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In a huge field there are hundreds of horses with their riders, of all styles and abilities: the clumsy, the dainty, the anxious, the confident, the timorous, the intrepid. As the curious visitor approaches he is fearful of the noise, more like a battlefield than a horse show. But little by little, straining his ears, he begins to make out some of the cries. "Fly with Pigasous." "Look at me: this is the way to ride." "Leave nothing to chance: sign up for quality-assured riding classes now." Some riders are using megaphones to make themselves heard, but this leaves them off-balance, and their horses, frightened by the distorted electronic cackling, start bucking and rearing uncontrolledly. Riders often fall off, though few but the seriously injured will let that interrupt the flow of speech: "Spirited, eh? Just how they should be! Ride with me and you'll be a Cossack in a matter of months".
Most of the riders are thronging around near the fence where the visitors are, eager for attention. That's fine by Lucy, because what little Lucy needs is all the space she can get. So she's over there at the far end of the field, down by the river. And she's not saying anything at all, except for the slightest occasional whisper, imperceptible to all but Relámpago, her dappled Spanish stallion. If anyone could see her, they'd realize she was in that middle world between concentration and rapture, tapping the universe's ageless store of mystery to create art of sublime beauty. Nobody can see her, or any of the other riders, because it's a dark, black, moonless night and there is a dense fog.
I think this is a very accurate portrayal of the translation industry today. Over the last few decades, demand for translation has boomed, causing chaotic supply-side response. And whereas most markets would stabilize out naturally, chaos in the translation market persists and intensifies owing to deep-rooted ignorance (the fog), exacerbated by great confusion, much of it generated deliberately (the megaphone noise).
Down-to-earth readers, with their circuit diagrams and spreadsheets, might object to my use of words like rapture, art and beauty. "We do technology. "We do business," I hear them say. "We're not interested in poetic grace." Just two comments, for the time being:
- First, translation (like any form of writing) is inescapably an artform, and however much we might wish to insist on its practical purposes, we would be bound to recognize its artistic properties by simple virtue of the fact that reader response to written language is no more readily explained than viewer response to pictures or listener response to music. Since the capability for artistic expression, of all types, is an inherent part of the human psychological makeup, it is harnessed in all types of human endeavour, including business and industry. But though art for business and industry might be governed by functional requirements, it remains art nevertheless. Business makes extensive use of the graphic arts, for example, but it recognizes the need to employ artists having the required artistic sensitivity. There would be no question of mechanizing the artistic process or hiring just any mediocre scribbler on the grounds that the artwork was to appear on the company stationery rather than be hung in an art gallery. Of course, much business art (and virtually all business music) is hideous, but there is never any attempt to justify the ugliness on the grounds of compensatory functionality. It would be absurd to say, "Sure, the logo is crap, but it serves its purpose." But an exactly analogous claim is made frequently by translators and translation buyers, and this claim is even enshrined as official dogma by translators' associations and the like, as we shall be seeing later.
- Second, readers who are incurably allergic to words like "art" and "inspiration" have my permission to think, "job well done". As a young and recent convert from the sciences to the arts, I suffered from a tendency to look down on my previous trade in engineering, from what I imagined were the cultural heights of literary enlightenment. What eventually caused me to redescend was a throwaway remark made by a metallurgist friend when reminiscing on his first job in a foundry: "For me, making steel was the most noble thing a man could do." I recognize the artist's motivation here, just like I recognize the artfulness of the bread made by my baker, so much better than any other bread in town that I am obliged to adduce other factors than mere recipe. For the unashamedly unartistic, let us therefore agree on a common ground inhabited not only by "art" but also by such notions as "engineering elegance" and even the "personal commitment" so beloved of our modern-age management consultants.
In any case, the enemy of art, the enemy of engineering elegance and the enemy of personal commitment is ignorance. In the first part of this article, I mentioned two primary sources of ignorance in the translation industry: inertia and chaotic growth. In Part 2 I will be examining inertia, and in Part 3 chaos.
Inertia
The persistent authority of the written word
I mentioned previously that whereas spoken language was the result of slow-moving biological evolution, written language must be considered a product of fast-moving cultural change. But everything is relative, and what might be fast in evolutionary terms still looks excruciatingly slow to the calendar-watcher. Because it afforded permanence and efficient transmissibility for long, complex chains of thought expressed through language, writing must be considered the most important discovery in the whole history of humanity. And for a very long time, the immense power of the written word was wielded by the tiny minority of the population that had access to education. Today, virtually everybody in the Western world can read, and a large proportion of the population can actually produce printed documents that resemble published works. But the written word's long history as a secret code, offering access to knowledge for initiates only, still shows through quite clearly today. For a start, the written word still enjoys an inherent credibility, regardless of whether credence is actually warranted by content. The written word was for so long the exclusive preserve of those in power that it continues to glow with an aura of authority today. I have frequently observed that a reader having difficulty with a text will be more likely to blame his own capacity for understanding than the author's capacity for explanation. Even among peers, the author is perceived as enjoying intellectual dominance, and the burden of achieving understanding will fall on the reader. Two examples:
- I remember showing a biochemist friend a rather bad translation of a document in his particular speciality area. He struggled over it for a long time, reading large chunks again and again in an attempt to extract the meaning. He finally put the document down and commented, "Yeah, I guess that's pretty much the way it works", referring to the author's explanation of complex biochemical processes. Though he regularly publishes papers himself (and evidently strives to write them as clearly as possible), it did not seriously cross his mind that the author (the translator, in fact) could have expressed himself better. Many translators would be tempted to interpret this as justification for their undervaluing of good writing: after all, the message did get across. I will merely comment that my friend read the article because I had specifically asked him to; otherwise, I doubt very much whether he would have reached the end.
- Most major office software packages come from the USA, and are translated (or "localized", to use the industry term) for non-English-speaking markets. Whereas the help screens for the native English packages are often well written, users of other language versions will usually find it much quicker and easier to proceed by trial and error rather than stumble through the cumbersome prose of the overliteral translations. Yet few computer users realize that the fault lies in the translation; it has simply become an accepted fact that the help function is not really helpful. This is considered as inevitable an annoyance as the occasional connection failure or Windows freeze. Sure, some of the more blatant mistranslations are occasionally pilloried to raise a laugh in the consumer press, but the ubiquitous plodding style of the foreign-language documentation produced by major software companies is accepted as an ordinary fact of life. So long as the words are spelt correctly and the grammatical structures will parse according to the rulebook, the reader will assume that the author/translator has done his job, and tend to blame difficulties in understanding on his own impatience rather than on the translator's incompetence.
Users of translated software might even be forgiven for correlating spectacular advances in software useability with declining quality in documentation: after all, modern software-design practice dictates that the user interface itself should provide sufficient implicit guidance to make the explicit help function largely unnecessary. Yet the original English-language documentation is usually perfectly adequate, or even good. And so it should be: it is designed and written with great care by specialized technical authors in well-organized technical documentation departments. Certainly, localization receives no lesser care and attention, judging from the industry-wide standards and procedures developed in recent years in an attempt to guarantee successful localization practice. So how is it that so much care and attention can produce such very bad results? It can only be that the care and attention is misdirected.
