Fictions of the Foreign: The Paradox of "Foreign-Soundingness" PDF

FIVE Fictions of the Foreign: The Paradox of “Foreign-Soundingness” For most of the last century, reviewers and laymen have customarily declared in order to praise a translation to the skies that it sounds as if it had been written in English. This...

FIVE Fictions of the Foreign: The Paradox of “Foreign-Soundingness” For most of the last century, reviewers and laymen have customarily declared in order to praise a translation to the skies that it sounds as if it had been written in English. This is hollow praise, since the selfsame community of reviewers and laymen has often shown itself unable to tell when an alleged translation was written in English. All the same, the high value placed on naturalness and fluency in the “target,” or “receiving,” language is a strong feature of the culture of translation in the English-speaking world today. But there are contrarian voices. If a detective novel set in Paris makes its characters speak and think in entirely fluent English, even while they plod along the boulevard Saint-Germain, drink Pernod, and scoff a jarret de porc aux len-tille s—then something must be wrong. Where’s the bonus in having a French detective novel for bedtime reading unless there is something French about it? Don’t we want our French detectives to sound French? Domesticating translation styles that eradicate the Frenchness of Gallic thugs have been attacked by some critics for committing “ethnocentric violence.”1 An ethics of translation, such critics say, should restrain translators from erasing all that is foreign about works translated from a foreign tongue. How then should the foreignness of the foreign best be represented in the receiving language? Jean d’Alembert, a mathematician and philosopher who was also co-editor of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, came up with an ingenious answer in 1763: The way foreigners speak [French] is the model for a good translation. The original should speak our language not with the superstitious caution we have for our native tongue, but with a noble freedom that allows features of one language to be borrowed in order to embellish another. Done in this way, a translation may possess all the qualities that make it commendable—a natural and easy manner, marked by the genius of the original and alongside that the added flavor of a homeland created by its foreign coloring.2 The risk of this approach is that in many social and historical circumstances the foreign- soundingness of a translation—just like the slightly unnatural diction of a real foreigner speaking French (or English, or German … )—may be rejected as clumsy, false, or even worse. In fact, the most obvious way to make a text sound foreign is to leave parts of it in the original. Such was the convention in Britain in the Romantic era. In the earliest translation of the novel now known in English as Dangerous Liaisons, for instance, characters refer to and address one another by their full titles in French (monsieur le vicomte, madame la présidente) and use everyday expressions such as Allez!, parbleu!, and ma foi! within sentences that are in other respects entirely in English. 3 Similarly, in recent translations of the novels of Fred Vargas, the lead character, Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, retains his French rank of commissaire in charge of a clutch of brigadiers, but he talks to them in English.4 Following the same logic of selective foreignism, German officers in most Second World War movies made in Hollywood speak natural English interrupted at regular intervals by Jawohl, Gott im Himmel, and Heil Hitler. The device may be taken much further, in popular as well as classical works. The dubbed Italian version of Singin’ in the Rain, though it performs miracles of lip-synch in the translation of witty patter, leaves the sound track of the title song in the original English. A famous modern production of King Lear in Chinese has Cordelia speaking Shakespeare’s lines—she speaks the truth to her father in the true language of her speech.5 In general, however, translations only simulate the foreign-soundingness of foreign works. In fact, the challenge of writing something that sounds like English to speakers of other languages can even be met by not writing English at all. English is heard around the world in pop songs, TV broadcasts, and so on by millions of people who do not understand the words of the lyrics, jingles, and reports. As a result there are large numbers of people who recognize the phonology of English—the kinds of sounds English makes— without knowing any English vocabulary or grammar. Some forty years ago, an Italian rock star performed a musical routine in which he pretended to be a teacher of English showing his class that you do not need to understand a single word in order to know what English sounds like. Sung to a catchy tune, Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol ol rait” is a witty and surprising simulation of what English sounds like—without being in English at all. However, the transcription of “anglogibberish” in textual form represents English-soundingness only when it is vocalized (aloud, or in your head) according to the standard rules for vocalizing Italian script. “Prisencolinensinainciusol ol rait,” which can be found on many currently available websites and in some cases with one of its possible transcriptions, is a specifically Italian fiction of the foreign. It is equally possible to produce gibberish that sounds foreign to English ears. A famous example is the song sung by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936). Having got a job as a singing waiter, the hapless fellow finds himself on the restaurant dance floor with the band thumping out a French music- hall tune, “Je cherche après Titine”—but he does not know the words. Chaplin dances, mimes, looks perplexed. Paulette Goddard, in the wings, mouths, “Sing!” Our lip-reading is confirmed by the intertitle: “Sing! Never Mind the Words!” Chaplin then launches into a ditty in Generic Immigrant Romance, which for English speakers only can be represented thus: Se bella giu satore Je notre so cafore Je notre si cavore Je la tu la ti la toi La spinash o la bouchon Cigaretto Portabello Si rakish spaghaletto Ti la tu la ti la toi Senora pilasina Voulez-vous le taximeter? Le zionta su la sita Tu la tu la tu la oi Sa montia si n’amura La sontia so gravora La zontcha con sora  Je la possa ti la toit Je notre so lamina Je notre so consina Je le se tro savita Je la tossa vi la toit Se motra so la sonta Chi vossa l’otra volta Li zoscha si catonta Tra la la la la la la That sounds like French—or Italian, or perhaps Spanish—to an English speaker with no knowledge of the languages, only a familiarity with what French (or Italian, or Spanish) sounds like. The verses have no meaning, and only a few of the words are actual words of French (Italian, Spanish). The point is this: you do not have to make any sense at all to sound foreign. For the ancient Greeks, the sound of the foreign was the unarticulated, open-mouthed blabber of va-va-va, which is why they called all non-Greek-speakers varvaros, that is to say, barbarians, “blah-blah-ers.” To sound foreign is to mouth gibberish, to be dim, to be dumb: the Russian word for “German” is , from , “dumb, speechless,” and in an older form of the language it was used for any non-Russian-speaker. However, since the 1980s a number of modern European classics have been retranslated into English and French by translators whose avowed intention was to make familiar classics such as Crime and Punishment or The Metamorphosis sound more foreign—although they certainly did not wish to make them sound dumb. Nineteenth-century translators frequently left common words and phrases in the original (but mostly when the original was French), though this device is rarely used by contemporary retranslators into English, however “foreignizing” they may seek to be. When Gregor Samsa wakes one morning and finds that he has turned into an insect overnight, he does not exclaim, Ach Gott! in any modern English version; nor does Ivan Fyodorovich say in any available translation of The Brothers Karamazov. Had these novels been written in French and translated into English by the conventions of the 1820s, we can be fairly sure that Gregor Samsa would have said Oh mon Dieu! and Ivan Fyodorovich would have said Alors, voilà in the English translation. Things have changed, not in French, German, or Russian, but in English. In the language culture of today, English-language readers are not expected to know how to recognize conversational interjections such as “Good God!” or “Well, now” when spoken in German or Russian; whereas within the language culture of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, educated readers were familiar with French expressions of that kind. A genuine educational and social purpose can be served by maintaining items of the source text in the translation. It allows readers to acquire what they had not learned at school, or to refresh their memory of half-forgotten lessons. Retention of the original expression in narrowly delimited and self-explanatory speech situations such as greetings and exclamations provides readers with something they might well want to glean from reading a translated work: the vague impression of having read a novel in French. When reading French was an important mark of cultural distinction, this could be a very satisfying feeling indeed. Selective, or “decorative,” foreignism is available only in translation between languages with an established relationship. For many centuries, French was a requirement of advanced education in the English-speaking world, and bits of French were therefore part of the educated English speaker ’s general linguistic resource. What those fragments of the other language signified was, simply, “This is French!” together with the pleasing corollary, “I know some French!” The effect on the reader ’s self-esteem was hardly diminished if the exact meaning of phrases such as parbleu and ma foi had been lost. When a mastery of French was the hallmark of the educated classes, part of the point of reading a French novel in translation for those whose education had not been quite so complete was to acquire the cultural goods that the elite already possessed. The more French was left in the translation of work from French, the better the reader ’s needs and wants were served. You can’t do that with Russian or German anymore. These languages are taught to only tiny groups of students nowadays. Knowledge of either or even both has no relation to cultural hierarchies in the English-speaking world—it just means you are some kind of a linguist, or maybe an astronaut or an automobile engineer. What could represent “Russianness” or “Germanness” inside a work written in English? Conventional solutions to this conundrum are no more than that—cultural conventions, established within the English-language domain by historical contact, patterns of immigration, and popular entertainments such as Cold War dramas like Dr. Strangelove. But if we were to take d’Alembert’s recommendation as our guide, then we would try to make Kafka and Dostoyevsky sound like the foreigners that they surely were … by having them write English “embellished” with features not native to it. In German and Russian, of course, Kafka and Dostoyevsky, however unique their manners of expression may be, do not sound foreign to native readers of those languages. Foreignness in a translation is necessarily an addition to the original. In Chaplin’s gibberish as in retranslations of literary classics, foreignness is necessarily constructed inside the receiving tongue. As a result, the “foreign-soundingness” of a translation seeking to give the reader a glimpse of the authentic quality of the source can only reproduce and reinforce what the receiving culture already imagines the foreign to be. Friedrich Schleiermacher, a distinguished nineteenth-century philosopher