Authors: David Bellos

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (7 page)

Un petit d’un petit
S’étonne aux Halles
⁸

Is this a translation? Well, it might be if instead of “translation” we said “mouthing” or “after-speaking.” Sound translation (also called
homophonic translation
), of which this is an example, may have few practical uses at present, but in historical terms it is one of the main ways in which our vocabulary has grown. English speakers have had contact over the centuries with dozens of other cultures, have listened to the words that they used, then said them again using the sound system of English, creating new words such as
bungalow
,
cocoa
,
tomato
,
potato
, and so on. Similarly, speakers of other languages having fruitful commercial and cultural contact with English-speaking peoples currently sound-translate all sorts of English terms, producing new words in Chinese (

kù
, “fashionable”), French (
le footing
, “jogging”), Japanese (
sm

to
, “svelte”), German (
Handy
, “mobile phone”), and so forth that English speakers understand imperfectly or not at all.

Loanwords (and, more generally, the leakage of vocabulary, syntax, and sounds between languages whose speakers are in contact with one another) are not usually thought of as relevant to the study of translation. Indeed, from a conventional point of view the probably universal device of repeating with approximation what you do not properly understand is the opposite of translation—which is to say something else in the place of what you do understand. On the other hand, linguistic borrowing between cultures in contact with one another is a fundamental fact of intercultural communication—and that is the very field of translation.

In reality, professional translators have frequent recourse to sound translation. The translator of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s unprecedented exposé of the Soviet gulag experience,
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, had to decide what to say to refer to the inmates of the camps, who were called, and also called themselves,