The power of popular misconception
The invention of writing opened the way to efficient communication of ideas across the barriers set by geography, politics and, above all, the passing of time. Thereby, it single-handedly potentiated the emergence of scientific enquiry: transient, short-range, unreliable word-of-mouth speculation on the workings of the universe would give way to a durable system that would enable each successive generation to build solidly on the findings of the last. Sure enough, humankind's boundless analytical curiosity would soon extend to the very vehicle whereby that curiosity was exercised: language. Indeed, enquiry into the nature of language has always held great fascination, perhaps because language makes such a crucial contribution to civilization, perhaps because language is what sets us apart from other animals. And the fascination is enhanced by the powerful political implications of language. Because thought is expressed using language, there has always been a temptation to see crossover between them: for example, oppressors have frequently imagined that rebellion can be quelled by silencing the language in which rebellious thoughts are phrased; and rebels have frequently imagined that rebellion can be consummated by remustering a linguistic identity. History has repeatedly disproved this misconception, yet it persists. Misconception concerning language has the habit of persisting, and this is part of what I mean by inertia.
The particular misconception that language in some way determines thought even enjoyed a brief period of academic acceptance as recently as the nineteen-fifties, its best-known proponents being the US linguists Whorf and Sapir. Basically, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claimed that a person's ideas would be conditioned by the framework of the particular language available for expressing them. Whorf observed, for example, that the language of the Hopi Indians used dramatically different tense structures from English, and suggested that this might have a bearing on how its speakers actually viewed the passing of time. Few, if any, serious linguists support this hypothesis today. In a way, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can be seen as seeking scientific legitimacy for people's tendency to perceive deep psychological differences between themselves and foreigners. Without wishing to accuse Whorf or Sapir of xenophobia, I think we could reasonably say that Whorfianism and xenophobia both derive from a commonplace sense of tribalism, and it is this deep-lying sense of tribalism that maintains the strong current of popular misconception on language. Steven Pinker opens his preface to The Language Instinct with this comment: "Language is beginning to submit to that uniquely satisfying kind of understanding that we call science, but the news has been kept a secret". Very often, the problem is not so much one of secrecy as of unwillingness to accept the encroachment of scientific enquiry into the jealously guarded personal domain of language: in her afterword to The Language Web, Jean Aitchison speaks of the "hornet's nest" of vociferous dissent aroused by her eminently sensible BBC Reith lectures in 1996. I can think of no other area in which flat-earth tribalism continues to enjoy such lasting success.
The infinitely expanding layers of the dictionary onion
The debate on Whorfianism is central to modern linguistics, and it provides a very useful window through which to examine the inertia that holds back good translation practice. Let us consider the English sentence "I'll pick you up at the station", and its French translation "Je viens te chercher à la gare". A Whorfian analysis of this stock translation might focus on the verb chercher , which in many contexts will mean "to look for". Clearly, the Whorfian might say, a French-speaking person emphasizes the process of seeking out the traveller, whereas his English-speaking counterpart resolves the search to emphasize its result, i.e. the finding and subsequent pick-up of the traveller. Might this not reveal greater uncertainty and pessimism in the French psyche than the English? Hardly! And while we're on rail, what about the Spanish question "¿te acerco a la estación?" , which might translate as "can I drop you off at the station?" Clearly, says the Whorfian, a Spaniard will speak of advancing the traveller along his way to the station, but is reluctant to promise that the destination will be reached. Again, nonsense!
Both of my rather evident railway-station misinterpretations arise out of false equivalences established by our would-be Whorfian across discrete sentence elements in the two languages. Let's look at the process in detail:
- Step 1: identify "acercar" with "pick up"
- Step 2: look up "acercar" in Spanish-English dictionary
Though the process looks logically valid, both of its component steps are hazardous. The first step (matching "acercar" with "drop off") is only possible because the Spanish and English sentences are short and share a similar structure. Basically, our Whorfian will have detected four basic sentence elements ("I", "you", "drop off" and "station"), then proceeded to match "I" with the "o" verb termination, "you" with "te", and "station" with "estación", thus leaving the Spanish verb "acercar" alongside the English verb "drop off" by elimination. This is hazardous because close structural similarities in proper translation are extremely rare outside the most simple and purely denotational of sentences (of the type "today is Tuesday", to quote the great Argentine writer and translator Julio Cortázar). But what concerns us most is the second step, that of looking up "acercar" in a Spanish-English dictionary. This is even more hazardous, and the hazard is exacerbated by the apparently innocent nature of the look-it-up-in-the-dictionary reflex. For acercar, a pocket Spanish-English dictionary gives the meaning "to bring near", which will be corroborated by our Whorfian analyst's realization that the verb acercar is derived from the adjective cerca, meaning "near". A mid-sized Spanish-English dictionary (Collins) gives "to bring near(er)" or "to bring over", though it also includes the example "acercar algo al oído" as meaning "to put something to one's ear". This inclusion of examples of typical usage is a much appreciated feature of larger dictionaries, and the choice and scope of examples will very much determine the quality of a dictionary. By including examples of typical usage, the dictionary is recognizing that a word in one language can almost never be directly matched to a word in another. This can be seen as practical confirmation of the linguist's theoretical observation that meaning is spread across stretches of discourse that are larger (much, much larger) than the word. The word "acercar" has different meanings in different contexts; alone, it has no meaning, because it is never normally used alone.
We can easily imagine a Spanish-English dictionary including my train-station sentence as an example of typical usage. But let's take a large conceptual step ahead, and imagine a really huge dictionary that gives all possible contexts for every word. So would this huge work not be a reliable resource for translators? Would it not legitimize the look-it-up-in-the-dictionary reflex I am so fond of maligning? More significantly, would it not provide a reliable database enabling a computer to perform translation? The answer is no, for three main reasons:
- The first reason is that this ultimately comprehensive dictionary of ours would have to be updated in real-time, to allow for language change. As well as fad-related shifts in the meaning of words (e.g. "gay" to mean "homosexual", and "quality" to mean "mediocrity"), changes in grammar (e.g. the gradual disappearance, even among educated writers, of the subjunctive form "wish I were there") and references to recent history, this also includes things like changes in perceived originality. Today's clichés derive from novel expressions that ended up victims of their own success. The first person to use the expression "jaded metaphor" was being highly original, but the expression has become such a standard collocation today that we could almost consider it a jaded metaphor itself.
- The second reason is that no two communities have the same vocabulary. In fact, no two people have the same vocabulary; as I mentioned in Part 1, individual idiolects are like fingerprints. The better dictionaries will occasionally give some kind of indication as to what kind of register a word belongs to; the word "fuck", for example, classically enjoys three-star rating on the vulgarity scale. But our comprehensive dictionary would have to offer a satisfactory account for continued coexistence of the words "buy" and "purchase", for example. It would have to explain why engineers do not speak the same language in the laboratory as they do in the pub. And it would have to offer a realtime-updated map of the ever-shifting and unpredictable vogue currents that inflect the speech of communities as disparate as skateboarders and political speechwriters. Not only does our dictionary undergo constant change, but, ultimately, it actually encompasses as many sub-dictionaries as there are speakers.