and the translator of Plato into German, hovered around this fundamental paradox in his much-quoted paper “The Different Methods of Translating.” He’s usually understood to have taken his distance from fluent, invisible, or “normalizing” translation when he said, “The goal of translating even as the author himself would have written originally in the language of the translation is not only unattainable but is also in itself null and void.”6 But that famous statement can also be understood the other way around: that it would be just as artificial to make Kafka sound like a “stage German” writing English as it would be to make Gregor Samsa sound as if he had turned into a beetle in a bedroom in Hoboken. Why should we want or need Kafka to sound German in any case? In German, Kafka doesn’t sound “German”—he sounds like Kafka. But to the ear of an English speaker who has learned German but does not inhabit that language entirely naturally, everything Kafka wrote “sounds German” to some degree, precisely because German is not quite that reader ’s home tongue. Making Kafka sound German in English is perhaps the best a translator can do to communicate to the reader his or her own experience of reading the original. For Schleiermacher, in fact, apart from “those marvelous masters to whom several languages feel as one,” everybody “retains the feeling of foreignness” when reading works not in their home tongue. The translator ’s task is “to transmit this feeling of foreignness to his readers.” But this is a peculiarly hard and rather paradoxical thing to do unless you can call on conventions that the target language already possesses for representing the specific “other” associated with the culture of the language from which the source text comes. Foreign-soundingness is therefore only a real option for a translator when working from a language with which the receiving language and its culture have an established relationship. The longest and most extensive rapport of that kind in the English-speaking world in general is with French. In the United States, Spanish has recently become the most familiar foreign tongue for the majority of younger readers. English therefore has many ways to represent Frenchness, and American English now also has a panoply of devices for representing Spanishness. To a lesser degree, we can represent Germanness, and, to a limited degree, Italianness as well. But what of Yoruba? Marathi? Chuvash? Or any one of the nearly seven thousand other languages of the world? There is no special reason why anything within the devices available to a writer of English should “sound just like Yoruba” or give a more authentic representation of what it feels like to write in Chuvash. We just have no idea. The project of writing translations that preserve in the way they sound some trace of the work’s “authentic foreignness” is really applicable only when the original is not very foreign at all. On the other hand, translated texts can teach interested and willing readers something about the sound and feel and even the syntactic properties of the original. So can originals—Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart introduces elements of African languages, and Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August gives you a good start on Hindi and Bengali vocabulary. But when foreignness is not thematized—not made the explicit subject of the story—some prior knowledge of the original language is essential for a foreign effect to arise. In order to even notice that this sentence from German a foreignizing translation is have you to know that in German subordinate clauses at the end their verbs put. Otherwise it is comical, clumsy, nonsensical, and so forth—not “German” at all. Modern Times and Adriano Celentano play entertaining games with literal foreign-soundingness in sung and spoken speech sounds. A recent translation of Metamorphosis could of course be sounded out in the reader ’s head in a nonnative phonology. Gregor Samsa’s first words in direct speech— “Oh God,” he thought, “what a gruelling job I’ve picked! Day in, day out—on the road.” —would then be taken as a written representation of sounds more recognizably transcribed as: “Och Gott,” e saut, “vot a kruling tschop aif picked! Tay in, tay out—on ze rote.” This is surely very silly: no translator ever intends his or her work to be sounded out with a stage accent. It nonetheless forces us to ask a real question: If that is not what is meant by foreign- soundingness in the translation of a foreign text, then what exactly is foreign-soundingness? What allows us to judge whether the following passage retains some authentic trace of the Frenchness of Jacques Derrida, or whether it is just terribly hard to understand? The positive and the classical sciences of writing are obliged to repress this sort of question. Up to a certain point, such repression is even necessary to the progress of positive investigation. Beside the fact that it would still be held within a philosophizing logic, the ontophe-nomenological question of essence, that is to say of the origin of writing, could, by itself, only paralyse or sterilise the typological or historical research of facts. My intention, therefore, is not to weigh that prejudicial question, that dry, necessary and  somewhat facile question of right, against the power and efficacy of the positive researches which we may witness today. The genesis and system of scripts had never led to such profound, extended and assured explorations. It is not really a matter of weighing the question against the importance of the discovery; since the questions are imponderable, they cannot be weighed. If the issue is not quite that, it is perhaps because its repression has real consequences in the very content of the researches that, in the present case and in a privileged way, are always arranged around problems of definition and beginning.7 We know that the content of this hard-to-follow extract isn’t related to whether it “sounds like” English or not—Celentano’s song has shown us already that you can make completely meaningless concatenations sound like perfect English if phonetic English-soundingness is all you want to achieve. However, one detail that marks it as a translation from French is the anomalous use of the word research in the plural, matching a regular usage of a similar-looking word in French, recherches. Obviously, that can be seen only by a reader who knows French as well as English: the foreignness of “researches” is not self-evident to an English-only speaker, who may well construct quite other hypotheses to account for it, or else accept it as a special or technical term belonging to this particular author. But if the bilingual reader also has some additional knowledge of French philosophical terminologies, then the word positive preceding researches becomes transparent. A bilingual reader can easily see that “positive researches” stands for recherches positives in the source. What that French phrase means is another issue: it is the standard translation of “empirical investigation” into French. We could say that “positive researches” is a poor translation of a standard French phrase that the translator seems to have treated as something else; or we could see it as a trace of the authentic sound of the original. Indeed, unless an English phrase is perceptibly anomalous, we would not be able to see it as containing any trace of not-English. But it is equally clear that we would not be able to see the “authentic Frenchness” of the phrase if we had no knowledge of French. Back-translation of the foreignism “positive researches” into a number of other languages, among them Modern Greek, would produce the same result—that is to say, would allow its meaning to be identified as “empirical investigation.” Without the information that the work in question has been translated from language A, foreignizing translation styles do not themselves allow the reader to identify which foreign language A is. Foreignizing translation styles bend English into shapes that mirror some limited aspect of the source language, such as word order or sentence structure. But they rely for their foreignizing effect on the reader ’s prior knowledge of the approximate shape and sound of the foreign language—in the quoted case of Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak’s translation of Derrida given above, specific items in the vocabulary of the foreign tongue. Imagine a novel translated from a language such as Hindi, where there are three ways of saying “you”: tu, tum, and ap, corresponding to the intimate, the friendly, and the formal. Alternation among the three forms of address is a significant part of the way the characters of our imaginary novel relate to one another. Could a translator create a linguistic anomaly in English that corresponds to this triple division of “you”? Yes, of course. But would we know that it was a mark of Hindi? Not without a translator ’s footnote—because we do not know any Hindi. Since the majority of translations take place between languages spoken by communities that have quite a lot to do with each other, culturally, economically, or politically, formal and lexical borrowings from the source have often been used to represent the foreignness—and the prestige—of texts imported from abroad. In the sixteenth century, for example, many works of literature and philosophy were brought from Italian into French, just as many Italian craftsmen were imported to beautify palaces and castles across the land. The translators of that era wrote French with a wealth of Italian words and turns of phrase, because they felt that their readers either did or really should know the words and phrases they imported. More than that: they thought French would be positively improved by being made a little more like Italian. And in fact the process of making French more like Italian has continued down to the present day. The caban (pea jacket) and the caleçon (underpants) in your closet and, if you’re lucky, the cantaloup and the caviar in your refrigerator, like a huge number of other ordinary, scholarly, refined, and delicious things, are all named in French by words taken from Italian, and for the majority of them the taking was first done by translators.8 A similar kind of lexical enrichment took place in the nineteenth century when German-speaking peoples sought to constitute themselves as a distinct and increasingly unified nation. German translators consciously imported a quantity of words from Greek, French, and English not only to make European classics accessible to speakers of German but also to improve the German language by extending its range of vocabulary. The issue as they saw it was this: French and English were international languages already, propped up by powerful states. That was why nonnative speakers learned French (and, to a lesser extent, English). How could German ever be the vehicle of a powerful state unless nonnatives learned to read it? And why should they learn to read it unless it could easily convey the meanings that arise in the transnational cultures held to represent the riches of European civilization? In today’s world, translators into “small” languages also often see their task as defending or else improving their own tongues—or both at the same time. Here’s a letter I received just the other day from a translator in Tartu: My mother language, Estonian, is spoken by about a million people. Nevertheless I am convinced that Life A User’s Manual and my language mutually deserve each other. Translating Perec I want to prove that Estonian is rich and flexible enough to face the complications that a work of this kind brings along. Translation can clearly serve national purposes—but also their opposite, the cause of internationalism itself. A contemporary writer of French who uses the pen name Antoine Volodine has formulated in striking terms why he wishes to use his native language as if it were a foreign tongue. For Volodine, French is not just the language of Racine and Voltaire. Because