade. It makes people think that it’s only a matter of time before we can all have a device to stick in our ear—the “Babel fish” of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
—to provide us with instant communication with all the peoples on earth.
Unlike most translators in written mode and a high proportion of consecutive interpreters, conference interpreters are rarely specialists in any particular field and come closest to being pure language professionals. Few domain-specific organizations are sufficiently large to justify having salaried interpreters on their books: only sixty-seven organizations in the world employ members of AIIC (the interpreters’ professional body) as full-time staff, and only four (the UN in Geneva and New York, and two of the International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague) employ more than ten. As a result, most of the three thousand members of AIIC (and a roughly equal number of nonmembers) work freelance and travel from conference to conference, dealing with all sorts and kinds of topics. Fast-talking yet good listeners, interpreters must be both alert and relaxed, able to tolerate unspeakably boring harangues but also quick to pick up the gist when something entirely new comes on the agenda. They belong to a rare breed.
They might become even rarer, because there are several threats to the survival of the species. First, the precipitous decline in the teaching of foreign languages in the English-speaking world in the last fifty years means that there are ever fewer entrants to the profession with English A. If you prevented boys from having bicycles, then the Tour de France would become a celebration of geriatric fitness in a decade or two, and then stop. If you don’t teach native English speakers two languages out of Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and French intensively to high levels while they are young, you will not have candidates for interpreter training within ten or fifteen years. There are many English–Spanish bilinguals, of course, but very few of them have another UN language to the requisite degree of fluency. If the requirement were lowered from two to one foreign language for English A, then the system could be run on relay and
retour
, and staffing problems would be less acute. However, because ten applicants to a translators’ school produce no more than five entrants, and because barely one third of those graduating will be found good enough to enter the profession, large investment in language education throughout the English-speaking world is urgently needed. Without it, the next cohort of our politicians and diplomats, businessmen and consultants, human rights campaigners, international lawyers, and policy wonks may well be reduced to stuffing fish in both ears.
A second threat to maintaining current language practice in international organizations is that some states may become unwilling to finance simultaneous interpretation into languages that are ceasing to be global vehicular tongues—but the replacement of Russian (for example) may prove politically impossible for many decades yet, and nobody has a clear idea of what might replace French.
But the bigger threat looming on the horizon is something that’s going on right now in research labs in New Jersey and elsewhere. Using the technology of speech recognition that allows a widely available word processor to generate text from speech, alongside the speech synthesis systems that power today’s automated answering machines, the FAHQT target that current U.S. science policy encourages could well become FAHQST—fully automated, high-quality speech translation. Experimental systems not very far from commercial release already produce running English text from Spanish speech. I may not live to see or hear it, but many of you probably will: automated interpreting for the secondary orality of predictable international diplomatic prose, for tourist inquiries at hotel reception desks, and maybe for other uses as well.
You will then enter the era of tertiary orality. It will be another world.
 
Match Me If You Can: Translating Humor
 
A relatively uncontentious way of saying what translation does is this: it provides for some community an acceptable match for an utterance made in a foreign tongue. This doesn’t go very far, but as it applies equally well to conference interpreting, comic strips, legal contracts, and novels, it’s a reasonable place to start.
What it leaves open are three huge questions:
1.
What makes a match acceptable?
2.
Which of the infinite catalog of qualities that any utterance has are those that a translation may or must make match?
3.
What do we mean by “match,” anyway?
 