- The third reason is size. A truly comprehensive dictionary would have to be literally infinite in size. This is evident (as Chomsky observed) from the combinatory nature of language: for any utterance of size X, it is always possible to generate an utterance of length X+1, by adding or embedding a clause. But more significantly, it is true for the simple reason that there is an infinite number of possible and unforeseeable occurrences liable to happen in the real world, and humans will be capable of responding by use of language to any such occurrence. Indeed, we are perfectly capable of inventing imaginary occurrences and describing them by the use of language. This, as I mentioned in Part 1, is the most important implication of Chomsky's well-known observation. Sceptics will insist on the combinatory aspect, noting that a word can have exactly the same meaning in many different sentences: my passenger can be taken to the station, airport or spaceship terminal, and in each case the essence of the taking remains identical. So why not just catalogue this meaning properly in the dictionary, and let it apply to any destination? Because sometimes it might simply be more appropriate to use a different expression, such as "I'll give you a lift", or "you can come with me". The expression we choose will depend on the speaker's idiolect, and on the surrounding material in the discourse. Ultimately (since this ideal dictionary claims to offer the ultimate in comprehensive coverage), we can say that any component of a discourse is dependent on all others, which is another way of saying that full meaning is spread across the discourse as a whole. And since there are as many possible discourses as there are possible situations, we end up with a dictionary of infinite size. I would also say that while my sceptic's simple slot-in approach might be applicable to the denotational, it would be much less applicable to the connotational (things like metaphor and insinuation). So we could say that for any utterance having a connotational component of size X, it is always possible to generate a connotational component of size X+1. Similarly, there is an infinite potential of novel connotational language response to the infinite number of real and imaginary occurrences liable to happen or to be imagined. If this sounds too mathematical, just bear in mind that most of the non-trivial utterances you utter today will never have been uttered before, and that the component parts of those utterances are highly vulnerable to overnight change in connotational meaning. For example, the denotational meaning of the name "World Trade Center" might remain fairly constant, but its connotational meaning changed very dramatically on 11 September 2001. Then consider that what are considered stock expressions or clichés today must have started life as powerfully original linguistic inventions by imaginative writers or speakers. As David Crystal notes in his Encyclopedia of the English Language, expressions such as "cruel to be kind", "tower of strength", "laughable", "barefaced", "fancy-free", "bated breath" and "foregone conclusion" (to mention just a tiny proportion of the total) were invented by Shakespeare. In other words, Shakespeare effected a huge and lasting change to the lexicon and grammar of the English language. To a much lesser extent, every writer who is read, and every speaker who is heard, makes some, albeit barely perceptible, impact on the language. Think jokes: the inventive action of cracking a joke changes the quality of the linguistic material that makes up the joke, for the simple reason that new and old jokes do not get the same response.
What all this amounts to is that no full bilingual dictionary can ever be written, since this would involve writing infinitely sized and perpetually changing works in as many versions as there were pairs of language speakers. So what? Let's go ahead and do it anyway! Or, at least, let's pretend. According to this model, as the dictionary gets bigger, the translation gets better. In a pocket dictionary, then, the French noun "coup" gets translated as "knock", and that's it. So with just a pocket dictionary, and no knowledge of French, we would be obliged to translate the expression "ça vaut le coup" as "this is worth the knock", which does not really belong to the English language (though it might do if used on television a couple of times). Moving up to a larger dictionary, we'll see "valoir le coup" listed as an entry in its own right. But instead of offering a generic translation for the expression, the dictionary is obliged to resort to typical examples, and among those examples, we do indeed find "ça vaut le coup" , alongside the suggested translation "it's worth it". This is about as far as dictionaries ever go, and very reasonably so, since well-chosen examples will be sufficient to give the reader the essence of the meaning, and a feel for how the meaning might change according to context.
Let's now broaden the context very slightly, to examine the expression "ça vaut le coup de continuer". Clearly, the dictionary entry for "ça vaut le coup" becomes inadequate, since it would give "it's worth it to continue", which, again, does not belong to the English language. A little twist would give "it's worth continuing", which is only a little better. So our expanding dictionary would have to include a separate entry for "ça vaut le coup de continuer". For example, we might find the translation "we might as well carry on", or "there's no point turning back now", or any of a dozen or more alternatives, depending on the broader context. It takes little mathematics to realize that any dictionary attempting even this degree of contextual comprehensiveness would be so enormous as to be impracticable.
In Part 1, I spoke of the UN technical agency that insisted on translating "la tension sur les bornes de la résistance" as "the voltage on the terminals of the resistor". This error was caused by the translator's ignorance of usual electrical engineering parlance, but according to my "comprehensive dictionary" model, we might also say that it was caused by the translator's using a defective dictionary. The dictionary was, apparently, big enough to avoid the even more flagrant error of translating "résistance" as "resistance", but not big enough to include a full enough entry for "bornes" . If I could have shown the head of the translation department a dictionary with such an entry, I might have been able to prevent the error. In other words, the error was of exactly the same nature as a schoolchild translating "il a dix ans" as "he has ten years". The dictionary is too small: it lists "avoir" as meaning "to have", but fails to include the special case of expressions of age. A bigger dictionary will fix this particular problem, but it cannot go much further; it could not, for example, reasonably include, as a special case, the expression "on a l'impression de stagner", which might well translate, under certain circumstances, as "this is getting us getting nowhere". In this example, as with a huge proportion of translation, there is little surface similarity between the source and target sentences. Meaning is distributed over large chunks of discourse, and, ultimately, over the discourse as a whole.
Deep and surface grammars
Virtually everything I've said about dictionaries will also apply to grammarbooks. The dictionary catalogues words, whereas the grammarbook describes how the words are put together to form legitimate sentences. Again, we can imagine grammarbooks ranging from the schoolkid's cribsheet up to an ideal comprehensive grammar, again of infinite size owing to the infinite expandability and variability of language. (Actually, because our ideal dictionary goes beyond words to examine contexts, it will catalogue not only the words in both languages, but also the way the words are put together. In other words, it is a grammarbook as well as a dictionary.)
The smaller grammarbooks will stop at the more obvious things like verb conjugations, while the larger ones will go further, to examine issues that the vast majority of even educated speakers are totally unaware of. Take adjective order, for instance. Why do we always say "a lovely big stone house" and never "a stone big lovely house" or any other of the six possible adjective permutations? Apparently, English has such a definite preference for word order here that any deviation is considered ungrammatical. Yet this grammatical rule displays a few very curious characteristics.
1 - It appears to perform no definite syntactical function. Sure, you might say that the "s" suffix on a third-person-singular verbform performs no useful function, since the obligatory subject pronoun provides all the necessary information. But at least you can identify the function the "s" performs.
2 - It lacks the binary right/wrong applicability of most grammatical rules. A "linen green fine jacket" would be struck instantly from any translated clothing catalogue, yet "a grey thundering momentous wave" might just be considered a little poetic.
3 - Everyone could correct "linen green fine jacket", but hardly anyone could formalize the rules they apply to do so. And I do not think there even exists a full account that reliably describes the way we naturally tend to place premodifying adjectives in one order and not another.
4 - The rule appears to operate at such a deep level that nobody ever gets it wrong. Teachers seem to agree that students of English rarely need to be told the order; they seem to know it already. And whereas "hard" grammar features such as verb conjugations can show considerable divergence across geographically close dialects, I can think of no English dialect that varies the order of premodifying adjectives.
Glancing through Leech and Svartvik's Communicative Grammar of English, I notice descriptions of even weirder notions such as "end focus" and "end weight", which explain why in English we usually prefer to save the most important or lengthy piece of information for last. These rules are so vague and approximate that it is difficult to apply them consciously, and very dangerous to give them greater dominion than they have. In fact, we should not consider them as rules at all, but as simple descriptions of how the English language tends to behave. This is true of all grammatical rules, though we must recognize that some rules (like verb conjugations) are hard because they govern simple and obvious functions like identifying the person or the time, whereas others are more liquid because they cover more complex functions such as emphasis. At an even finer level of detail, in our ideal comprehensive grammarbook, we would expect to find descriptions of how other complex functions are performed in language. Very significantly, most good dictionaries will include a section giving tips on the use of language functions such as "requests", "comparisons", "opinion" and "permission" (to mention just a few of the headings in the Language Use section of the Collins Robert Senior). Ultimately, just like the "end focus" rule describes one of the mechanisms employed to mark emphasis, so we might expect our ideal grammarbook to describe, for example, ways in which joy coupled with expectation for the future and a shade of reconciled nostalgia is conveyed between social equals of different sex. Very clearly, we have left the realm of objective grammar to enter a very subjective realm that almost resembles literary criticism. At this, ultimate, level of detail, we are very close to examining the way in which thoughts are translated into words.