translation into French has been practiced for a very long time, French is also the language of Pushkin, Shalamov, Li Bai, and García Márquez. Far from being the privileged vector of national identity, history, and culture, “French is a language that transmits cultures, philosophies and concerns that have nothing to do with the habits of French society or the francophone world.”9 It is not that French is by its nature or destiny an international language: on the contrary, only the practice of translation into French makes the language a tool of internationalism in the modern world. Thanks to its long history of translation from foreign languages, French is now a possible vehicle for an imaginary, infinitely haunting literature that Volodine would like to consider absolutely foreign to it. It would therefore be quite wrong to see the progressive interpenetration of English, French, German, and Italian together with terms and phrases from the ancient source tongues, Latin and Greek, and (in the writings of Volodine) Russian and Chinese, too, as the sole product of what is now called globalization. In any case, globalization does not spread only English into other languages and cultures: it could just as well be exemplified by the spread of pizza language and the vocabulary of pasta into corner stores and fast-food joints the world over. It is also the result of long efforts by translators to raise their national languages to international status. They did not necessarily seek to make their translations sound authentically foreign. Indeed, if that is what they were really trying to do, their success has made mincemeat of the ambition, because the words they imported or mimicked have now become part of the receiving language to such an extent that they are no longer foreign at all. No less than 40 percent of all the headwords in any large English dictionary are imports from other languages. A foreignism—be it a word, a turn of phrase, or a grammatical structure that is brought into our marvelously and infuriatingly malleable tongue by a translator seeking to retain the authentic sound of the original—has its path already mapped out. Either it will be disregarded as a clumsy, awkward, or incomplete act of translation, or it will be absorbed, reused, integrated, and become not foreign at all. However, contemporary efforts to produce translations into English that keep something authentically foreign about them are not strictly comparable to the kind of translators’ campaigns in centuries past that made German more like English, French more like Italian, Syriac more like Greek, and so forth. The for-eignizers of today are not struggling to make English an international language, because English is the international language of the present. To some degree, they are seeking to enrich English with linguistic resources afforded by languages that are distant from it. “One subliminal idea I started out with as a translator was to help energize English itself,” Richard Pevear stated in an interview in The New Yorker.10 That creative, writerly project rests on a wish to share with readers some of the feelings that Pevear has when reading a Russian novel. He has also often said that he is not a fluent speaker of the language and relies on his partner to provide a basic crib that he then works into a literary version.11 Something similar may be true of other proponents of awkward and foreign-sounding translation styles. The project of writing translations that do the least “ethnocentric violence” to the original thus runs the risk of dissolving into something different—a representation of the funny ways foreigners speak. The natural way to represent the foreignness of foreign utterances is to leave them in the original, in whole or in part. This resource is available in all languages and has always been used to some degree in every one of them.12 It is not easy to represent the foreignness of foreign languages in complete seriousness. It takes the wit of Chaplin or Celentano to do so for comic effect without causing offense. What translation does in the first place is to represent the meaning of a foreign text. As we shall see, that’s quite hard enough.  SIX Native Command: Is Your Language Really Yours? Translators traditionally and now almost by iron rule translate from a foreign language into what is called their mother tongue. In translation-studies jargon this is called L1 translation, as opposed to L2 translation, which is translation out toward a learned or other tongue. But what exactly is a mother tongue? We all start with a mother and it seems obvious that we first learn language in her arms. The language that your mother speaks to you is therefore what you are “born into,” which is all that can be meant when instead of “mother tongue” we call it a native language. It is an axiom of language study that to be a native speaker is to have complete possession of a language; reciprocally, complete possession of a language is usually glossed as precisely that knowledge of a language that a native speaker has. In spite of the obvious fact that speakers of the same language use it in infinitely varied ways and often have quite different vocabularies and language habits at the levels of register, style, diction, and so forth, we proceed on the assumption that only native speakers of (let us say) English know English completely and that only native speakers of English are in a position to judge whether any other speaker is using the language “natively.” We also know, from observation and self-observation, too, that native speakers make grammatical and lexical mistakes and find themselves lost for words from time to time. In what is now a conventional view of language use, the slips and stumbles in the speech of a native speaker are themselves part of what it means to possess the language natively. Teachers of foreign languages are expert in distinguishing between mistakes that language learners make and those that are characteristic of native speech; and for a native speaker of any language, there are some kinds of errors made by others that sound not just wrong but not native. But let us put these practical and effective uses of the distinction between “native” and “nonnative” aside. Other, much more difficult issues are involved in using terms such as mother and native to name the way we are more or less at home in the language we call our own. We do not have to learn our mother tongue from a mother. It can be acquired just as effectively from siblings, from an au pair, or from the kids next door. What matters for normal human development is that there be a language available in our immediate environment in infancy, for no child invents a language by itself, without input from outside. We acquire our first language from whatever sources are available in our infant environment. Some children do it faster than others, some acquire wider vocabularies than others, but all children normally achieve communicative competence within a relatively narrow time band, between the ages of one and three. But the language that is acquired in those early stages of development may or may not turn out to be the one in which as adults we feel most at home. Great numbers of people the world over are not particularly skilled users of the language taught to them by their infant environment. In many circumstances, formal education replaces the infant language with one that goes on to be used in adult life as the operative means of communication. From the disappearance of Latin as a spoken language in around the sixth and seventh centuries C.E. until the age of Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz, no mother ever spoke Latin to her child, and no child was ever born into a Latin-speaking home. However, Latin was learned by young males of the higher social classes throughout Christianized Europe for well over a thousand years. Throughout that long period, Latin was the language in which all educated Europeans operated in thought, formal speech, and writing, for purposes as varied as diplomacy, philosophy, mathematics, science, and religion. The language was taught by means of writing, and it was also spoken—in schools, monasteries, churches, chancelleries, and law courts—as the verbalization of a written idiom. All speakers of Latin in the period of its use as the primary form of communication had at least one other mother tongue, but these vernaculars were not used as tools for elaborated thinking or expression. But if a clear distinction can be made between the language learned from your mother and the language in which you operate most effectively for highborn males in Western Europe between 700 and 1700 C.E., the very concepts of “mother tongue” and “native speaker” need to be looked at again. Examples of the difference between “first learned language” and “operative language” can be found almost anywhere. I can find several in my own family. My father learned to speak in Yiddish, the language of his mother and of his environment in London’s East End some ninety years ago. Once he started going to school, he acquired English. There is no question that he could soon do far more with it than he ever could with his mother tongue. Similarly, the mother of my children spoke Hungarian as an infant but acquired French when she moved to France at the age of five. Neither of these cases involved the loss of the mother tongue. Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz also remained everyday speakers of their “native languages,” respectively, French, English, and German. In many modern cases, the mother tongue that is supplanted by a learned language for higher-level activities remains only “mother ’s tongue,” used exclusively for interaction with the older generation. Yiddish and Hungarian remained for my two relatives the way they spoke with their mothers and served almost no other purpose in adult life. That is fairly typical of first-generation immigrants in countries such as France, Britain, and the United States, many of whom possess a mother tongue that is stuck at the state of sophistication achieved around the age of five. But that was certainly not true of Descartes or Newton, who also wrote in French and English, respectively; it may well not be true of many millions of other bilingual speakers in the world today. Throughout our lives we retain more or less strong emotions about the language in which we first learned songs, nursery rhymes, games, and playgroup or family rituals. These are foundational experiences, and the language in which they were experienced must surely be forever lit by the warm glow of our earliest reminiscences. But it does not automatically follow that the language of our earliest memories has any special importance as a language for what we may go on to become, or for what we take to be our personal identity. When the first-learned language is overlaid by a language of education, it ceases to be at the forefront of an individual’s development. What is learned in the second but increasingly firstlike language are the foundational techniques of writing and counting, as well as all-important systems like the rules of baseball, alongside song lyrics and the bruising business of social interaction outside the family circle. All this sudden learning can of course be translated back into a first language, especially if the family environment supports parallel development and parents or siblings take the time to teach the child how to express all these new things in the family idiom; but without such support, few children would bother to do something so manifestly pointless (pointless, because unrelated to the social and personal uses of the newly acquired skills). One problem with using the expression “mother tongue” to name the language in which an adult operates most comfortably is that it confuses the history of an individual’s acquisition of linguistic skills with the mystery of what we mean by the “possession” of a language. But it also does something more insidious: it acts as a suggestion that our preferred