Those are the questions that translation studies has always sought to answer, sometimes under heavy academic disguise. “Translation quality evaluation criteria,” for example, is a label for answers to question 1. But whatever way you ask these three questions, the answers are not easy to provide.
All sorts of criteria may be involved in judgments made by different people at different times about the acceptability of a match—theoretical criteria, or practical, social, or cultural ones, and no doubt, on occasions, purely arbitrary ones, too (such as the translator is a famous prizewinner and
must
have got it right). Trying to rank these criteria or to distribute them to classes of situations where they might apply seems too complicated by half. It is perhaps more fruitful to work in from the outside edge and to begin by looking at places where matches are commonly believed to be extremely difficult to find.
One area flagged by nearly all translation commentary as being match-poor is utterances that raise a laugh or a smile. Here’s an old Soviet joke about Stalin:
Stalin and Roosevelt had an argument about whose bodyguards were more loyal and ordered them to jump out of the window on the fifteenth floor. Roosevelt’s bodyguard flatly refused to jump, saying, “I’m thinking about the future of my family.” Stalin’s bodyguard, however, jumped out of the window and fell to his death. Roosevelt was taken aback.
“Tell me, why did your man do that?” he asked.
Stalin lit his pipe and replied: “He was thinking about the future of his family, too.”
1
Well, that’s a translation (from Russian), and even in Russian it’s a translation already, because exactly the same joke has been told over the centuries about other brutal potentates, starting with Peter the Great. We can safely assume that this joke form can be preserved together with its point in any human language under two conditions that are only incidentally linguistic ones: the target language must possess an expression for “thinking about your family” that can apply to two slightly different projects (to provide support for your spouse and children, and to protect them from persecution); and that the listener understands or can guess that evil potentates punish disobedient underlings by persecuting their relatives. These two conditions may not be met in all cultures and languages in the world, but they are surely widely available. The “untranslatability of humor” hasn’t survived the very first dig of the spade.
Provided the two general conditions given above can be met, the jump-for-Stalin joke can be rejiggered to fit a wide variety of other historical and geographical locales in the same language or any other, and still be the same joke. There are very many transportable, rewritable joke patterns of that kind—including those politically incorrect ethnic disparagements of near neighbors that you hear in structurally identical form when the French talk about Belgians, Swedes about Finns, the English about the Irish, and so on.
Translating these kinds of circulating jokes means matching the pattern made by the interplay of presupposition and meaning that constitutes the point, and then rewriting all the rest to suit. An ability to recognize the match is not rare, and may be almost universal. But the ability to find a good match is one that only some people have. However, we don’t have to go far to find humorous uses of language that work in a slightly different way.
A Brooklyn baker became deeply irritated by a little old lady who kept standing in line to ask for a dozen bagels on a Tuesday morning despite his having put a big sign in his window to say that bagels were not available on Tuesday mornings. When she got to the head of the line for the fifth time in a row, the baker decided not to shout and scream but to get the message through this way instead.
“Lady, tell me, do you know how to spell
cat
—as in
catechism
?”
“Sure I do. That’s C-A-T.”
“Good,” the baker replies. “Now tell me, how do you spell
dog
—as in
dogmatic
?”
“Why, that’s D-O-G.”
“Excellent! So how do you spell
fuck
, as in
bagels
?”
“But there ain’t no
fuck
in
bagels
!” the little old lady exclaims.
“That’s precisely what I’ve been trying to tell you all morning!”
There are different ways of saying what the point of this—admittedly paltry—joke is. It makes a character speak out loud a truth she had been unable to internalize. There’s no reason to suppose that matches cannot be found in any language to make fun of some person in the same way. The overall point is made by playing on a difference between written and oral language: structurally similar plays can probably be found and constructed in any language that has an imperfectly phonetic writing system. But once we get down to the implementation of these two features, hunting for matches becomes much more difficult. The assimilation of the present participle of a taboo word to the stem of that word plus the preposition
in
is possible only because in English the distinguishing mark of the first—the final consonant,
g
—is habitually dropped in colloquial speech. That’s a low-level, local feature of a particular language, and it turns on the slight mismatch between its spoken and written forms. A structural match in any other language would most likely have to turn on a phonetically and grammatically different feature that may or may not allow the same point—making someone stupid say what they don’t want to understand by diverting their attention from the issue through an intentionally deceptive spelling game.
What’s usually considered to be at issue in humor of this kind is the capacity that all languages have for referring to themselves, and thus for playing games with words. Metalinguistic expressions—sentences and phrases that refer to some aspect of their own linguistic form—carry meanings that are by definition internal to the language in which they are couched. “There ain’t no
fuck
in
bagels
” may be vulgar and silly, but it is a good-enough example of a metalinguistic expression. It is not about bagels, only about the spelling and pronunciation of a word of the English language seen exclusively as a word and not as a sign. “Plays on the signifier” are traditionally viewed as the dark corner of language, where translation becomes a paradoxical, impossible challenge.
That would be a valid position if the criteria for an acceptable match obligatorily included matching the signifiers themselves. But they obviously do not. What a translation makes match never includes the signifiers themselves. It would not count as a translation if it did.
Just as only some jokes exploit the metalinguistic function of language, so not all self-referring expressions are funny. Especially not those used as example sentences by philosophers of language, such as:
1. There are seven words in this sentence.
It is no trouble to find a matching sentence in German:
2.
Es gibt sieben Wörter in diesem Satz
.
However, that particular translinguistic match is regarded as a happenstance—an arbitrary and irrational coincidence in a particular case. What’s usually seen as problematic about sentences such as (1) is that they cannot reliably be translated into other tongues, and they thus appear to contradict the axiom of effability—that any thought a person can have can be expressed by some sentence in any natural language, and that anything that can be expressed in one language can also be expressed in another (see chapter 13).
The real problem with a sentence such as (1) is that it can’t be translated into English, either. “This sentence consists of seven words” rephrases (“translates”) (1), but by doing so it becomes counterfactual, which (1) is not. Likewise, rephrasing it in French produces an untruth if you think that translation means matching signifiers one by one with equivalents provided by pocket dictionaries:
3.
Il y a sept mots dans cette phrase
.
The main cause of problems is solutions, an American wit once declared, and the conundrums created by rephrasing self-referring sentences taken out of any context seem to be good examples of that. That’s because (3) is not the only way you can express (1) in French. Indeed, it’s just about the least plausible version you could come up with. A better match would be:
4.
Cette phrase est constituée par sept mots
.
But because philosophy is written by philosophers and not translators, the clash between (1) and (3) is taken to be a demonstration of a wider, general truth:
Translation between languages cannot preserve
reference
(what a sentence is about),
self-reference
(what a sentence says about itself) and
truth-value
(whether the sentence is right or wrong) at the same time.
2
 