As I mentioned earlier, since there is no limit to the number of potentially experiencable situations to which humans can respond with use of language, with limitless degree of nuance, the full surface grammar (my ideal dictionary plus grammarbook) of any instantiation of language must be considered infinite. In simple terms, this just means that people will always be able to express novel ideas in novel ways; literary criticism is a far-from-expendable resource. But a very big problem arises whenever we touch upon the notion of infinity. An infinitely-sized grammar can fit on no bookshelf, and can fit in no brain. Clearly, then, it must be generated by a mechanism of staggering power and complexity but nevertheless finite size, implemented in the human brain. And this mechanism must be capable of generating full grammars in any instantiation; a child born in Madrid will grow up speaking Spanish whereas a child born in Beijing will speak Chinese. This realization, by Chomsky in the nineteen-fifties, marked a momentous turning point in the history of linguistics. By analogy with Chomsky's term "deep structure", we can thus conceive of a powerful and efficient deep grammar (also referred to as "universal grammar"), common to all languages and used for arranging ideas ready for expression in the surface grammar of a particular language instantiation. Pinker (though he would doubtless object to the term "deep grammar") speaks of "mentalese" when referring to this prerequisite mental representation of ideas.
We can model the grammar/lexicon of a language as a triangle (a multi-dimensional cone would be better) with a small number of hard and simple grammatical rules at the apex and a very large number of liquid and complex grammatical rules at the base. Dictionaries and grammarbooks cover the apex of the triangle, the tip of the iceberg. Note that the tip of the iceberg is readily open to objective and formalizable rules, whereas complexity fast precludes formalization and objectivity as we work down away from the tip. Note also that objectivity-subjectivity forms a continuum. We could also call this the grammar-style continuum. Grammar and style are of the same substance; it's just that we tend to speak of grammar when referring to rules that are catalogued in the grammarbook and style for everything that isn't.
So what does all this have to do with translation? Well, for a start it explains my assertion that there will often be little parallel in surface structures across source and target texts. Bad translation works with small dictionaries and superficial grammarbooks, which ensures close parallelism to the detriment of accurate conveyance of meaning. So does this mean that good translators just work with large dictionaries and grammarbooks? Is this how it works? No! Not at all.
Applicability of comparative grammars
I have already intimated that dictionaries and grammarbooks become unworkable beyond the rather elementary, but I would like to further emphasize this point with a brief examination of the origins of a bilingual dictionary. What exactly is it that enables us to list the Spanish word "mesa" alongside the English word "table"? It can only be the fact that Spanish people are observed to say "mesa" when referring to the object that British people refer to as "table". In other words, we place members of the two language communities in the same situation and observe their language response. We can do this for all the words in the language, but, as we have seen, there will be many more special cases than main entries, and the number of special cases will increase limitlessly with the length of the extract under examination. Again, very similar considerations apply to grammarbooks. What was it that allowed the first French textbook to equivalate "il a" with "he has" and "il avait" with "he had"? Principally, the fact that the expressions were observed to be frequently and fairly systematically used to express the notion of possession in present and past time respectively. But the parallel only extends to the most elementary of sentences, and then only in a most unreliable manner. A list of even the most basic exceptions to the parallel (e.g. historic present tense and expressions of age and needs) would, again, occupy hundreds of times more space in the grammarbook than the actual verb conjugation. And this is way before we even begin to examine the more esoteric aspects of grammar such as word order, sentence weighting, and the millions upon millions of intricately interweaved factors that determine how a text actually sounds in the reader's inner ear. A small comparative grammar might successfully translate "il a dix grenades" as "he has ten pomegranates". A slightly larger grammar might successfully translate "il a quinze ans" as "he is fifteen". A big grammar might even manage to negotiate the French historic present and translate "il a quinze ans quand il découvre Coltrane" as "he was fifteen when he discovered Coltrane". A grammar larger than any ever written but not entirely inconceivable might conceivably translate "on a l'impression de stagner" as "we're getting nowhere". But what about a text like this:
"Car si le premier ministre nous conviait à un échange, c'était avant tout à un échange thermique. On sentait qu'il mobilisait désespérément en lui tout le combustible disponible pour accomplir cette tâche prométhéenne: la fonte de sa banquise individuelle. S'il parvenait, là, tout de suite, à offrir la seule représentation attendue par le peuple, celle de la liquéfaction de l'élite française, de ses certitudes et de son arrogance, alors l'exemple serait certainement contagieux. Alors de proche en proche, les mammouths congelés du syndicalisme, les grévistes raidis sur leurs refus, se laisseraient gagner aussi par la contagion du dégel."
A colleague ventured this as a translation into English:
"For if the prime minister was inviting us to an exchange, it was above all a thermal exchange. One felt that he was desperately mobilizing within himself all the fuel available for accomplishing this Promethean task: the melting down of his individual ice floe. If he succeeded, there, at once, to offer the only performance expected by the people, that of the liquefaction of the French elite, of their certainties and arrogance, then the example would surely prove contagious. Then step by step the frozen mammoths of trade-unionism, the strikers stiffened in their refusal, would also let themselves be won over by the contagion of the thaw."
Very obviously, this translation was performed using a grammarbook. Not in paper form, but in the translator's brain. It was performed algorithmically, applying the low-level algorithms of a small comparative grammar in order to transform the surface structure of the French into a closely parallel surface structure in English. The result does not belong to any viable dialect of the English language, since no English-speaking person (much less a professional journalist like the writer of the French text) would ever reasonably choose to express himself in this way.
So what would a more comprehensive comparative grammar have told the translator? Hundreds and thousands of things. I'll list just two:
- The "si . c'était" construction is so extremely commonplace in French that it must be considered a throwaway piece of stock rhetoric. By translating this algorithmically, the translator has grossly distorted the feel of the article, making it much heavier and more pompous that it actually seems in French. Exactly the same applies to the rhetorical "là, tout de suite" , which is clumsily and unnaturally rendered as "there, at once".
- The word "banquise" was doubtless chosen instead of "iceberg" simply because it is a native French word and not an ill-sounding import. Since this is just part of an extended metaphor anyway, there is no value in the precise literal meaning of the word. So the conscientious translator will follow the same thought process as the writer and choose the best-sounding option consistent with the metaphor in English, just like the writer chose the best-sounding option in French. Very similar considerations apply to "liquéfaction" .
I could go further. Much further. I could easily fill a dozen pages with a detailed grammatical analysis of this text, and even that would not be complete: another linguist could easily come along and spot things I had missed, and extend my angle of vision on the things I had spotted.
I attempted the translation myself and came up with this:
"The prime minister had invited us in to the warm, and you could tell he had gathered all the fuel he could find to accomplish the Promethean task of melting down his own personal iceberg. If he managed to meet the public's sole expectation of the moment, by dissolving the arrogance of the French elite, then the process would surely prove contagious and the thaw would soon spread to the frozen mammoths of trade-unionism itself, and the strikers set in their icy stubbornness."