language is not just the language spoken to us by a mother but is, in some almost mystical sense, the mother of our selfhood—the tongue that made us what we are. It is not a neutral term: it is burdened with a complex set of ideas about the relationship between language and selfhood, and it unloads that burden on us as long as we take the term to be a natural, unproblematic way of naming our linguistic home. We may all be born with the potential to acquire a language and a need to do so—with what some linguists have called a “language-acquisition device”—hardwired in our brains. But in practice, we are not born into any particular language at all: all babies are languageless at the start of life. Yet we use the term native speaker as if the contrary were true—as if the form of language acquired by natural but fairly strenuous effort from our infant environment were a birthright, an inheritance, and the definitive, unalterable location of our linguistic identity. But knowing French or English or Tagalog is not a right of birth, even less an inheritance: it is a personal acquisition. To speak of “native” command of a language is to be just as approximate, and, to a degree, just as misleading as to speak of having a “mother tongue.” The curious ideology of these language terms is brought into clearer focus by British and American universities, which, when seeking to appoint someone as a professor of languages, conventionally state that “native or quasi-native competence” is required in the language to be taught. What can “quasi-native” possibly mean? In practical terms it means “very, very good.” Implicitly, it means that you can be very good at French or Russian or Arabic even if it is not your birthright. But the most obvious implications of the formula are, first, that a distinction can be made between those who were “born into” the given language and those who were not; and, second, that for the purposes of high-level instruction in the language this distinction is of no consequence. But that creates a curious problem. If the latter holds, how can the former be true? Language scholars distinguish between sentences that are grammatically and lexically “acceptable” and “unacceptable” by appealing to the intuitive judgments of “native speakers.” “Native-speaker competence” is the criterion most commonly invoked for determining what it is that the grammar of a language has to explain. Now it may seem obvious that “Jill loves Jack” is a sentence of English and that “Jill Jack loves” is not, and that a grammar of English should explain why the first is acceptable and the second is not. But to ground the boundaries of what is and is not English on the judgments of native speakers alone creates a somewhat mind-bending circularity to the whole project of writing a grammar. How do we judge in the first place whether the English spoken by some individual is “native” or not? Only by appealing to the grammar, itself established by reference to the judgments of “native speakers” themselves. Yet there is no regular way for distinguishing unambiguously between native and nonnative speakers of any tongue. Most often we don’t even use any formal tests, we just take people’s word for it. And, as a result, we often make mistakes. That is to say, speakers of English cannot reliably ascertain whether another person speaking the language acquired it in the cradle, or at school, or by some other means. And we are even less able to separate the “natives” from the “others” when it comes to written expression. I am sometimes mistaken for French when speaking the language. But I am not a “native speaker” in the commonly accepted meaning of the word: I learned French at school, from a mild-mannered teacher called Mr. Smith. When French people exclaim with surprise, “But I thought you were French,” I still blush with pride, like the good schoolboy I was. But what such flatterers really mean is not that I speak “native French” but that they took my speech to indicate a particular nationality. Nationality is of course one of the few things that most people acquire by birth—either because of the nationality of their parents (“by right of blood,” jus sanguinis) or because of where they were born (“by right of soil,” jus soli).1 The relatively short history of the European nation-state founded on linguistic uniformity has resulted in a fairly profound confusion of language with nationality, and of “native-speaker competence” with country of origin. The passport you hold doesn’t have anything to do with your competence as a translator, nor does the language that you learned in your infant environment. What matters is whether you are or feel you are at home in the language into which you are translating. It doesn’t really help to call it “native,” and it helps even less to insist that you can translate only into a “mother” tongue. The paths by which speakers come to feel at home in a language are far too varied for the range of their abilities to be forced into merely two slots (“native” and “nonnative”), however broad or flexible the definitions of those slots may be. Knowing two languages extremely well is generally thought to be the prerequisite for being able to translate, but in numerous domains that is not actually the case. In the translation of poetry, drama, and film subtitles, for example, collaborative translation is the norm. One partner is native in the “source- text language,” or L1, the other is native in the “target language,” or L2; both need competence in a shared language, usually but not necessarily L2. Also, the target-language translator needs to be or to believe he is in expert command of the language of the genre—as a playwright, as a poet, as a skilled compressor of meanings into the very restricted format of subtitles, and so on. Even in the translation of prose fiction, there are celebrated translation teams—Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, for example, who together have produced new English versions of many classic works of Russian literature. A different form of collaborative transmission is involved in my own work with the novels of Ismail Kadare, who writes in Albanian, a language I do not possess beyond phrase-book level. I work from the French translations done by the violinist Tedi Papavrami and then raise my own queries with both Papavrami and Kadare, through the medium of French, which Kadare speaks well enough to discuss allusions, references, questions of style, and so on. In cultures other than those of Western Europe, the prejudice against translating into a language that is not native is less profound, and in some places it is rejected outright. For many decades, Soviet Russia insisted that the speeches of its UN delegates be interpreted not by native speakers of the other official languages but by Russian speakers who were expert interpreters and translators into Spanish, French, English, Arabic, and Chinese. The translators’ school in Moscow developed a theory—or a cover story—to justify this politically motivated practice, according to which the essential skill of an interpreter is her complete comprehension of the original.2 Most professionals disagree, regarding unreflecting fluency in the target language as the real key to getting away with the almost unimaginably brain-taxing act of simultaneous interpretation—but for more than forty years the Russian booths at the UN were indeed staffed with what are called “L2 interpreters,” who coped with the job very well.3 L2 translation—writing in a language that is not “native”—is also quite widespread for languages that do not belong to the small group of Western tongues with established traditions of teaching one another ’s languages in schools and long-standing two-way translation relations. Few “native” writers of English, French, Spanish, or German are fluent readers of Tamil, Tagalog, Farsi, or Wolof, and among them fewer still wish to devote their time to translation. For writers in these and most of the other languages of the world, the only way to get an international hearing is to put the work into a world language learned at school or else through emigration or travel. The effort often backfires. L2 translations from contemporary China and Albania are notoriously dreadful. Many of the sillier examples of translation mistakes in commercial material and tourist signage are visibly produced by L2 translation. But it would be futile to insist that the iron rule of L1 translation be imposed on all intercultural relations in the world without also insisting on its inescapable corollary: that every educational system in the world’s eighty vehicular languages devote significant resources to producing seventy-nine groups of competent L1 translators in each cohort of graduating students. The only alternative to that still-utopian solution would be for speakers of the target languages to become more tolerant and more welcoming of the variants introduced into English, French, German, and so forth by L2 translators working very hard indeed to make themselves understood.  SEVEN Meaning Is No Simple Thing Whether done by a speaker of L1 or L2, an adequate translation reproduces the meaning of an utterance made in a foreign language. That sounds straightforward enough. It corresponds entirely to the service that contemporary translators and interpreters claim to provide. But it doesn’t provide an adequate understanding of what translation is, because the meaning of an utterance is not a single thing. Whatever we say or write means in many ways at once. The fact is, utterances have all sorts of “meanings” of different kinds. The meaning of meaning is a daunting topic, but you can’t really study translation if you leave it aside. It may be a philosophical can of worms—but it’s an issue that every translation actually solves. There is obviously more to meaning than the meaning of words, and here’s a simple story to show why. Jim is out hiking with friends. He wanders away from the group and finds himself in thick woods. He’s lost his bearings entirely. Then the smell of coffee reaches his nose. What does that mean? It means that camp is not far away. It’s a real and important meaning to Jim—but it has nothing to do with words. The kind of meaning that things have just by themselves is called symptomatic meaning. Smells, noises, physical sensations, the presence of this or that natural or manufactured object, have symptomatic meanings all the time. In daily life, we pick up a thousand clues of that kind every day but retain only those that endow our world with the meanings we need. In like manner, anything said also has symptomatic meaning from the simple fact of it having been said. If I go into a coffee shop and order an espresso, what does that mean? As a symptom, it means I speak English, that the barista does, too, and so forth. That’s obvious. Most of the time, the symptomatic meaning of an utterance is just too obvious to be noticed. But not always. The Great Escape, a film made by John Sturges in 1964, tells the almost-true story of a mass breakout from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. The leader of the plot, Squadron Leader Bartlett, has good language skills in French and German and teams up with Flight Lieutenant MacDonald, who has only English, to get from the tunnel exit to the Channel coast. Camouflaged as a pair of French businessmen, they are in line to board a bus that will take them farther on. There’s a security check. Bartlett bluffs his way through in very plausible French and German. He has already begun to get inside the bus when the canny policeman wishes the pair of them “Good luck”—in English. MacDonald, still on the step, instinctively turns around, smiles, and blurts out, “Thank you”—and that’s the end of his great escape. It’s not the linguistic meanings of the policeman’s expression or MacDonald’s response that catch the fugitives out but the symptomatic meaning of the language used. It is not possible to reproduce the symptomatic meaning of the use of a given language in a language other than the one being used. You