Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

SEVENTEEN The Third Code: Translation as a Dialect

What language do you speak? That sounds like a merely factual inquiry with an uncomplicated answer, whatever it is. But as I was reading an American newspaper during the financial crisis of 2008, I learned that the U.S. treasury secretary was about to unveil the big megillah to put an end to the tsunami that was rocking Wall Street at the time. What language was that? Well, English—but only sort of. It was also, marginally, in Hebrew (mediated by Yiddish) and in Japanese, too. I can translate it into French—M. Paulson s’apprête à dévoiler la bonne méthode pour calmer la tourmente des marchés—but that doesn’t prove the sentence was in English, only that I understood it. I can back-translate the French sentence in any number of ways—but that would only show that “English” is a far from determinate thing.

Translators working into English are confronted on every page with decisions about the nature, scope, identity, and audience of the language they are writing. I write in a personal idiom that bears traces of my upbringing in England, my long stay in Scotland, and my present life on the East Coast of the United States. When I write a translation, however, I have to make choices in every paragraph about what variety of written English to use. As is well known, spellings, numbering systems, greetings, and curses, as well as several hundred common vocabulary items, have different forms in different parts of the English-speaking world. It drives me mad. How do I know what is “English” and what is something else?

The practical solution is this: I write the way I like, and then a skillful copy editor amends my prose to make it conform to the style appropriate to the output and the target audience of a particular publishing house. But that is only the outward form of the solution. The target audience of most English-language publishing houses, for most of the books they put out, is indeterminately large, and includes American, Australian, Indian, Canadian, and South African readers—each large grouping feeling most at home in significantly different varieties of the spoken and written tongue. So what gets edited out in any of my translations—and in any translated literary or nonfiction work of more than local interest—are those quirks of language that mark it as belonging to any geographical variety of English. In other words, I get de-Britted if I am being edited for U.S. publication and de-Yanked (a less difficult job, since my Americanisms are few and far between) when a London publisher takes the lead. What you get at the end of the process is “English-minus”—ideally, a common center ground of the English language, stripped of vocabulary and turns of phrase that are not understood or understood in different ways in any part of the messy spread of what is still called, for want of a better word, the English tongue.

The language of translations in English is therefore not a representation of a language spoken or written anywhere at all. Because its principal feature is to be without regional features, it’s hard to see from outside—and that’s precisely the point of this sophisticated stylistic trick. “Tranglish” is quite different in nature from the clumsy International English of social science and global journalism. It’s smooth and invisible, and it has some important advantages. Detached with skill and craft by professional language doctors from any regional variety of the tongue, it is much easier to translate than anything actually written in “English” by a novelist from, say, Queensland, Ireland, Wessex, or Wales. But as it is already translated (from French, in my case, but this would be just as true if I were working from Russian or Hindi), any remaining strangeness in the prose, in the ears of a speaker of any of the myriad varieties of English the world over, is automatically construed as a trace of the foreign tongue, not of the translator’s identity. The “translator’s invisibility,” eloquently denounced by Lawrence Venuti as a symptom of the anti-intellectual, antiforeign bias of Britain and America,[116] is also the unintended result of the unbounded nature of the English language itself.

The suspicion that the language of translated works is not quite the same as the language the translations purport to be in has given rise to scholarly work based not on anecdotes and intuition but on the automated analysis of quite large bodies of translated texts in machine-readable form. These techniques allow insights into what is now called the “third code”—the language of translations seen as a dialect that can be distinguished from the regular features of the target language.[117] In one such investigation, it’s been found that English novels in French translation have at least one language feature that seems quite at variance with novels originally written in French.

When you want to add emphasis to one part of a French sentence, you take it out of its normal grammatical place and put it right at the start, replacing it in its ordinary location with a pronoun or dummy word. For example, if you want to disagree with what your children ask for as a treat at the fair, you can say—in English—“But I want ice cream,” using the tone of your voice to stress that ice cream is what you want when the kids are clamoring for cotton candy. The regular way to do this in French is to put I in a special form at the head and then to repeat it: Moi, je veux une glace. “Left dislocation,” as this feature of French is most often called, is pretty common in all sorts of circumstances in speech and writing, not just in arguments with kids. In a corpus of extracts from recent prizewinning novels written in French, it occurred 130 times in an expanse of around 45,000 words. But in a parallel corpus extracted from similarly well-seen novels translated around the same time into French, it occurred only 58 times. The difference is quite marked and can’t be explained by any individual translator’s style. A “third code” does seem to exist.[118]

What’s even more interesting and especially relevant to understanding translation is that the use of left dislocation in the corpus of translations into French is highly concentrated in one kind of context—in dialogue. In the corpus of texts originally written in French, however, more than half of the occurrences crop up in third-person narrative. None of the occurrences of left dislocation in the entire double corpus is grammatically wrong or stylistically inappropriate, but it seems clear that the language norm to which translators of English novels in French adhere (whether they know it or not) is not identical to the language use of novel-writers in French.