To do this, I did not consciously perform any algorithmic conversions. A proper and reasonably thorough algorithmic approach would have been unbelievably time-consuming, because it would have involved developing that twelve-page grammatical analysis full of literary-criticism-type commentary along the lines of the two points I made above. As well as taking far too much time, this would also have been unreliable because the base of our triangle is so immense that I could never be sure of covering it all. So what did I do? I crossed the river between the two languages at the only place where it is actually bridgeable, at the source, i.e. at the grammar generator. Specifically, I read the text, made sure I understood all the ideas and the whole of the argumentary plot perfectly, put myself in the author's place, and wrote exactly the same ideas in English, following exactly the same argumentary plot. Because the author was a professional writer himself, I had to assume that the argumentary plot, including a grossly overworked metaphor that didn't please me personally, was wholly intentional and carefully planned. As you might expect, my colleague claimed that I had "rewritten" the text instead of translating it, but in fact, my translation stands at the absolute upper limit of acceptable literality. (A case could be made for a more liberal approach, especially if the text was intended for readers with no prior understanding of the French political situation at the time.) Anything more literal than this should not properly be considered a translation. In a technical or business translation I would almost certainly have had to correct the argumentary plot to ensure that the resulting text was coherent and therefore viable in English.
Note that a full understanding of the text requires an understanding of the author's personality and frame of mind. This means a translator must be a bit of an actor, a bit of a mind-reader. It means the translator must be very sensitive indeed to the way people use language to express their ideas. And it means the translator must be able to write at least as well as his authors. As we saw in Part 1, if you can't write, you can't translate. Crucially, whereas the algorithmic approach addresses words, the read-understand-write approach addresses ideas. Translators do not translate words: they translate ideas!
Statistical proof
Because the algorithmic, overliteral approach is such a persistent impediment to good translation practice, let me just offer one more conclusive proof that, despite powerful support from big-name writers like Nabokov and Kundera, it lacks any justification whatever.
Every language divides reality up into segments amenable to convenient description through the use of words. Some segments have such obvious dividing lines that they are common to all languages. This applies, for example, to days of the week, everyday objects and everyday actions. Since people of all cultures have arms and legs, all languages (to my knowledge) have discrete words for these items. But as soon as we move away from the perfectly clear-cut (Cortázar's "Tuesday"), we find that different languages use different segments. To take some extremely elementary examples, French has several words for the English "valve" but ostensibly only one word to cover the English "like" and "love". Spanish has two verbs for the English "to be", and, no, this does not imply any kind of existential dilemma. It's just that in mapping reality, each language is forced to adopt some rather arbitrary decisions in the segmentation it uses; imagine taking a large picture then giving it to fifty different people to saw up into jigsaw pieces. You wouldn't expect any two pieces from any two jigsaws to be identical.
One result of the difference in segmentation is that certain words and expressions can, to the algorithmically-bound translator, appear extremely difficult to translate. Classic examples from French include "animation" and its derivatives (used very liberally to describe situations as diverse as extracurricular activities, pop-up books, piped music, riotous nightlife, busy marketplaces, sales drives and workgroup management) and "enjeux" (variously translated as "implications", "stakes" or "challenge"). Young translators will frequently ask "how do you translate animation here?", to which the only possible answer is that you don't translate the word "animation" at all. What you translate is a much larger chunk of text, expressing an idea for which French just happens to use a different language segmentation.
To make my statistical proof, let us just consider a single simple example from English: the verb "afford". French has no single word for the English "afford", so where an English speaker might say "we can't afford it", his French-speaking counterpart in the same situation might typically say something like "on n'a pas les moyens" . We might therefore consider these sentences to be translation equivalents, in certain contexts. But let us now consider the inherent dissymmetry between French-to-English and English-to-French translation across these translation equivalents. When translating from English to French, the translator is immediately confronted with a problem for which there is no ready slot-in solution, and he is therefore obliged to find a workaround, along the lines I suggest. The problem arises in the other direction, from French to English, since here there are a couple of readily available slot-in solutions, such as (very literally) "we don't have the means", or "we haven't got the cash". An algorithmic approach will therefore systematically fail to find the solution that uses the verb "afford". Now I'm not saying the slot-in solutions will always be wrong, or that the solution with "afford" will always be right. Far from it! All I am saying is that the "afford" solution will sometimes be right (simply because English speakers in this situation will be likely to use this expression), yet it will never be found by algorithmic means. It follows that a large corpus of algorithmic translation (large enough for statistical analysis to be significant) will be systematically deficient in certain expressions that would be found frequently in a similarly sized corpus of native writing. In other words, algorithmic translation cannot be faithful since it fails to reproduce anything like the statistical breakdown of words and expressions that we would find in native writing.
It might be argued that even an algorithmic translator could slot in "we can't afford it" whenever he sees "on n'a pas les moyens" . I would argue back by simply taking a slightly more complicated usage of the verb "afford". In a situation in which an English speaker might say "we can't afford not to", his French counterpart might typically say something like "il faut absolument " , or "c'est essentiel " , and though these expressions might at first sight seem blander than the English, since they lack the sense of implied threat, we must bear in mind that this aspect of meaning can perfectly well be conveyed elsewhere in the French text; as we have already seen, meaning is distributed broadly across large chunks of text. In this instance, then, I think it is clear that few algorithmic translations would manage to reproduce what is a very commonplace English expression. Again, if an expression occurs very frequently in a large corpus of native material but hardly ever in a large corpus of translated material, we can only conclude that the translation method is defective.
The educational gyroscope
The inertia that besets the translation business is almost wholly due to persistence of the algorithmic approach. So what is the explanation for this persistence? After all, there is nothing particularly original or revolutionary in my explanations proving why an algorithmic approach is misguided; this knowledge has been part of mainstream linguistics for the best part of half a century! So why do the immense majority of translators still practise an algorithmic approach? I can think of three main reasons.
Sawbone mentality
Belying the frequent charge that schools are staffed by overidealistic revolutionaries overeager to experiment suspiciously novel teaching methods on our unsuspecting overvulnerable children, the fact is that language teaching in schools has changed very little in a hundred years, despite overwhelmingly conclusive evidence that the traditional "grammar-translation" method is grossly ineffective. And when I say "overwhelming", I mean it would be difficult to find even a single serious work that justified the continued use of this method. This is not even a controversial issue: the whole body of linguistic and pedagogical thought over the last five decades concurs on the inefficacy of the grammar-translation method of language teaching. There is simply no serious dissent at all.
And yet, the French and German exercise books of my young nieces look identical to mine, which looked identical to my father's, which looked identical to his father's. Like my grandfather, like my father and like myself, my nieces will leave school after six or seven years of foreign-language instruction without any kind of practical fluency in a foreign language. They will be able to recite verb conjugations and other grammatical rules, but they will be unable to apply them in real-time for the purposes of an actual conversation.
Oh, I was forgetting. Yes, they will be able to perform a rather curious circus trick, a neat little number that consists in aligning words in one language alongside other words in another language, in accordance with algorithms so basic they would occupy a tiny pinpoint at the very tip of our grammar triangle. Their teachers call this "translation". Excepting the tiny minority with the good fortune to have language teachers in tune with current scientific thinking, all schoolchildren get six or seven years' sustained training in bad translation practice. They get regular hands-on practice in how to do it wrong! To be fair to teachers, I admit that it is not easy to teach modern languages properly to large classes, especially when they suffer from discipline problems. But there is still no excuse for misuse of translation in the language classroom. So why do teachers fall back on this technique, which is proscribed in every serious work on language teaching written in the last fifty years? There are three reasons. One: "that's the way I was taught, and if it was good enough for me it's good enough for them". Similar gyroscopic reasoning purportedly explains why battered children become child batterers. But it fails to explain why teachers today go to work in cars whereas their grandfathers sat atop mules. And it fails to explain why people prefer modern medicine to the sawbone's gruesome toolkit. Two: it's perceived as a quick and easy exercise. Elementary algorithmic transposition is seen as a convenient way to check the pupil's understanding of grammatical constructions. So instead of getting the pupil to develop agility in his foreign-language grammar generator, the teacher instructs him to apply low-level conversion algorithms. Instead of getting the pupil to observe a situation and describe it spontaneously in the foreign language (however falteringly, at first), the teacher will ask him to "translate" an English-language sentence describing the situation.