can’t use Finnish, for example, to re-create the force of “speaking in English when escaping from a German prison camp.” In the French-language version of the film, “good luck” and “thank you” stay in English—French audiences are expected to recognize the sounds of English and to know the symptomatic meaning of using English in wartime Germany. But in versions intended for audiences for whom spoken English, French, and German just have the sound of “Average West European,” the overall meaning of the sequence can’t be saved by not translating the spoken sentences (as in French) or by translating them, since the use of any language other than English would miss the point. Some other layer or channel of communication has to be added, such as a subtitle or a surtitle. The supplementary stream would give a metalinguistic description of the utterance, such as “The German policeman is speaking English,” or “The authorities use the native language of the fugitive, who foolishly replies in like manner.” Would that count as translation? It surely must, since its purpose and real effect is to provide rapid access to the meaning of a work in a foreign language. But it doesn’t fit the simple definition of translation given at the start of this chapter. The subtitle doesn’t reproduce the meaning of the utterance made in another tongue. It just gives you the information you need to grasp not so much what is actually said but what is going on in the saying of it. Understanding anything always involves relating what is said (MacDonald’s “Thank you”) to the meaning of its having been said. That’s the basic framework of all acts of communication. The trouble is that the relationship of what’s been said to what the saying of it means is unstable, and often extremely murky. After all, the English fugitive would have been caught out in exactly the same way whatever he had said in reply to the German policeman’s “Good luck!” if he had said it in English. In that specific context, “Thank you,” “Get lost!” and “You’re a real gentleman” could be said to have the same meaning, and you could prove that outrageous assertion by showing that they would have to have identical subtitles in Chinese. To return to the parable of Jim lost in the woods with his partner Jane, one of the pair might say on smelling the welcome aroma of coffee brewing nearby, “Aha! I smell coffee!” or else “Can you smell what I smell?” or “Can you smell coffee, too?” These are different sentences having what linguists would call different sentence meanings, but in that context they all have the same force—namely, that the camp is near at hand, that they are not lost, that they should rejoice, and so on. In translation the differences between these sentence meanings hardly matter. What matters here is to preserve the force of the utterance, and knowing how to do that in another language is the translator ’s main skill. Levels of formality in conversation, as well as customs and rules about how men and women may relate to each other when lost in the woods, vary quite widely between languages and the cultures that they serve. For the story of Jim and Jane, the translator ’s job is to express the force of the utterance in those particular circumstances in forms appropriate to the target language and culture. Whether or not the chosen form of words corresponds to the sentence meaning of the sentence that Jim uttered is beside the point. Of course, Jim could have communicated the meaning he attached to his having smelled a particular smell not in words but with a smile, a twitching of his nostrils, a wave of his hand. In many circumstances such as these, nonverbal communication can have pretty much the same force as an utterance. It’s an awkward fact for translation studies, but the truth is that meaning does not inhere solely to words. When it comes to knowing what something means and what meaning has been received, there is no clear line to be drawn between language and nonlinguistic forms of communication—in the story of Jim and Jane, between smiling, twitching, waving, and speaking. There’s no clear cutoff point but only a shifting and ragged edge between language use and all the rest. Symptoms and nonverbal complements to verbal expression lie on or just over the edge of the field of translation, which covers only utterances that have linguistic form—but there’s always more to an utterance than just its linguistic form. That’s why there’s no unequivocal way of saying where one mode or type or level of meaning ends and another begins. If you turn off the soundtrack of the bus- trap sequence in The Great Escape, you see a man in a leather coat saying farewell to two guys in mufti, one of whom returns his good wishes and then, inexplicably, tries to run away. You would have understood nothing. But if you just listen to the soundtrack, without seeing the context in which someone says “Good luck” with a slight German accent, you would probably have understood even less. The context alone doesn’t tell you what the utterance means unless you can hear the utterance as well; conversely, the utterance alone doesn’t contain nearly enough information to allow you to reconstruct the context. You have to have both. Film is a useful tool for exploring the myriad ways in which meaning happens. What we understand from a shot or sequence is formed by different kinds of information made available by various technical means. The angle of the camera and the depth of field; the decor; the characters’ clothing, facial gestures, and body movements; the accessories displayed; the sound effects and background music that have been superimposed all affect the meanings we extract from a sequence or shot. In the most accomplished films, no single stream can be separated from all the others. They work in concert, and their timing is integral to the meaning that they build. Each stream of meaning is one part of the context that gives all other streams their power to mean and necessarily affects the specific meanings that they have. What is reasonably clear from film is also applicable to human communication in general, including the blandest and simplest of sentences uttered. For translation, and for us all, meaning is context. The expression “One double macchiato to go”—an expression I utter most days, around 8 a.m.— means what it means when uttered in a coffee shop by a customer to a barista. The situation (the coffee shop) and the participants (customer and barista) are indispensable, inseparable parts of the meaning of the utterance. Imagine saying the same thing at 2 a.m., in bed, to your partner. Or imagine it said by a trans-Saharan cycling fanatic on arrival at a Tuareg tent camp. The words would be the same, but the meaning of their being said would be entirely different. Symptomatically, it might be that you were having a nightmare, or that dehydration had driven the cyclist out of his mind. Any piece of language behavior, even a simple request for coffee, acquires a different meaning when its context of utterance is changed. The point is worth repeating: what an utterance means to its utterer and to the addressee of the utterance does not depend exclusively on the meaning of the words uttered. Two of the key determinants of how an utterance conveys meaning (and of the meaning that it effectively conveys) are these: the situation in which it is uttered (the time, the place, and knowledge of the practices that are conventionally performed by people present in such a time and place); and the identities of the participants, together with the relationship between them. The linguistic meaning of the words uttered is not irrelevant (a double macchiato is not the same drink as a skinny wet capp), but it’s only a fragment of all that’s going on when something is uttered. It may be the only fragment that can be seen to be translated, but it falls far short of constituting the entirety of what has been said. In a classic contribution to the study of language, the philosopher J. L. Austin pointed out that there are some types of English verbs that don’t describe an action but are actions just by the fact of being uttered. “I warn you to stay away from the edge of the cliff” is a warning because the speaker has said “I warn you.” There are quite a number of these performative verbs in English, though they do not all function in exactly the same way. But many difficulties arise in trying to treat promising, warning, advising, threatening, marrying, christening, naming, judging, and so forth as a special class of verb. For one thing, few of them constitute the act that they name unless various nonlinguistic conditions are met. “I name this vessel The Royal Daffodil” has its proper force (that is to say, really does grant that name to some real vessel) only if the person authorized to launch the ship utters it at the actual launching while the rituals associated with the launching of ships are performed at the same time—the champagne bottle cracking open against the bow, the chocks being removed, and so forth. Said in some other circumstance, by a man strolling on the beach at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, for example, it doesn’t constitute the action of naming a ship at all. Austin calls these necessary concomitants to the successful performance of the action of a performative verb its “conditions of felicity.” Of course, there are many ways a “performance” can be undermined or abused by tampering with the conditions of felicity it requires. But that doesn’t alter Austin’s vital point that the force of an utterance isn’t exclusively a function of the meaning of the words of which it seems to be composed. The nonlinguistic props and surroundings of a linguistic expression—this person speaking in the presence of that other, at this time and in that place, and so on—are what really allow language users to do things with words. Many actions can be carried out with words without using any of the verbs that allegedly “perform” the action. I can promise to marry someone by saying “Sure I will” in response to a plea, and that’s just as binding as saying “I promise.” I can warn somebody with an imperative—“Stay away from the cliff!”—just as I can threaten someone by asking them to step outside in a particular tone of voice. The force of an utterance is not related solely to the meanings of the words used in the utterance. In many instances, it is hard to show on linguistic evidence alone that they are related at all. Intentional alteration of one or more of the basic contextual features of an utterance usually turns a meaningful expression into some kind of nonsense. But the reverse can also be achieved: nonsense can be made to make sense by supposing some alternative context for it. At the start of his revolutionary work Syntactic Structures (1957), Noam Chomsky cooked up a nonsense sentence in order to explain what he saw as the fundamental difference between a meaningful sentence and a grammatical one. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” was proposed as a fully grammatical sentence that had no possible meaning at all. Within a few months, witty students devised ways of proving Chomsky wrong, and at Stanford they were soon running competitions for texts in which “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” would be not just a grammatical sentence but a meaningful expression as well. Here’s one of the prizewinning entries: It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.1 Nowadays the expression “colorless green ideas” could perhaps refer to the topics of negotiation at the Copenhagen Climate Summit of December 2009; to say that they “slept furiously” may be no more than to name the paltry outcome of the conference. The point of this is not just to say that people play with language and often make mincemeat of authoritative generalizations about it. It is this: no grammatical sentence in any language can be constructed such that it can never have a context of utterance in which it is meaningful. That also means that everything that can be said or written—even nonsense—can (at some time or another) be translated. Verdi idee senza colore dormono furiosamente. To translate utterances that perform a conventional action by the fact of being uttered—greeting, ordering, commanding, and so on—requires the target language to possess parallel conventions about things you can do with words. But there are significant differences between cultures and languages in how people do things with words. A promise may be a promise the world over, but the conditions of felicity, as well as the forms of language that are appropriate to the making of a promise, may vary greatly between, for example, Japan and the United States. It’s not the linguistic meaning of “I promise, cross my heart and hope to die” that needs to be translated if the aim is to make a similar commitment in the target language. Once again, the expression uttered (in speech or writing) is not the sole or even the primary object of translation when the force of an utterance is what matters, as it always does. These considerations don’t affect just the set of verbs that Austin called performatives. The range of things you can do with words goes far beyond the promising, warning, knighting, naming, and so on that attracted the philosopher ’s attention, and it would be better to see those not-so-special verbs of English as only one way of grasping a more general aspect of language use. When I say “How are you?” to an acquaintance I run across, I am performing the social convention of greeting with an utterance that is conventionally attached to it. Whether I use a performative verb (as in “Salaam, your highness, I greet you most humbly”) or not (as in “Hi!”), the expression that constitutes the action of greeting has a meaning only by virtue of the kind of action I am performing with it. “Greeting” could be thought of as a kind or register or genre of language use. It’s not hard to see that translating “How are you?” into any other language is to translate the convention of greeting, not to translate the individual items how, are, and you. But what is widely understood as appropriate for the kind of language use that tourist phrase books always include is no less appropriate in many other translation contexts. A knitting pattern that does not follow target-language conventions for knitting patterns is completely useless, just as a translated threat of retribution that does not conform to the conventions of threatening in the target culture is not a threat, or a translation. In the summer of 2008, The Wall Street Journal ran a hot story under the headline GOP VEEP PICK ROILS DEMS. To make sense of this you need a lot of knowledge of American political events in the run-up to the last presidential election, including the conventional nicknames of the two main parties, as well as familiarity with the alphabetical games played by editors on night desks in Manhattan. Should we pity the poor translators the world over who needed to reproduce the bare bones of the story in double-quick time? Not really. The meanings of the words in that headline are not important. What’s important is that it works as a headline. Like any headline in the English-language press, GOP VEEP PICK ROILS DEMS is explained by the story that follows it in less compressed language. The task of the translator—if indeed it is the translator, not the editor, who performs this function—is to understand the story first and only then invent an appropriate headline within the language of headlines holding sway in the target culture. “Le choix de Madame Palin comme candidate républicaine à la vice-présidence des États-Unis choque le parti démocrate” conforms quite well to French headline-writing style, for example, and is a plausible counterpart to The Wall Street Journal’s nutshell quip. The original and its translation must conform to the general conventions of headline writing in their respective cultures, because headline writing is just as much a genre—a particular kind of language use restricted to particular contexts—as promising, christening, threatening, and so forth. How many genres are there? Uncountably many. How do you know what genre a given written sentence is in? Well, you don’t, and that’s the point. No sentence contains all the information you need to translate it. One of the key levels of information that is always missing from a sentence taken simply as a grammatically well-formed string of lexically acceptable words is knowledge of its genre. You can get that only from the context of utterance. Of course, you know what that is in the case of a spoken sentence—you have to be there, in the context, to hear it spoken. You usually know quite a lot in the case of written texts, too. Translators do not usually agree to work on a text without being told first of all whether it is a railway timetable or a poem, a speech at the UN or a fragment of a novel (and few people read such things in their original languages either without being told by the cover sheet, dust jacket, or other peritextual material what kind of thing they are reading). To do their jobs, translators have to know what job they are doing. Translating something “from cold,” “unseen,” “out of the blue,” or, as some literary scholars would put it, “translating a text in and for itself” isn’t technically impossible. After all, students at some universities are asked to do just that in their final examinations. But it is not an honest job. It can be done only by guessing what the context and genre of the utterance are. Even if you guess right, and even granted that guessing right may well be the sign of wide knowledge and a smart mind, you are still only playing a game. Many genres have recognizable forms in the majority of languages and cultures: kitchen recipes, fairground hype, greeting people, expressing condolences, pronouncing marriage, court proceedings, the rules of soccer, and haggling can be found almost anywhere on the planet. The linguistic forms through which these genres are conducted vary somewhat, and in some cases vary a great deal, but as long as the translator knows what genre he is translating and is familiar with its forms in the target language, their translation is not a special problem. Problems arise more typically when the users of translation raise objections to the shifts in verbal form that an appropriate translation involves. Translators do not translate Chinese kitchen recipes “into English.” If they are translators, they translate them into kitchen recipes. Similarly, when a film title needs translating, it needs translating into a film title, not an examination answer. It’s Complicated is a romantic comedy starring Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep, playing characters who have a romantic fling in sun-drenched Santa Barbara despite having been divorced for some years. The complications alluded to in the title include Baldwin’s slinky and suspicious young wife, her five-year-old son with uncannily acute ears, as well as the three children of the refound lovers’ original marriage, now aged between eighteen and twenty-five. Can the two parents really get back together again? As Baldwin says in his closing lines, in a sentimental scene on the swing seat in the front garden: “It’s complicated.” As a sentence abstracted from any context of utterance, “It’s complicated” can be adequately represented in French by C’est compliqué. That would get full marks in a school quiz. In the context of utterance as it occurs in the film, Baldwin’s resigned, evasive, and inconclusive “It’s complicated” can also be plausibly rendered in French by the same sentence: C’est compliqué. But the French release of the movie itself is not titled C’est compliqué. The distributors preferred to call it Pas si simple! (“Not so simple!”). It’s not that the meaning is very different. Nor is it because the context of utterance alone changes the meaning: film titles, by virtue of being titles, have, in a sense, no context at all. Titles of new works announce and constitute the context in which the work’s meaning is to be construed. Title making, in other words, is a particular use of language—a genre. As in any other genre, a translated title counts as a translation only if it performs its proper function—that is to say, if it works as a title in the conventions of title making that hold sway in the target language. That’s no different from saying that the most important thing about the translation of a compliment is that it fulfills the function of the kind of language behavior that we call a compliment. In languages and societies as close as French and English, it’s often the case that sentences having much the same shape and similar verbal content in the two languages fulfill the same genre functions as well. But not always. The task of the translator is to know when to step outside. In contemporary spoken French, compliqué has connotations that the English complicated does not. Its sense in some contexts may verge on “oversophisticated” and “perverse.” A more likely way of suspending a decision, of getting off a hook, of lamenting the unstraightforwardness of life, is to say: It’s not so simple. Of course, you could say that in English, too, in the right context. But could it be a film title? “Not so simple!” doesn’t work nearly as well, and that’s no doubt why the original producers of the movie didn’t use it. In French it works just fine and avoids the unwanted additional suggestions of perversity that cloud C’est compliqué. Judgments like these don’t only call for “native- speaker competence” in the translator. They rely on profound familiarity with the genre. What it comes down to is this: written and spoken expressions in any language don’t have a meaning just like that, on their own, in themselves. Translation represents the meaning that an utterance has, and in that sense translation is a pretty good way of finding out what the expression used in it may mean. In fact, the only way of being sure whether an utterance has any meaning at all is to get someone to translate it for you.  EIGHT Words Are Even Worse In Russian, there are two words, and , that mean “blue,” but they do not have the same meaning. The first is used for light or pale blue hues, the second for darker, navy or ultramarine shades. So both can be translated into English, subject to the addition of words that specify the quality of blueness involved. But you can’t translate plain English blue back into Russian, because whatever you say—whichever of the two adjectives you use—you can’t avoid saying more than the English said. The conventions that hold sway among publishers and the general public do not allow translators to add something that is not in the original text. So if you accept those terms of the trade, you could quickly arrive with impeccable logic at the conclusion that translation is completely impossible. Observations of this kind have been used by many eminent scholars to put translation outside of the field of serious thought. Roman Jakobson, a major figure in the history of linguistics, pointed out that , the Russian word for “cheese,” cannot be used to refer to cottage cheese, which has another name, , in Russian. As he puts it, “the English word ‘cheese’ cannot be completely identified with its Russian heteronym.”1 As a result, there is no fully adequate Russian translation of something as apparently simple as the word cheese. It’s an indisputable fact about languages that the sets of words that each possesses divide up the features of the world in slightly and sometimes radically different ways. Color terms never match up completely, and it’s always a problem for a French speaker to know what an English speaker means by “brown shoes,” since the footwear in question may be marron, bordeaux, even rouge foncé. The names of fishes and birds often come in nonmatching sets of labyrinthine complexity; similarly, fixed formulae for signing-off letters come in graded levels of politeness and servility that have no possible application outside of the culture in which they exist. These well-known examples of the “imperfect matching,” or anisomorphism, of languages do not really support the conclusion that translation is impossible. If the translator can see the sky that’s being called blue—either the real one or a representation of it in a painting, for example—then it’s perfectly obvious which Russian color term is appropriate; similarly, if the cheese being bought at the shop is not cottage cheese, the choice of the Russian term is not an issue. If, on the other hand, what’s being translated is a sentence in a novel, then it really doesn’t matter which kind of Russian blue is used to qualify a dress that exists only in the reader ’s mental image of it. If the specific shade of blue becomes relevant to some part or level of the story later on, the translator can always go back and adjust the term to fit the later development. The lack of exactly matching terms is not as big a problem for translation as many people think it is. Pocket dictionaries contain common, frequently used words, and their larger brethren are fattened up with words used less often. Most of those additional words are nouns with relatively precise and sometimes recondite meanings, such as polyester, recitative, or crankset. It’s trivially easy to translate words of that sort into the language of any community that has occasion to refer to synthetic fibers, Italian opera, or bicycle maintenance. Large authoritative dictionaries thus create the curious illusion that most of the words in a language are automatically translatable by slotting in the matching term from the dictionary. But there’s a huge difference between most of the headwords in a dictionary and the words that occur most often in the use of a language. In fact, just two or three thousand items account for the vast majority of word occurrences in all utterances in any language—and they aren’t words like crankset, recitative, or polyester at all.2 If translation were a matter of slotting in matching terms, then translation would clearly be impossible for almost everything we say except for our fairly infrequent references to a very large range of specific material things. Conversely, those many people who come up with the false truism that translation is impossible certainly wish that all words were like that. A desire to believe (despite all evidence to the contrary) that words are at bottom the names of things is what makes the translator ’s mission seem so impossible. The idea that a language is a list of names for the things that exist runs through Western thought from the Hebrews and Greeks to the man in the street by way of many distinguished minds. Leonard Bloomfield, a professor of linguistics who dominated the field in the United States for more than twenty-five years, tackled the problem of meaning in the textbook he wrote in the following way. Let us take the word salt. What does it mean? In Bloomfield’s book, the token salt is said to be the label of sodium chloride, more accurately (or at least, more scientifically) designated by the symbol NaCl. But Bloomfield was obviously aware that not many words of a language are amenable to such simple analysis. You can’t get at the meaning of words such as love or anguish in the same way. And so he concludes: In order to give a scientifically accurate definition of meaning for every form of a language we should have to have a scientifically accurate knowledge of everything in the speaker ’s world … [and since this is lacking,] the statement of meanings is the weak point in language study.3 Indeed it is, if you go about it that way. I still find it bewildering that a man of Bloomfield’s vast knowledge and intelligence should ever have thought that “NaCl” or “sodium chloride” constitute the meaning of the word salt. What they are is obvious: they are translations of salt into different registers of language. But even if we revise Bloomfieldian naïveté in this way, we are still trapped inside the idea that words (translated into whatever other register or language you like) are the names of things. One well-known reason so many people believe words to be the names of things is because that’s what they’ve been told by the Hebrew Bible: And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. (Genesis 2:19) This short verse has had long-lasting effects on the way language has been imagined in Western cultures. It says that language was, to begin with, and in principle still is, a list of words; and that words are the names of things (more particularly, the names of living things). Also, it says very succinctly that language is not among the things that God created but an arbitrary invention of humankind, sanctioned by divine assent. Nomenclaturism—the notion that words are essentially names—has thus had a long history; surreptitiously it still pervades much of the discourse about the nature of translation between languages, which have words that “name” different things or that name the same things in different ways. The problem, however, doesn’t really lie in translation but in nomenclaturism itself, for it provides a very unsatisfactory account of how a language works. A simple term such as head, for example, can’t be counted as the “name” of any particular thing. It figures in all kinds of expressions. It can be used to refer to a rocky promontory (“Beachy Head,” in Sussex), a layer of froth (“a nice head of beer”), or a particular role in a bureaucratic hierarchy (“head of department”). What connects these disparate things? How do we know which meaning head has in these different contexts? What does it mean, in fact, to say that we know the meaning of the word head? That we know all the different things that it means? Or that we know its real meaning but can also cope with it when it means something else? One solution proposed to the conundrum of words and meanings is to tell a story about how a word has come to mean all the things for which it serves. The story of the word head, for example, as told in many dictionaries, is that once upon a time it had a central, basic, or original reference to that part of the anatomy which sits on top of the neck. Its meaning was subsequently extended to cover other kinds of things that sit on top of something else—a head of beer and a head of department would represent extensions of that kind. But as familiar animals with four feet instead of two have their anatomical heads not at the top but at the front, head was extended in a different direction to cover things that stick out (Beachy Head; the head of a procession). Some such stories can be supported with historical evidence, from written texts representing an earlier state of the same language. The study of how words have in fact or must be supposed to have altered or extended their meanings is the field of historical semantics. But however elaborate the story, however subtle the storyteller, and however copious the documentary evidence, historical semantics can never tell you how any ordinary user of English just knows (a) that head is a word and (b) all of the things that head means. From this it follows that the word head cannot be translated as a word into any other language. But the meaning it has in any particular usage can easily be represented in another language. In French, for example, you would use cap for “Beachy Head,” mousse for “head of beer,” and chef, patron, or supérieur hiérarchique to say “head of department.” Translation is in fact a very handy way of solving the conundrum of words and meanings. That’s not to say that anyone can tell you what the word means in French or any other language. But what you can say by means of translation is what the word means in the context in which it occurs. That’s a very significant fact. It demonstrates a wonderful capacity of human minds. Translation is meaning. Linguists and philosophers have nonetheless devised Houdini-like ways of extricating themselves from the self-imposed dilemma of having to account for what words mean qua words. Head is considered a single word with a range of transferred or figurative meanings and can serve as an example of polysemy. Yet equally common words such as light are treated as a pair of homonyms— two different words having the same form in speech and writing—one of them referring to weight (as in “a light suitcase”), the other to luminosity (as in “the light of day”). The distinction between polysemy and homonymy is completely arbitrary from the point of view of language use.4 Where the spelling is different but the sound the same, as in beat and beet, linguists switch terms and give them as examples of homophony. Yet more subdivisions can be made in the tendencies of words to drift from one meaning to another. A part can stand for a whole when you have fifty head in a flock, or the whole can stand for the part, as when you refer to a sailor walking into a bar as the arrival of the fleet. Sometimes there is or is said to be a visual analogy between the central meaning of a word and one of its extensions, as when you nose your car into a parking slot, and this is called metaphor; sometimes the extension of meaning is the supposed fruit of contiguity or physical connection, as when you knock on doors in your attempt to get a job, and this is called metonymy. The machinery of “figures of meaning,” taught for centuries as part of the now-lost tradition of rhetoric, is fun to play with, but at bottom it’s eyewash. Polysemy, homonymy, homophony, metaphor, and metonymy aren’t terms that help to understand how words mean, they’re just fuzzy ways of holding down the irresistible desire of words to mean something else. It would take a very imaginative language maven indeed to explain satisfactorily why the part of a car that covers either the engine or the luggage compartment is called a “bonnet” in the U.K. and a “hood” in the United States. Despite the enthusiasm of the large throng of hobbyists who contribute to it, the semantics of words is an intellectual mess. All the same, most languages have words for the same kinds of things and don’t bother with words for things they don’t have or need. They tend to have separate expressions for basic orientation—(up, down, left, right—but see chapter 14 for languages that do not), for ways of moving (run, walk, jump, swim) and for directional movement (come, go, leave, arrive), for family relations (son, daughter, brother ’s wife, and so on), for feelings and sensations (hot, cold, love, hate), for life events (birth, marriage, death, sickness, and health), for types of clothing, food, and animals, for physical features of the landscape, and for the cardinal numbers (up to five, ten, twelve, or sixteen). Some have words for fractional numbers, such as the German anderthalb (one and a half) or the Hindi sawa (one and a quarter)—but I don’t believe any has a separate item for the number 2.375. All languages used in societies that have wheeled vehicles have words for wheeled vehicles of various kinds, but none, as far as I know, has a single lexical item with the meaning “wheeled vehicles with chrome handlebars,” so as to refer collectively to bicycles, tricycles, tandems, mopeds, motorcycles, strollers, and lawn mowers. French may have single words for “the whole contents of a deceased sailor ’s sea chest” (hardes) and “gravelly soil suitable for growing vines” (grou), but in practice all sorts of real and possible things, classes of things, actions, and feelings don’t have names in most languages. English, for instance, does not possess a designated term for the half-eaten pita bread placed in perilous balance on the top of a garden fence by an overfed squirrel that I can see right now out of my study window, but this deficiency in my vocabulary doesn’t prevent me from observing, describing, or referring to it. Conversely, the existence in Arabic of ghanam, a word that means “sheep” and “goats” without distinction, does not prevent speakers of Arabic from sorting the sheep from the goats when they need to. Just because English does not have a one-word or phrasal counterpart to the French je ne sais quoi or German Zeitgeist, it in no way