Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

TWENTY-EIGHT What Translators Do

Speakers of any natural language repeat themselves and others all the time, and to do so they use their natural facility to rephrase together with a well-filled toolbox:

• they can replace one word with another of like meaning (synonymy)

• they can take one part of the expression and replace it with a longer and more elaborate one (expansion)

• they can take one part of the expression and replace it with a dummy, an abbreviation, a short form, or nothing at all (contraction)

• they can take one part of the expression and move it to a different position, rearranging the other words in appropriate ways (topic shift)

• they can use the relevant tool from their language kit to make one part of the expression stand out as more important than the others (change of emphasis)

• they can add expressions that relate to facts or states or opinions implicit in the original in order to clarify what they (or their interlocutor) just said (clarification)

• but if they try to repeat exactly what has been said with the same tone, pitch, words, forms, and structures, they do not succeed (unless they are also gifted, sharp-eared, and well-trained impersonators, and probably employed in the music hall)

Translators do exactly the same things when they repeat the words of another, and the fact that their “afterspeech” is in what we call another tongue makes no difference at all to the range of discursive devices they use.

But they use these tools to support an overriding aim that is not necessarily relevant to voluntary or inadvertent repetition in interaction in the same tongue. They seek to preserve the force of the original utterance—not only the overall meaning of what has been said but the meaning that the saying of it has, and to do so in a way that is appropriate to the specific context in which the second formulation is to be heard or used. They are not trying to change anything—whereas when we repeat something without translating it, we usually intend to make some small or large difference to it.

Here’s a tiny example of the kind of changes translators make in order not to change anything much at all. In the multilingual “in-flight magazine” supplied to travelers on the Eurostar train, a page is devoted to graphics demonstrating the size and achievements of the whole enterprise of high-speed rail through the Channel Tunnel. One of the bubbles features “334.7 km/h,” which is glossed in English as “The record breaking top speed (208 mph) a Eurostar train reached in July 2003 when testing the UK High Speed 1 Line.” It is followed by the following French text:

The suppression of the “miles per hour” speed in the French translation might be seen as simply conventional—but the obvious reason for its omission is that it is of no relevance to French readers, who do not generally know how far a mile is anyway. More interesting is the French assertion that 208 miles per hour was the top speed of the train doing the test, whereas the English asserts that the train’s top speed broke a record. What record? Well, in Britain, just about every record—no train had ever gone faster on a British track. But it’s not a record for France, where TGVs have exceeded that speed many times. So for the French not to be frankly counterfactual, the translator has to rephrase and recontextualize. However, the real subtlety in the recontextualization is when the “UK High Speed 1 Line” becomes just “a high-speed line in Great Britain” in French. French readers do not need to know the embarrassing fact that Britain still has only one such line, when the French have many, and so they had also better not be told the proper name of a piece of railway engineering that is unique exclusively in British terms. Now linked more closely than ever by a fast train, Britain and France still provide two quite different contexts of use for even the simplest expressions. Translations naturally rephrase the message to adapt it to its alternative context of use.[172]

Literary translators have a less clear idea of the “context of use” of their work than translators of all other kinds. Actually, they don’t know for sure that it will have any end use at all. Many translated works (including many of great merit) sell pitifully small numbers of copies and disappear into a black hole. The only real “client” of a literary translation is an imaginary reader—the reader that each translator invents in his head.

That’s the real reason why, when it comes to the transmission of cultural goods, translators tell themselves they are trying to produce an equivalent effect.

There are two difficulties with this commonly mentioned criterion of translation art: “equivalent” and “effect.”

Translations do have effects. They may make readers laugh or weep or rush to the library to find more books of the same kind. They can even have quite sinister effects, as the following historical anecdote shows.

In 1870, Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, released a statement to the press about his sovereign’s negative reaction to a request from the French ambassador that the German royal family should commit itself to never accepting the throne of Spain. The statement also reported that the Kaiser didn’t want to talk to the French ambassador again and had sent him a message to stay away by the hand of the “adjutant of the day”:

The “adjutant of the day”—Adjutant vom Dienst—names a high-ranking courtier, an aristocratic aide-de-camp. But it happens to be almost identical to a word of French—adjudant. When Bismarck’s statement was received in Paris it was instantly translated by the Havas news agency service and wired to all newspapers, which reprinted it in the “special extra” that went on sale straightaway. In the Havas version, Adjutant is not translated, but left in its original form. The effect of that one word was enormous. French adjudant means “warrant officer” (“sergeant-major” in Britain). It therefore seemed that the French ambassador had been treated with grievous disrespect by having had a message from the Kaiser taken to him by a messenger of such low rank. The French were outraged. Six days later, they declared war.

It’s likely that the overall effect—the outbreak of war—was what Bismarck intended at that time, but it is implausible that he sought to achieve it by drafting a statement in such a way as to lead to its being misunderstood through the existence of a false cognate of a German word in French. After all, Bismarck didn’t decide to leave Adjutant in German in French translation—the Havas agency did.

In life generally, and in translation in particular, we are not very good at calculating the effects that our words and actions will have.