The wrong way:
The right way:
But not only do schoolkids get regular hands-on practice in how to do it wrong: they are actively discouraged from doing it right. Since the purpose of the transposition exercise is to check understanding of grammatical points, there is a strong disincentive to translate meaning. In an exercise whose stated purpose is to check knowledge of the past tense of "avoir" , how will the pupil behave when confronted with the sentence "nous n'avions pas assez d'argent" ? He will always opt for "we didn't have enough money" and never for "we couldn't afford it". Now I know that no half-way responsible teacher would knowingly set an exercise liable to mislead the student in this way. And I realize that only a monster of a teacher would mark "we couldn't afford it" wrong. But the fact remains that current language-teaching practice strongly and Pavlonially programmes pupils into a diametrically wrong view of translation. Very few, even among those who go on to study translation and become translators, will ever manage to correct this view. Those who go on to study modern languages get more of the same: bad translation is a requisite throughout the university curriculum, right up to the very highest level of academic achievement in France (the agrégation competitive examination, which offers access to a career in teaching at university level). This brings us full-cycle and puts extra spin on the educational gyroscope, to keep our bearings constantly fixed in the diametrically wrong direction.
The third reason why teachers misuse translation in the language classroom is because it offers a semblance of objectivity. As a fervent convert from the sciences to the arts, I have never understood why so many teachers and practitioners in the subjective realm feel so inferior to their counterparts in the objective realm. But the inferiority complex is very real, very widespread and very acute. I left science because I was attracted by the prospect of fuzzy borders, and was astonished to discover that many of my colleagues in the subjective realm actually feel naked and embarrassed without the hard borders I had fled from. To seek the opaque clothing their inferiority complex demands of them, many will resort to blatant intellectual dishonesty, and for all its fragility and elusiveness, the most popular figleaf of all is that of objectivity. (The other big one is standardization, as we shall be seeing.)
Physics envy
Steven Jay Gould used the term "physics envy" (by analogy with the "penis envy" of Freudian psychology) to chide his fellow life-scientists for their apparent unease at not being able to work within the physicist's reference frame, whose perceived rigidity was seen as conducive to intellectual credibility. The expression applies perfectly to translators and translation theorists.
The problem stems from the desire of the educational establishment to impose some kind of intellectual parity across all disciplines, in subjective and objective realms. It is felt that a three-year degree course in modern languages should be "worth" a three-year degree course in physics, though students of both subjects realize this is absurd. Physics students suffer from French envy at university because they have to work much harder; they'd get kicked out if they tried to keep up with the partying pace of their pals in the French department. But they get their own back after graduation, when they're wooed with offers of well-paid jobs while their pals struggle for years from one bum, boring, temporary office job to the next. Nobody seems willing to face up to the fact that you do not need to go to university to learn French: two years living in France will be more than sufficient, especially if you were lucky enough to get a head start by hitting on the five percent of enlightened language teachers at school. Modern-language departments therefore find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to find something to keep the students busy for three years. The bulk of the time is spent on literary criticism, the main result of which is to ensure that most students never dream of opening a book in any language ever again after graduating. And, again, the professors' physics envy is assuaged by compulsory practice of pseudo-objective mechanical transposition between the two languages, which renders the students unemployable for useful translation work.
So aren't things any better at translation school? Well, no, yes, no and no:
- No, first of all, if we judge by the results: whereas you could reasonably trust a graduate from medical school to diagnose and cure a simple ailment, you most certainly cannot trust a translation-school graduate to translate properly. This I know from extensive personal experience over a twenty-year career in translation: I see none but a negative correlation between formal training and actual competence in translation.
- Yes, because translation schools do at least give recognition to serious linguistics; few translation school teachers would quibble with the analysis set out in this article so far, for example. Translation schools also do valuable work in translation theory, but because much of this work seems highly abstract, it is overtly derided by many practising translators. While I do understand their perplexity at the contrived obtuseness of some learned papers, I rarely join in the derision. I see translation theory as taking us a good couple of metres down into the comparative grammar triangle, and though this is still the tip of the iceberg, it is valuable because all knowledge is valuable. We might be daunted by the size of the task, but that shouldn't stop us from making a start. Then there are parallels between translation theory and work on universal grammar. Universal grammar proves much more elusive than was originally expected, but we learn from its very elusiveness.
Two good recent books on translation are Mona Baker's In Other Words and Mildred Larson's Meaning-Based Translation. But though both claim to be translation textbooks, I see them more as fascinating studies in comparative linguistics. They are full of stuff like this:
"If theme is whatever occurs in initial position we would have to acknowledge that some languages prefer to thematize participants (expressed as subjects in SVO and SOV languages) on a regular basis while other languages prefer to thematize processes (expressed as verbs in VSO languages)."
Mona Baker
"The sequential and simultaneous relations [.] relate events which are of equal prominence; that is, in an addition relation. There are also units related to one another which are not of equal prominence. One of the units supports the other. There is a support-HEAD relation between the two units."
Mildred Larson
"[.] some English texts make little or no use of conjunctions. There are often pragmatic reasons for the preference of certain types of conjunction and the frequency with which conjunctions are used in general. [.] some genres are generally 'more conjunctive' than others and [.] each genre has its own preferences for certain types of conjunction. Religion and fiction use more conjunctions than science and journalism."
Mona Baker (citing work by Smith and Frawley)
Technical studies like these are admirable feats of observation and analysis. But they are not, and hardly claim to be, "how to" books. To take Mona Baker's observation that "religion and fiction use more conjunctions than science and journalism", for example, we cannot imagine any translator telling himself to "lay off the conjunctions because this is a scientific paper and not a sermon"! A scientific writer (or a translator writing in a "scientific" register) will simply find himself using the features of that register. If that register happens (as Smith and Frawley claim) to be relatively light in conjunctions compared to a religious register, the writer will not be consciously aware of this fact as he is writing. Again, we are very much among the fuzzy rules. So the real lesson a translation student learns from this observation is simply that there is never any reason to assume that a conjunction in one language should generate a conjunction in another. Books like Baker's explain the non-parallel, non-linear, non-algorithmic nature of translation so meticulously, so convincingly and so relentlessly that the onlooker is left dumbfounded by the inability of translation school graduates to put the principles into practice. This leads me to my second "no".
- No, because translation schools too are frequent victims of physics envy. In her introduction to In Other Words, Mona Baker displays unmistakable symptoms of the malady herself:
"Like doctors and engineers, [translators] have to prove to themselves as well as others that they are in control of what they do; that they do not just translate well because they have a 'flair' for translation, but rather because, like other professionals, they have made a conscious effort to understand various aspects of their work."
This kind of reasoning, born of the translator's perpetual yearning for intellectual parity with professions like medicine and engineering, leads to educational syllabuses modelled on those of medical and engineering schools. But nothing could be more misguided.