prevents me from knowing how to say what these words mean. Far from providing labels for “all the things in the world,” languages restrict their word lists to an ultimately arbitrary range of states and actions, while also having means to talk about anything that comes up. The peculiar flexibility of human languages to bend themselves to new meanings is part of what makes translation not only possible but a basic aspect of language use. Using one word for another isn’t special; it’s what we do all the time. Translators just do it in two languages. One formerly fashionable way of avoiding the insoluble problem of fixing the meaning of a word was to imagine it as the compound product of sublinguistic mental units or “features” of meaning. Take the three words house, hut, and tent. They can all be used to refer to dwellings of some sort, but they refer to three different kinds of dwelling. The task of distinctive feature analysis was to find the minimal semantic constituents that would account for the meaning relations among these three semantically related terms. All three are “marked” with the feature [+dwelling], but only house also has the two features [+permanent] and [+brick]. Tent would be marked [–perma-nent] [–brick] and hut could be marked [+permanent] [–brick]. How wonderful it would be if all words in the language could be decomposed into atoms of meaning in this way. The meaning of a word would then be fully specified through the list of the distinctive features that mark it. If you could show that it was possible to account for the differences in the meanings of all the words in a language by the distribution of a finite set of semantic features, then you could go further still. You would be in a position to build a great Legoland of the mind, in which all possible meanings could be constructed out of irreducible, binary building blocks of sense. To map some area of vocabulary (let alone a whole language) using only such elementary features of meaning is an enticing prospect, but it runs up against a fundamental problem: what criterion to use to establish the list of the elementary semantic features themselves. Common sense no doubt dictates that [±animate] and [±female] are among the distinctive features relevant to the meaning of the term woman and that [±chrome-plated] is not. But common sense appeals to our total experience of the nonlinguistic world as well as to our ability to find a way through the language maze: it is precisely the kind of fuzzy, vague, and informal knowledge that distinctive feature analysis seeks to overcome and replace. Despite the usefulness of binary decomposition for some kinds of linguistic description and (in far more complex form) in the “natural language processing” that computers can now perform, word meanings can never be fully specified by atomic distinctions alone. People are just too adept at using words to mean something else. Such quasi-mathematical computation of “meaning” is equally unable to solve an even more basic problem, which is how to identify the very units whose meaning is to be specified. To ask what a word means (and translators often are asked to say what this or that word means) is to suppose that you know what word you are asking about, and that in turn requires you to know what a word is. The word word is certainly a familiar, convenient, and effective tool in the mental toolbox we use to talk about language. But it is uncommonly hard to say what it means. Computers must know the answer, because they count words. That’s no consolation to us, however. What computers know about words is what they’ve been told, which comes down to this: a word is a string of alphabetic characters bounded on left and right by a space or one of these typographical symbols:—/ ? ! : ; ,.5 Computers don’t need to know what a word means to carry out the operations we ask of them. But we do! And if in some instance we really don’t, then we try to find out from a dictionary, from an acquaintance, or from listening to how other people speak. But all kinds of problems remain. In languages such as English the identification of words is more art than science. Publishers have their own style sheets with rules for deciding whether couples have break-ups or break ups or breakups; but ordinary people also want to know if “to break up” should be counted as one, two, or three words. Yet nobody can really say.6 English prepositional verbs provide unending employment for language experts who want to determine what a word is. They come in three or four parts. Sometimes they stay together—“Did you remember to take out the trash?”—and sometimes they don’t: “I promised to take my daughter out to see a film.” Does that mean that “to take out” is a word (or three) or two different words—“to take out” and “to take … out”—(or six) that look the same? Compilers of alphabetical dictionaries adopt practical solutions, but not the same ones, leaving the underlying question—what word is this?— unresolved. Teachers of English as a second language know the best answer to the question of how many words there are in a prepositional verb. If you want to know how to use the language properly, don’t ask. Given the labyrinthine complexity of the variable terminologies and conflicting expert solutions to the conundrum of establishing what the word units are in perfectly ordinary English expressions, it seems fairly obvious that an ordinary user of a language such as English doesn’t need to know what a word is—or what word it is—in order to make sense. Wordhood is often a useful notion, but it is not a hard-edged thing. Other languages undermine the wordness of words in a variety of different ways. German runs them together to make new ones. Lastkraftwagenfahrer (truck driver) is of course a single word in ordinary use, but it can easily be seen as two words written next to each other (Lastkraftwagen plus Fahrer, “truck” plus “driver”), or as three words run together (Last plus Kraftwagen plus Fahrer, “freight” plus “motor vehicle” plus “driver”), or as four (Last plus Kraft plus Wagen plus Fahrer, “freight” plus “power” plus “vehicle” plus “driver”). Hungarian also melds what we think of as many separate words, but in a different and equally elegant way. What a computer would count as a three- word expression, Annáékkal voltunk moziban, for example, would be expressed in English by around a dozen words: “We were [voltunk] at the cinema [moziban] with Anna and her folk” (that’s to say, friends or relatives or hangers-on, without distinction). The modest suffix -ék is all that is needed to turn Anna into a whole group, and the “glued-on” or agglutinated addition -kal says that you were part of it, too. Indeed, at my younger daughter ’s wedding in London in 2003, in honor of her Hungarian grandparents I was able (after doing my homework) to raise a toast édeslányaméknak, which is to say in one word “to my dear daughter ’s husband, in-laws, and friends.” Classical Greek has no proper word for word; moreover, in manuscripts and monuments from the earlier period, Greek is written without spaces between words. But that does not automatically mean that Greek thinkers had no concept of a basic unit of language smaller than the utterance. There is evidence of word dividers in Greek written in Linear B and Cyprian, ancient scripts that predate the Greek alphabet, and in various other ways a notion of “basic unit” does seem to emerge even in a language that supposedly has no “word” for the unit thus distinguished. 7 Even Hungarians recognize that some “words” are more basic than others, that beneath the practically infinite welter of possible agglutinated and compounded forms lie nuggets that are the elementary building blocks of sense. Gyerek is Hungarian for “child,” and though it may almost never occur in that form in any actual expression, it is nonetheless the “root” or “stem” corresponding to the English stem word child. Without an operative concept of the meaning units of which a language is made, it would be hard to imagine how a dictionary could be constructed. And without a dictionary, how would anyone ever learn a foreign tongue, let alone be able to translate it?  NINE Understanding Dictionaries Translators use dictionaries all the time. I have a whole set, with the Oxford English Dictionary in two volumes and Roget’s Thesaurus in pride of place, alongside monolingual, bilingual, and picture dictionaries of French idioms, Russian proverbs, legal terminologies, and much else. These books are my constant friends, and they tell me many fascinating things. But the fact that I seek and obtain a lot of help from dictionaries doesn’t mean that without them translation would not exist. The real story is the other way around. Without translators, Western dictionaries would not exist. Among the very earliest instances of writing are lists of terms for important things in two languages. These bilingual glossaries were drawn up by scribes to maintain consistency in translating between two languages and to accelerate the acquisition of translating skills by apprentices. These still are the main purposes of the bilingual and multilingual glossaries in use today. French perfume manufacturers maintain proprietary databases of the terms of their trade to help translators produce promotional material for export markets, as do lathe manufacturers, medical specialists, and legal firms working in international commercial law. These tools assist translators mightily, but they do not lie at the origin of translating itself. They are the fruits of established translation practice, not the original source of translators’ skills. Sumerian bilingual dictionaries consist of roomfuls of clay tablets sorted into categories— occupations, kinship, law, wooden artifacts, reed artifacts, pottery, hides, copper, other metals, domestic and wild animals, parts of the body, stones, plants, birds and fish, textiles, place-names, and food and drink, each with its matching term in the unrelated language of Sumer ’s Akkadian conquerors.1 As they are organized by field, they correspond directly to today’s SPDs, or “special purpose” dictionaries—Business French, Russian for the Oil and Gas Industries, German Legal Terminology, and so forth. Some of them are multilingual (as are many of today’s SPDs) and give equivalents in Amoritic, Hurritic, Elamite, Ugaritic, and other languages spoken by civilizations with which the Akkadians were in commercial if not always peaceful contact.2 From ancient Mesopotamia to the late Middle Ages in Western Europe, word lists with second-language equivalents went on serving the same purposes—to regularize translation practice and to train the next generation of translators. Characteristically, they mediate between the language of conquerors and the language of the conquered retained as a language of culture. What did not arise in the West at any time until after the invention of the printed book were general or all-purpose word lists giving definitions in the same language. The Western monolingual dictionary—“the general purpose” dictionary, or GPD—is a late by- product of the ancient tradition of the translator ’s companion, the bilingual word list, but its impact on the way we think about a language has been immense. The first real GPD was launched by the Académie Française in the seventeenth century (volume 1, A–L, appeared in 1694); the first to be finished from A to Z was Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of the English language, which came out in 1755. These monuments mark the invention of French and of English as languages in a peculiar, modern sense. Once they had been launched, every other language had to have its own GPD—failing which, it would not be a real language. It wasn’t just rivalry that sparked the great race to produce national dictionaries for every “national language.” The need to compile self-glossing lists of all the words in a language also expressed a new idea of what kind of a thing a language was, an idea taken directly from what had happened in English and French. The Chinese tradition is