Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

SIXTEEN Translation Impacts

Some Bible translations have had profound and lasting effects on the receiving language. Luther’s Bible is considered the first monument of modern German, and the King James Bible remains an inescapable reference point in the history of English. However, such impacts are not typical of translation in general. Individual translators do not often produce the smallest ripple in the target culture. However, continuing waves of translated works in particular fields always leave the receiving language in a significantly different shape.

That was clear to Friedrich Schleiermacher when he set out to explain how the Greek classics should best be translated into German. It wasn’t any one book that would make the difference, he insisted, but only large-scale translation of Greek philosophy and drama that could help the German language “to flourish and develop its own perfect power through the most varied contacts with what is foreign.”[111] But depending on the relation between the original and the receiving society, the target may get hit in radically different ways.

English-language translations of French critical theory from the 1960s to the 1990s, for example, have made abstract discourse about literature in English sound much more like French than it ever did before. In the reverse direction, the language of celebrity journalism in French has been quite transformed by the mass import of English-language styles: la presse people (pronounced pi-pol) exhibits unmistakable signs of what is now denounced as the homogenization of tongues.

It’s not just a matter of vocabulary. A small but quite profound change in the way dialogue is introduced in Swedish narrative can be traced back to its source in translations of English-language novels.[112] Constructions of the following type are ten a penny in modern English fiction of all kinds:

1. “Don’t try,” she said with disdain.

2. “It doesn’t matter,” he said calmly.

3. “And now you must go to sleep,” he said in a tone that was friendly but authoritative.

4. “Get out,” said Frank abruptly.

The grammar of Swedish does not make this kind of construction impossible. However, placing a verb of saying together with a modifier (“with disdain,” “calmly,” “abruptly”) after direct speech is fairly unusual in Swedish novel-writing style. In a representative corpus of thirty novels written originally in Swedish, the construction occurs 64 times, but in a parallel corpus of about the same size consisting of novels translated into Swedish from English, it occurs 484 times. This “fingerprint” of English—of one of the English novel’s habitual “dialogue props”—has now been integrated into original writing in Swedish, where it is characteristic not of literary fiction in general but of detective fiction in particular. It’s one of those small yet significant merg-ings of language and style that are often attacked as unintended results of globalization. But Swedish detective fiction has had sweet revenge. Its language may have been infiltrated by an English-language device for the presentation of dialogue, but hard-boiled Swedish crime fiction by Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson has now conquered the world’s bestseller lists.

Merging of another kind has been vigorously proposed by the American lawyer Preston Torbert. In his work for U.S. companies doing business in China, he has had to deal with hundreds of contracts that had to be written in two languages—English and Chinese—and have equal validity and force in two jurisdictions. It’s a tall order because their legal traditions have grown up in isolation over many centuries and don’t have many matching terms.[113]

One difficulty arises from what is called the “class presumption” in American law. If a contract says that one of its clauses applies to “any house, apartment, cottage, or other building” on some piece of land, for example, that “other building” means, by the force of the class presumption, only another building of the class constituted by “house, apartment, cottage”—that is to say, a residential building. This construction of the sentence is contrary to English usage in a nonlegal context, where “other building” may plausibly refer to a factory, a space station, or a folly.

Chinese does not have a term for “class presumption,” and its legal culture does not allow for it, either. If the restriction expressed in English is translated without additional modification, the Chinese characters for other building refer equally plausibly to a factory or a workshop as to a residential building, a meaning that the “class presumption” of American legal English specifically excludes. You could, of course, insert additional Chinese characters to say “or any other similar building,” “or any other building of the same class,” “or any other residential construction.” But if it came to a dispute in court, a smart lawyer might be able to claim that the two versions of the contract were not exactly equivalent, since the English contains no words that correspond to the added characters.

The solution proposed by Torbert is to draft the English in such a way that its Chinese translation is not a problem—that is to say, to modify the source-language text to make it better suited to translation into the target language. Moreover, such a change would make American legalese less arcane, which is of benefit to everybody. The solution is so simple that it makes you wonder why American contracts have not always said “house, apartment, cottage, or other similar building.” Torbert’s answer is that it is because legal drafters have not had Chinese to help them until now. Chinese can teach English-language lawyers how to say what they mean.

Translation impacts such as these are obviously tiny. French, English, Swedish, and Chinese have not been altered by them, just lightly massaged at the edges—at least, so far. But the translation of the Gospels into Bosavi, a language spoken by small communities of rain-forest dwellers on the Great Papuan Plateau, has had much more far-reaching effects.[114]

Before the Bosavi were converted to Christianity in the 1970s, their culture (somewhat like that of ancient Rome) did not recognize sincerity as a concept. It was what people said in public that was taken seriously; private thoughts and the conformity of outward behavior with inner states was not a concern. But sincerity—the correspondence between saying something and meaning it—is integral to the message that Christian missionaries brought. The Asia Pacific Christian Mission regarded vernacular languages as “the shrine of a people’s soul” and was therefore committed to teaching the gospels in Bosavi. However, none of the missionaries was a field linguist, and none became fluent in the language. In addition, Bosavi people in general spoke no other tongue: for trade contacts, they had always relied on speakers in bordering villages who could translate through a neighboring language and, in more recent times, on the regional contact language, Tok Pisin.