A doctor facing an unusual pathology can seek information in medical literature then apply this information to solve his problem. An engineer designing a machine can run tests and take measurements to ensure it will run properly, and once the machine is running he can even run further tests and take further measurements in order to gauge the accuracy of his design assumptions. Both are consciously applying learned knowledge, and it would be inconceivable that an engineer or doctor, having learned and assimilated all the relevant principles, would then be unable to apply them. Sure, there is always a gap between theory and practice, but an educational syllabus in engineering or medicine can realistically include practical work to cover a reasonably representative sample of typical situations.
The situation is very different in translation. It is perfectly conceivable for a student to read and fully understand the principles set out in books like In Other Words, yet still be unable to apply them. It is even perfectly conceivable for a linguist to write books on these principles yet be unable to apply them: I have several badly-written books on linguistics, and, surprisingly enough, linguists actually have a rather bad reputation for writing style. I pride myself on understanding these principles, even to the point of attempting to explain them to others. Yet I know that in certain situations I am unable to apply them properly; some translations are just too tough for me! If an engineer is able to identify and explain an engineering phenomenon, this, for him, is the end of the problem. But for the translator it is not even the beginning. Many translators would even say that identification and explanation are not even relevant to their task. I don't agree with this outlook, especially when it condones the pursuit of ignorance, but I certainly do understand it.
The problem, again, lies in the fuzziness of the rules, which are not rules at all but merely approximate descriptions of observed behaviour. An engineer can look up the physical properties of the materials he will be using but a translator cannot look up the properties of his linguistic raw materials, first because nobody has ever come anywhere remotely near to cataloguing these properties completely, second because any such catalogue would be so huge and complex as to be unworkable, and third because language just does not work like that. A software engineer can read any number of practical "how to" books on application design, but there is no such thing as a "how to" book on translation, again, because language just does not work like that.
So how does language work? The best explanation I have read comes in Pinker's The Language Instinct: highly recommended (despite what I consider an excessively Darwinian slant). One key point is that most utterances are novel, individual, creative and largely unrepeatable acts. Utterances are not formed by consciously assembling parts listed in a dictionary according to rules listed in a grammarbook. The parts are assembled, and they are assembled coherently, but the assembly process is masked from us, just like the biomechanics of walking is masked from us. The act of walking involves many interrelated muscle, nerve and bone processes, but we do not consciously trigger our nerve paths, actuate our muscles or shift our bones. We just walk. In the same way, we form ideas in response to the situations we experience, and to convey these ideas, we just talk. Yes, writing is more deliberate than speaking, but it is governed by exactly the same principles, in the same way that an athletics discipline is more deliberate than the mere act of walking, but governed nevertheless by identical biomechanical principles.
Knowledge of biomechanics does not make a champion athlete, and knowledge of grammar or linguistics does not make a good writer or translator. And I am setting aside the fact that our understanding of linguistics lags far behind our understanding of biomechanics: we do know a great deal about bone and muscle, but very little about the brain circuitry responsible for language. Language, then, is not a learned skill like differential calculus but an innate skill like walking. And writing is a slightly more elaborate form of language much like athletics is a slightly more elaborate form of walking.
To be really effective, a translation school would have to offer something more akin to coaching in athletics than formal lecture-theatre instruction in differential calculus. Personal experience corroborates my theoretical musings to confirm that if there is any way at all to teach translation, that way can only be one-to-one coaching, along the lines of an apprenticeship. If engineering really is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, translation is just the opposite. I hate to disagree with Ms Baker, but 'flair' is just about everything to the translator. And while flair can be nurtured, it cannot be taught.
- No, finally, because translation schools will often attempt to cure physics envy by inoculating a virus that is in fact more dangerous. To counter the sometimes legitimate accusations of irrelevance, inefficacy and inapplicability, they will resort to almost anything to show their willingness to keep in touch with the world outside and address the real-life needs of the booming worldwide translating industry. I will be examining this more fully in Part 3, but for now will just mention two points. The first concerns the fad for filling out the teaching staff with real-life translators with some kind of business prominence. The problem here is that because translation is the ideal salesman's product -something people need but are unable to assess- business prominence often means good salesmanship alone. The result is that translation students are being taught by some excruciatingly bad translators, with neither flair nor theoretical understanding -for whom Mona Baker is about as intelligible as Albert Einstein. The second concerns the fad for terminology courses, which are about as useful to the professional translator as a stylophone to the concert pianist. Terminology courses are the climax in physics envy because they stand safely in the objective realm, protected against any risk of interference from the messy business of actually writing. Of course, they are very easy to teach. And lower-ability students love them because they offer the prospect of neat, precise, numbered "right answers". By accepting terminology as a useful field of study, the translation school tacitly denies that the translator needs familiarity with the subject matter. If a translator is sufficiently familiar with his subject matter, he will have very little need of heavy-duty terminological assistance. Heavy-duty terminology aids only become useful if the translator has no idea what he is writing about. And under those circumstances he should not be translating that kind of material in the first place.
Saddle-shyness
As project manager with a large French translation agency I would grope around for analogies to give new recruits a glimpse of what I meant by good translation practice. Often, I would ask them to consciously distance themselves from the source text like a visitor to an art gallery will stand back to view a painting. I'd tell them that if ever they found themselves struggling with a particular non-technical word in French (like "animation"), it meant they weren't standing far enough back. If ever they found themselves reaching for the dictionary for ideas on how to translate a word they had in fact understood, it meant they were letting the brushstroke whirls conceal the irises.
My other favourite, particularly apt for the agency's aerospace projects, was escape velocity. To translate well you have to overcome the gravitational pull of the source language. This means your own text needs its own momentum. If your own text is to have its own momentum, you obviously have to know your subject matter, which brings us back to the requirement on understanding discussed in Part 1. But that's not all: you have to actually appropriate the text. You have to get into it. Pinker postulates that children learn languages spectacularly more easily than adults because language-learning brain circuitry is redeployed to other functions after a certain age. An alternative theory, supported by applied linguists like Stephen Krashen, stresses the importance of affective factors; since language plays such an important part in personal and group identity, adults are psychologically ill-prepared for going through the language-learning process. Of course, there is nothing incompatible between these theories, since if an affective factor is real, it too must be implemented in brain circuitry. I mention this because I think affective factors are important in translation. If a translator is to get into a text, he must be an actor. And quite aside from subject-matter familiarity, I doubt that any actor is equally at home in any role. As a life-long physical and intellectual nomad, I believe I am blessed with the sense of universal curiosity that is the translator's second most important quality (after writing ability). I thrive on variety, and this enables me to enthusiastically accept a wide range of acting roles. But everyone has his limits. Different translators will quake at the prospect of impersonating scientists, engineers, poets, analysts, literary figures or advertising copy writers. None of these roles intimidates me unduly, and I welcome technically tough projects as an opportunity for learning. No, what throws me as a translator is the piece of writing that says nothing. The infatuation with communication is a disease of modern society. Public relations departments seem beset by the conceit that captive customers will have nothing better to do than read the repetitive verbiage coaxed out of would-be journalists cluttering up the payrolls of a hundred sad little PR agencies. Personnel departments imagine that the company magazine will enjoy pride of place on the worker's bedside table, guarding against the risk of painful withdrawal from corporate culture over the weekend. In this kind of publication, nobody ever has anything interesting to write about, and the sterile, thankless task of writing about nothing will usually go a junior office employee who can't yet be trusted to perform useful work on his own. The translator thus finds himself in the position of the naughty schoolboy punished with a three-hundred-word essay on the importance of being earnest, which would actually be fine were it not for the fact that the junior office employee got in there first. On this kind of project, I can experience great difficulty getting up to escape velocity. On occasions I have managed to persuade the customer to let me write the thing from scratch, without going through the junior office employee at all. But when I am unable to do this, I observe a curious mechanism at work. As a rather boisterous schoolboy I got a lot of practice writing three-hundred-word essays on the importance of being earnest, and partly because I suspected the essays would never be read, I would colour them with parodies and the occasional unpleasant insinuation about the teachers and school life in general. And I'd do this gently and subtly enough to escape the teacher's wrath if ever the thing was read. Much later, as a language teacher, I imagined training up a total novice to full competence in how not to speak business English. Day after day, month after month, I'd get him to practise proper English grammar, but using a slightly modified register. My student, preferably a senior government official or company president, would attend his first important international meeting fully confident in his English language skills. But instead of saying "I think this matter calls for careful reappraisal", he would come out with "this is a heap of crap and you fucking well know it, asshole". In an impeccable RP accent, of course. There is a mischievous streak in me.