When translating a crime novel by Fred Vargas, I came across a comically grandiloquent passage of direct speech that recycled a famous line from Victor Hugo. To re-create what I thought would be an equivalent effect of misplaced hyperbole I substituted a barely altered quotation from a speech by Winston Churchill. It didn’t work. A reviewer reprimanded me for inserting Churchillian language where the original had none. Can I blame her for not knowing what motivated the effect that I sought? Of course not. Using “Churchill” for “Hugo” was just an entertaining mind game. You can’t require readers to notice that the switch was supposed to produce an equivalent effect, because there’s no way of assessing whether it does that or not.

A similarly futile submission to the doctrine of equivalent effect can be found among the cans of sound recordings used by Jacques Tati for his Oscar-winning movie, Mon Oncle. Before it was released, Tati conceived the ambition of producing an English-language version himself. He reshot several scenes that included public signage, painting over École, Sortie, and so on with School, Exit, et cetera. It was then pointed out to him that the change of visible language would create confusion as to where the action was really located. His solution to that problem was to change the background music track of the English-language version to make it sound more French, and that’s why the Tati archive contains cans labeled ambiance française pour version anglaise—“French atmospheric music for the English version.” That didn’t work, either. Despite the care with which it was done, My Uncle never had an “equivalent effect” because distributors and audiences loved the French original so much. The English version with its “French effects” ran for a few weeks in a single movie theater in New York and then disappeared for fifty years.

Servile adherence to the ideology of equivalent effect can lead translators a merry dance and give rise to unforeseen effects—if they are seen at all. The investigator at the center of an unfinished “literary thriller” by Georges Perec called “53 Days” is looking into the disappearance of a thriller writer by the name of Serval. He comes across Serval’s last unfinished novel on the writer’s desk and is told by the typist that one chapter of it at least was copied out from another book. The investigator looks more closely at the two texts—Perec gives us the two-page original, which he invented—and notices that some of the words have been changed in the plagiarized version. Oddly, they are all twelve-letter words, and there are twelve of them. He writes them out in capital letters, and they naturally make two word-squares:

The investigator stares at the two lists for a while, but as he can’t see any sense in them, he puts them aside. End of chapter.

One day, when I had already started translating the novel, a graduate student burst into my office in Manchester to ask if I had noticed that the diabolical Perec had actually placed a huge clue in the word list printed in the left-hand column (shown above). Reading one letter per row from top left to bottom right in a diagonal line, you get the name of a mountain massif in southeastern France that is also the first word in the title of a famous novel by Stendhal. I hope you can see. At the time, nobody—not even the editors and publishers of Perec’s posthumous novel—had seen it. Bravo! I said to the student. So what am I supposed to do?

What I did in mindless implementation of the idea of equivalent effect was this: I doctored the English translation of the pseudo-extract to make it include twelve twelve-letter words that, when written out as a list, preserve reference, self-reference, and truth value with respect to Perec’s left-hand column:

But having replanted the invisible clue, and feeling rather pleased with myself, I went one further and invented a purely fictional list to stand in lieu of the twelve words that Serval had used to mask the original. These words had to fit plausibly into the same places in the plagiarized text, so my choices for List 2 had a retroactive effect on List 1 and consequently on the sentence formulations in the translation of the supposed source. Rome wasn’t built in a day. But because the task was so mind-bendingly tricky I decided to give it a personal point that is not present in the French. Here are the two lists in English:

Is the effect “equivalent,” after all that work? I’m not aware that my simulation of the game Perec played has had any effect on readers at all. Or else the fan mail is twenty years late.

An even more obvious trouble with the idea of an equivalent effect is that there’s no scale available for measuring equivalence. “Effects,” especially holistic impressions left by extended works, can’t be extracted from people and measured against one another. Nor can any one reader give an independent measure of the effects made on her by two language versions of the same text. That’s because a reading of a text always happens in a language—not in between. The distinction between language A and language B is problematic enough, but one thing is sure: there is no linguistic no-man’s-land in the middle, just as there is no midpoint between Dover and Calais where you can stand on the water and look on French and English from the outside at the same time.

A bilingual reader may have a perfectly trustworthy judgment of whether a translation communicates the same meaning as its source. But can such a person, however smart and subtle, ever reasonably say that this “Baudelaire in German translation” has on her an effect equivalent to the effect that that “Baudelaire poem in French” has? Such an assertion would be radically unverifiable—and in my view it is also a meaningless string of words. “Baudelaire in French” has a whole range of different effects on me at different times, and it surely has an even wider range of effects on the community of readers as a whole. Of which one does the “effect” of a translation aim to be the equivalent?

The truth of literary translation is that translated works are incommensurable with their source, just as literary works are incommensurable with one another, just as individual readings of novels and poems and plays can be “measured” only in discussion with other readers. What translators do is find matches, not equivalences, for the units of which a work is made, in the hope and expectation that their sum will produce a new work that can serve overall as a substitute for the source.

That’s why Douglas Hofstadter’s version of the poem by Clément Marot given here of this book is a translation of it. It matches many (but not all) of the semantic, stylistic, and formal features of the source. You may not like it—that’s your affair. But you cannot claim that it is not a translation on the grounds that its overall effect, or one of its subunits, or some specific feature, is not “equivalent” to the source.

A match may be found through all or any of the means that we have for rephrasing something in our own or any other tongue.

What counts as a satisfactory match is a judgment call, and is never fixed. The only certainty is that a match cannot be the same as the thing that it matches.

If you want the same thing, that’s quite all right. You can read the original.