The missionaries used the Nupela Testamen, the New Testament translated into Tok Pisin—not from Latin or Greek but from the simplified English text called the American Good News Bible, first published in 1966, aimed at children and uneducated adults. Use of the intermediary language limited the mission’s initial contact to a small group of young Bosavi men who had worked outside the area and acquired some Tok Pisin. The missionaries taught them basic literacy and then set them on the road as missionizers themselves. At the rudimentary services these new converts organized in the small villages, they read aloud from the Nupela Testamen, then improvised an oral translation into Bosavi, either in small sections or after a whole passage. Given the translation method, it’s not surprising that they introduced many Tok Pisin words and ways of saying into Bosavi as they went along. But the true impact of these “language turners” lies at a deeper level than that.

Bosavi is one of the many languages that possess evidentials, grammatical forms that indicate how something is known—by sight, by hearsay, or by deduction (see here). Tok Pisin, by contrast, does not. So when it came to improvising a Bosavi version of the Tok Pisin version of the Good News version of a Bible story focused on the difference between what people thought and what they said, the newly minted Papuan missionaries had a huge problem, exemplified by the phrases in italics below:

Tok Pisin uses na long bel belong, literally “in belly of them,” to express “in their hearts” or “in their minds,” and in the Nupela Testamen this phrase stands together with tingting, “think,” to express the fact that the teachers of the law “thought” something without saying so. The Bosavi oral translators couldn’t say anything quite so ungrounded in evidence. One recorded version has Jesus knowing by direct visual evidence what the men of law were thinking—the evidential suffix -lo: b is added to the verb for “think.” Also, it adds a tag, a: la: sa: lab, to the whole line, meaning something like “it says,” or at any rate grounding the source of the knowledge not in the actual speaker but in some external authority. But versions varied among different preachers and occasions quite considerably, until a formal borrowing (a syntactic calque) from Tok Pisin became accepted as a new way of referring to “inner thought,” thought not evidenced by words spoken aloud: kufa, literally, “of belly,” prefixed to the verb for “think.” The effort of translation has altered the language of Bosavi, and with it, a whole mental world. “Private thoughts” are now “belly-think” in Bosavi, or, to put it the other way around, thanks to frontline and improvised language mediation, what a speaker of Bosavi can now do with his belly has undergone a huge change.

Changes brought about in the life of the Bosavi by the missionary effort obviously go far beyond the grammar and vocabulary of their language. However, the change in the way speakers of Bosavi can now conceptualize and refer to “inner life” is not only an effect of conversion to Christianity but also a direct impact of translation—the translation of the gospels from Tok Pisin into the Bosavi tongue.

Most commentaries on the effects of translation on receiving cultures of the remote or recent past use words such as enrich, extend, and improve to describe how the target was hit. But when we can see and hear it happening in our own present time, quite other metaphors crop up: distort, mangle, and homogenize come to mind. The role of evidentials in Bosavi grammar has been irreparably diminished by the improvised calques from Tok Pisin that provide a way of talking about things that have no evidential status at all. From some points of view that has mangled a unique and irreplaceable mental world. Similarly, we could say that the mass import of English-style celebrity gossip into French media has produced a stylistic monstrosity that cheapens the language itself. However, in other times and places, much greater lexical and stylistic changes of the same nature have given rise not to lamentation but to feelings of the opposite kind. For example, Japanese translators imported many scientific terms from European languages in the late nineteenth century, and most users of those new terms considered their language had been enriched by them. Similarly, in the fourth to eighth centuries C.E., Syriac (a Semitic language closely related to Aramaic) is said to have flowered in the hands of Severus Sebokht, a bishop, scholar, and translator who imported quantities of Greek words and expressions together with the mathematical, medical, and astronomical knowledge of the ancient Greeks that the Latin West had ignored (and would not rediscover for centuries, until Arabic translations of those Syriac translations of Greek science were translated once again in the middle of the twelfth century C.E., in Toledo [Spain], by Gerard of Cremona, into Latin, for wider distribution throughout Europe).[115]

The Christian fundamentalists who converted the Bosavi people may indeed believe they enriched the language of the souls they have saved; and I suppose there may have been Syrian naysayers all those years ago who thought the mass import of Greek terms had wrecked their own ancient tongue. But the fact is that attitudes toward language change induced or accelerated by translation are not motivated exclusively by feelings about language or about translation. They arise from deeply seated and far less tractable ideas.

The first of these is the place you think your language ought to occupy in the hierarchy of translation tongues. For many people, especially those caught in the mind-set of a monolingual European nation-state, this is a sensitive topic; because the imagined rank of a language often conflicts with reality, this can give rise to collective hypocrisy and spite. French people who look down on the use of English words that they nonetheless import by the bucketload are in this kind of plight. They are not alone.

The second major constituent of attitudes toward language change propelled by translations is the value you place on what it is that the new vocabulary brings. Translation impacts on a receiving language can’t really be separated from the impact that the translated material has. At different times, translations may flood receiving cultures with Hollywood glitz, shipbuilding techniques, religious salvation, saucy stories about Marie Antoinette—just about anything that’s ever been thought worth writing down. The value you attach to the linguistic traces of such flows is subordinate to your need or desire for the material that the translations in question make available for the first time.

The damage done to other cultures by lopsided translation flows is no different from the benefits brought to receiving languages by lopsided translation flows. The real damage and the real benefits lie not in translation as such, or in its impacts on receiving languages, but in the nature of the works that translation spreads.