Sometimes, on a particularly numbing, particularly vacuous project, I will read through my work and berate myself. "No native English-speaking writer could possibly have written that. How could you ever attribute that to an authentic junior office employee who can't be trusted to do useful work in Melton Mowbray? Come on, Paul! You know about the read-understand-write principle. You know about sawbone mentality and saddle-shyness. You were the one that invented them, man! You know perfectly well that with the two muscular extensions at the tip of its trunk, the elephant can 'remove a thorn, pick up a pin or a dime, uncork a bottle, slide the bolt off a cage door and hide it on a ledge, or grip a cup so firmly, without breaking it, that only another elephant can pull it away' [Pinker]. So what is this crap?" And then one day it hit me. Perhaps this wasn't ordinary crap at all. Didn't I recognize the mischievous essence of those subversive schoolboy essays? Wasn't there just a hint of the spiked handshake soundtrack: "How do you do? Can't believe it: you're even fatter than in the photos"? I mean, if I really was down there unentrusted with useful work in a seedy little office in Melton Mowbray, wouldn't I be tempted by the parody option? You bet! But more than that, wouldn't the company actually benefit from this option? Isn't parody better than nothing? I mean, if you've got something to say -even if it's only figures, statistics and stuff- then predictable, styleguide-compliant language with buzzwords might just about work. The Economist gets by just fine! But when you've got nothing to say.? I'm only half joking.
Better than the Van Gogh analogy, and better than the escape velocity analogy, is the recalcitrant horse analogy. Novice riders can find it difficult to get the horse to do what they want. And there are easy horses and difficult horses, just like there are easy and difficult translations. One way to tackle the problem is to get angry. Often, the horse will respond immediately by doing what you asked, as if to say "why didn't you say so in the first place?" But good riders hardly ever get angry. They don't need to. As soon as they even approach the horse, their energy level and confidence is sufficient to ensure that the horse will follow them trustingly through any difficulty, as it would a natural leader in the herd. I haven't got to that stage yet, but when riding a recalcitrant horse, I will replace the anger by a conscious increase in energy level, almost as if I were preparing to run a race. It works much better! And so it is with translation. Sometimes it really can help to get angry with the text. Sometimes, this will be sufficient to raise your energy level and kick your grammar generator into effective independent action. But I have a nagging suspicion that anger might distort things, producing all sorts of interference. Might that not be where the mischief and parody come from? Much better to work on the confidence and energy directly! One thing is certain: a hesitant, lethargic translator will not be a good translator.
The other parallel between translating and riding is that novice adult riders will try to rationalize what they are doing, as if they were learning to operate a machine, an airplane, perhaps. The habit of an algorithmic approach to learning is so extraordinarily difficult to shed that I would be tempted to explain it in terms of Pinker's brain-circuit redeployment rather than Krashen's affective factors. Even though I am acutely aware of the problem (algorithm within algorithm?), my riding still suffers seriously from it. Riding instructors use a number of tricks to fool students into riding with their bodies rather than their brains. Night-riding, for example, introduces sensory deprivation to develop the rider's sensitivity to how the horse responds to changes in body position. Then there are games, which divert the rider's conscious attention onto something else, thereby developing more natural and more effective interaction with the horse. The neatest trick I have seen so far is in the beginners' jumping class. The instructor gets the students to jump a low fence as best they can, encouraging them to stay as relaxed as possible. When they have jumped the fence enough times not to be frightened by it, the instructor places a second fence just after it. What happens is that the rider does not have enough time after the first fence to start rationalizing about how he's going to jump the second. So the first fence gets jumped as clumsily as usual, owing to brain interfering with body, but the second fence gets jumped smoothly, owing to the brain being switched off. The smooth second jump gives the student a precious initial experience of what a smooth jump should feel like, and the spectacular difference between the two jumps proves the importance of riding with the body rather than the brain.
Now I'm not suggesting that translation students should switch off their brains (though I would say they should be encouraged to use them differently). My point is simply that if riding instructors are imaginative enough to invent such brilliantly simple and effective techniques to focus the right kind of attention on the right tasks, why should translation teachers not do likewise? Some do, I know. One trick, for example, is to have the students read the source text once then translate it from memory. But just like a rider learns more from the horse than from the instructor, so a translator learns more from translating than from studying translation. In my opinion, effective translator training requires an overwhelming emphasis on writing skills, and writing skills cannot be taught in the lecture theatre. The only satisfactory way to train translators is through some kind of apprenticeship arrangement.
Backlash
Many, myself included, consider language to be the most important human specificity, the defining feature of humankind, as it were. In The Language Instinct, Pinker likens the human's language capability to the elephant's trunk, which any child's drawing will tell us is the defining feature of this most endearing animal. Though one feature is decidedly more fleshy and tangible than the other, both are fabulously sophisticated pieces of equipment. Pinker takes no fewer than twenty-two lines to simply list some of the most extraordinary functions of the elephant's trunk. (It is, apparently, "lined with chemoreceptors that enable the elephant to smell a python hidden in the grass or food a mile away".)
Now the elephant owes its superiority over the human being to a total ignorance of economics. But let us imagine a two-fold cultural disaster among elephantkind. Not only do they get economics, but the ensuing rush of market forces brings compelling reasons why it is no longer cool to "pull up clumps of grass and tap them against their knees to knock off the dirt, to shake coconuts out of palm trees, and to powder their bodies with dust". The market has dropped right out of walking on deep riverbeds using the trunk as a snorkel. What matters most for the modern elephant is wings! Clearly, those overdesigned trunks will have to be reengineered, and there's no way we can wait for evolution to fix it.
In Part 2, I have attempted to set out the reasons behind the academic inertia that has held back progress in the translation industry. But however irritating it might be, academic inertia is far less dangerous than the backlash against it, caused by mounting impatience at academia's failure to keep pace with booming market demand for business, rather than literary, translation. Whatever its failings, academia is founded on reason, and is eventually and inevitably amenable to reason. From academia we can at least expect a slow but sure convergence upon truth. The backlash movement, on the other hand, is not in the least interested in truth. It is motivated solely by economic expediency, and instead of convergence upon truth we can only expect from it a divergence into chaos. Ludicrously, grotesquely, the business-oriented backlash movement within the translation industry seems intent on rapidly reengineering the human equivalent of the elephant's trunk. This will be the subject of Part 3.
In His great wisdom, God the supreme engineer configured the universe to ensure that any species unfortunate enough to open the Pandora's box of economics would also find therein the hope of science. The balance between the two is up to us.
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Articles – Sounding the elephant's trumpet, part 2