The reason for this particular feature of the “third code” in French is not difficult to find. French grammar books and the teaching of French in schools have traditionally categorized left dislocation as typical of oral speech. Translators seem to have internalized that lesson, even though it runs counter to the observable practice of native writers of French. Translators therefore tend to write in a normalized language and are more attentive to what is broadly understood to be the correct or standard form. In fact, anyone who has personal experience of translation work knows this truth. Translation tends toward the center—to whatever linguistic regularities are conceptualized as belonging to the standard language, irrespective of what native speakers typically say. The plight of the English translator edited into “English-minus” is therefore not exceptional in the world of translation. French translators seem to get to the same place even before copy editors go over their work.

The movement of translation toward the standard form of the receiving language can be highlighted by the fate of regional and social dialects. Bournisien, one of the minor characters of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, speaks with turns of phrase and vocabulary items that are comically typical of the region where the action is set—rural Normandy in the 1830s. English obviously does not have a conventional way of representing the speech of nineteenth-century countryfolk from Normandy. In principle, a translator could make Bournisien speak in English like a Wessex farmer out of Thomas Hardy or a Scottish preacher invented by Walter Scott. But representing one regional dialect of the source by some regional dialect of the target is rarely attempted in translation.[119] Most people currently think it is just silly to make a Bavarian dairy farmer use Texas cowboy slang, or to have a woman on the St. Petersburg tram express herself in Mancunian in order to suggest her geographic and linguistic distance both from the capital and the standard language. The culture of translation as it presently exists in English as well as in French and many other languages eradicates regional variation in the source. It drives written representations of dialectal speech toward the center.

An obvious case of movement toward the center occurs in Charles Baudelaire’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug.” The African American slave in the story, Jupiter, is represented as speaking in this manner: “Dar! dat’s it!—him never plain of notin—but him berry sick for all dat.” Baudelaire doesn’t try to find a dialect of French to fit, he just says what Jupiter means to say in standard French: Ah! Voilà la question!—il ne se plaint jamais de rien, mais il est tout de même malade.

What else could Baudelaire have done? No resources were available in nineteenth-century French to match an English convention for the representation of African American vernacular.[120]

Strange to say, the same treatment is not generally accorded to variations in form and style that correspond not to region but to social class. High-flown, pompous, elegant, or regal forms of language in the source are generally represented by forms of corresponding social rank in the target. Real difficulties arise only when the class register is low, and especially when the language of the source represents the speech forms of uneducated folk. This difficulty runs through all kinds of translating, not just literary prose. No consecutive interpreter, for example, would think of adopting lower-class diction to reproduce for the benefit of a visiting foreign dignitary the kind of language spoken to him by a factory hand or collective farm worker: it would surely seem disrespectful and cause a mighty scandal. In written prose, too, translators shy away from giving the uncouth truly uncouth forms of language in the target text. The reason is obvious—grammatical mistakes, malapropisms, and other kinds of “substandard” language must not be seen to be the translator’s fault. It’s actually easier to translate the ravings of a certified lunatic than the intentionally rude and vulgar language of many modern novels. The outright sanitization of bawdy classics carried out in seventeenth-century France (see here) is quite out of fashion—but something of the same sort goes on in almost any translation project.

The “third code” effects that have been revealed in translations (in French, but also in Norwegian, Swedish, and English) and the strong prejudice against regional variation are, even so, mere sidelights on the less easily pinpointed but far more general tendency of all translations to adhere more strongly than any original to a normalized idea of what the target language should be. To put that a different way: translation always takes the register and level of naturally written prose up a notch or two. Some degree of raising is and always has been characteristic of translated texts—simply because translators are instinctively averse to the risk of being taken for less than fully cultivated writers of their target tongue. In important ways, translators are the guardians and, to a surprising degree, the creators of the standard form of the language they use.