This would explain in a nutshell why puns and plays on words and all those kinds of jokes that exploit specific features of the language in which they are expressed cannot be translated. Because this is presented as a general assertion, it can be disproved by a single persuasive counterexample. But the reason it is wrong is not contained in any counterexample. The flaw in the axiom lies in its failure to say what it means by “translate.” So here’s my idea of a better approximation to the truth about translation:
Arduously head-scratching, intellectually agile wordsmiths may simultaneously preserve the reference, self-reference, and
truth value of an utterance when fate smiles on them and allows them to come up with a multidimensional matching expression in their own language.
In chapter 52 of Georges Perec’s
Life A User’s Manual
, a depressed young man called Grégoire Simpson wanders around Paris and stares for hours at shop windows. He saunters into a covered arcade and gazes at the display of a printer’s wares—dummy letterheads, wedding invitations, and joke visiting cards. Here’s one of them:
Adolf Hitler
Fourreur
 
Fourreur
is the French word for “furrier,” but it is also an approximate representation of the way the German word
Führer
is pronounced in French. The joke is a metalinguistic and self-referring one, provided you know who and what Hitler was, know in addition that a furrier and a dictator are different things, and are able to subvocalize the French word as if it were a German sound and vice versa. What needs matching to make a translation of this joke is not any one of these particular things in French but the relationship between them—the pattern of mismatched sounds and meanings between two tongues, one of which has to be German.
I came up with this:
Adolf Hitler
German Lieder
 
It took a while to find, and it took a stroke of luck. It may well be not the only or the best possible translation of Perec’s joke visiting card, but it matches well enough in the dimensions that matter. It plays a sound game between English and German, and it relies on the same general field of knowledge. It doesn’t preserve all dimensions of the original—what ever does?—but it matches enough of them, in my honest but not very humble opinion, to count as a satisfactory translation of a self-referring, metalinguistic, and interlingual joke.
Humorous remarks, shaggy-dog tales, witty anecdotes, and silly jokes are untranslatable only if you insist on understanding “translation” as a low-level matching of the signifiers themselves. Translation is obviously not that. The matches it provides relate to those dimensions of an utterance that, taken together, account for its principal force in the context in which it is uttered.
That still doesn’t tell us what we mean by “match.” But we’re getting closer.
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