Dancers at the wedding
by Kerstin Hoge
David Bellos. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything
400pp. Particular Books. £20. ISBN 978 1 846 14464 6
Caught in the act of translation, a translator may seem to be engaged in a pas de deux with the source text. Like dancers, translators can stay in close embrace or move further away (the higher the degree of adaptation, the “freer” the translation), need to fit their performance to the context (different kinds of text and communicative functions impose different constraints), and often find their professional relationship described in eroticized terms (accusations of betrayal and infidelity are part and parcel of the discourse on translation). What is more, dance and translation, notwithstanding their ubiquity, are both the target of popular misconceptions, and frequently understood to occupy a rarefied realm that eludes commonsensical description.
In the wonderfully titled Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, David Bellos, a renowned translator and scholar of French literature, seeks to debunk a number of established myths about translation and convince us that “translation is another name for the human condition”, embodying the presuppositions that we are all different and yet the same. Translation, whether it involves literary works or court proceedings, is argued to be a “basic aspect of language use”; that is, translation between languages draws on the same procedure of “using one word for another” that is employed within a single language.
In his endorsement of the principle of effability (“each proposition can be expressed by some sentence in any natural language”), which entails the view that cross-linguistic translation is always possible, Bellos challenges the well-rehearsed adage that translation is no substitute for the original. Much of this book is an astute examination of whether there is any truth to the various ways in which this claim has been interpreted and what motivates assertions of “untranslatability”. Bellos shows that Western thinking about translation reflects a particular etymological tradition (the idea that translation transfers meaning might not have arisen if we, like the ancient Sumerians, thought of translators as “language turners”), and draws on a wealth of historical, linguistic and literary evidence to argue that it is time to see translation as no more nor less than “matchmaking”.
What counts as a good match depends on what the translation is for. Translations “rephrase the message to adapt it to its alternative context of use”, which means that translators must strive for informational equivalence between source and target but adopt the criterion of suitable likeness, instead of equivalence, when it comes to the many other dimensions of a text, such as register or rhythm. Translators can choose “which dimensions to connect in a relationship of likeness and the extent to which the likeness is made visible”. Translation is thus always an interpretative and creative act, and Bellos passionately and convincingly argues the case for it to be valued as such, rather than viewed as some kind of ersatz product or “compensatory strategy” for coping with linguistic diversity.
The context of use for a translation is shaped in part by the hierarchical relationship that exists between source and target language. The book gives ample illustrations of the sociocultural and linguistic effects of the difference between translating “up” into a culturally more dominant or prestigious language and translating “down” into a less dominant one. Dominant languages often fulfil an additional role of “pivot language”, facilitating cultural exchange between linguistic communities that have no bilateral translation relation (an example is the use of English as source for the Chinese translation of the Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer).
The flow of translation up and down linguistic hierarchies is rarely balanced: UNESCO data indicate that from 2000 to 2009, nearly 80 per cent of all literary translations between Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi and Swedish were translations from English, but only 9 per cent of the translations among these languages were translations into English. The current status of English as the most widely translated language has the effect that for a writer to achieve global recognition depends on publication in English, which is not easily accomplished for a non-anglophone writer, given the comparative scarcity of translations into English. Bellos presents the argument that in order to gain entry into the English-language market, foreign-language writers may well internalize translation constraints or even shift to English as their language of literary production. If so, translation exercises a retroactive effect on artistic work, which in turn influences how the work (and the source-language culture) will be received in translation. For example, “our standard vision of Swedes as verbally challenged depressives” may have little grounding in reality but derive from Ingmar Bergman’s canny awareness of subtitling constraints.
In short, translation matters; and Bellos’s book traces the importance, understanding and workings of translation in its many facets. Writing punchily about topics as diverse as the relationship between language and thought, the pseudo-translation of fictional authors, and the first use of simultaneous interpretation at the Nuremberg Trials, Bellos is always diverting, but his book amounts to more than a kaleidoscopic display of language-related curiosities. David Bellos has an argument to make for translation as a central feature of linguistic behaviour, and he makes it well. In his conception, translation is not a means to create (or restore a mythical state of) intercomprehensibility, but an expression of human creativity and a civilizing force. If translation involves matchmaking, we should all hope to dance at many more weddings.
TLS, January 6, 2012