Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

TWO Is Translation Avoidable?

Translation is everywhere—at the United Nations, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, and many other international bodies that regulate fundamental aspects of modern life. Translation is part and parcel of modern business, and there’s hardly a major industry that doesn’t use and produce translations for its own operations. We find translations on the bookshelves of our homes, on the reading lists for every course in every discipline taught at college; we find them on processed-food labels and on flat-pack furniture instructions. How could we do without translation? It seems pointless to wonder what world we would live in if translation didn’t happen all the time at every level, from bilingual messages on ATM screens to confidential discussions between heads of state, from the guarantee slip on a new watch we’ve just bought to the classics of world literature.

But we could do without it, all the same. Instead of using translation, we could learn the languages of all the different communities we wish to engage with; or we could decide to speak the same language or else adopt a single common language for communicating with other communities. But if we balk at adopting a common tongue and decline to learn the other languages we need, we could simply ignore people who don’t speak the way we do.

These three options seem fairly radical, and it’s likely that none of them figures among the aspirations of the readers of this book. However, they are not imaginary solutions to the many paradoxes of intercultural communication. All three paths away from translation are historically attested. More than that: the refusal of translation, by one or more of the means described, is probably closer to the historical norm on this planet than the culture of translation that seems natural and unavoidable around the world today. One big truth about translation that is often kept under wraps is that many societies did just fine by doing without.

The Indian subcontinent has long been the home of many different groups speaking a great variety of languages. However, there is no tradition of translation in India. Until very recently, nothing was ever translated directly between Urdu, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, and so on. Yet these communities have lived cheek by jowl on a crowded continent for centuries. How did they manage? They learned other languages! Few inhabitants of the subcontinent have ever been monoglot; citizens of India have traditionally spoken three, four, or five tongues.[2]

In the late Middle Ages, the situation was quite similar in many parts of Europe. Traders and poets, sailors and adventurers moved overland and around the inland seas picking up and often mixing more or less distantly related languages as they went, and only the most thoughtful of them even wondered whether they were speaking different “languages” or just adapting to local peculiarities. The great explorer Christopher Columbus provides an unusually well-documented case of the intercomprehensibility and interchangeability of European tongues in the late Middle Ages. He wrote notes in the margins of his copy of Pliny in what we now recognize as an early form of Italian, but he used typically Portuguese place-names—such as Cuba—to label his discoveries in the New World. He wrote his official correspondence in Castilian Spanish but used Latin for the precious journal he kept of his voyages. He made a “secret” copy of the journal in Greek, however, and he also must have known enough Hebrew to use the astronomical tables of Abraham Zacuto, which allowed him to predict a lunar eclipse and impress the indigenous people he encountered in the Caribbean. He must have been familiar with lingua franca—a “contact language” made of simplified Arabic syntax and a vocabulary taken mostly from Italian and Spanish, used by Mediterranean sailors and traders from the Middle Ages to the dawn of the nineteenth century—because he borrowed a few characteristic words from it when writing in Castilian and Italian.[3] How many languages did Columbus know when he sailed the ocean in 1492? As in today’s India, where a degree of intercomprehensibility exists among several of its languages, the answer would be somewhat arbitrary. It’s unlikely Columbus even conceptualized Italian, Castilian, or Portuguese as distinct languages, for they did not yet have any grammar books. He was a learned man in being able to read and write the three ancient tongues. But beyond that, he was just a Mediterranean sailor, speaking whatever variety of language that he needed to do his job.

There are perhaps as many as seven thousand languages spoken in the world today,[4] and no individual could learn them all. Five to ten languages seem to represent the effective limit in all cultures, however multilingual they may be. Some obsessive individuals have clocked up twenty; a few champion linguists, who spend all their time learning languages, have claimed knowledge of fifty, or even more. But even these brainiacs master only a tiny fraction of all the tongues that there are.

Most of the world’s languages are spoken by very small groups, which is the main reason why a great number of them are near the point of collapse. However, outside the handful of countries speaking one of the half-dozen “major” world languages, few people on this planet have only one tongue. Within the Russian Federation, for example, hundreds of languages are spoken—belonging to the Slavic, Turkic, Caucasian, Altaic, and other language families. But hardly a member of any of the communities speaking these very diverse tongues does not also speak Russian. Similarly, in India, there aren’t many people who don’t also have either Hindi or Urdu or Bengali or English or one of the half-dozen other interlanguages of the subcontinent. To engage with all but a tiny fraction of people in the world, you definitely do not need to learn all their first languages. You need to learn all their vehicular languages—languages learned by nonnative speakers for the purpose of communicating with native speakers of a third tongue. There are about eighty languages used in this way in some part of the world. But because vehicular languages are also native to some (usually very large) groups, and because many people speak more than one vehicular language (of which one may or may not be native to them), you do not need to learn all eighty vehicular languages to communicate with most people on the planet. Knowing just nine of them—Chinese (with 1.3 billion users), Hindi (800 million), Arabic (530 million), Spanish (350 million), Russian (278 million), Urdu (180 million), French (175 million), Japanese (130 million), and English (somewhere between 800 million and 1.8 billion)—would permit effective everyday conversation, though probably not detailed negotiation or serious intellectual debate, with at least 4.5 billion and maybe up to 5.5 billion people, that is to say, around 90 percent of the world’s population. (The startlingly wide range of estimates of the number of people who “speak English” reflects the difficulty we have in saying what “speaking English” means.) Add Indonesian (250 million), German (185 million), Turkish (63 million), and Swahili (50 million) to make a baker’s dozen,[5] and you have at your feet the entire American landmass, most of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, the great crescent of Islam from Morocco to Pakistan, a good part of India, a swath of Africa, and most of the densely populated parts of East Asia, too. What more could you want?[6] Exeunt translators! Enter the language trainers! The cast would be more or less identical, so the net loss of jobs worldwide would most likely be nil.

If thirteen languages seem too hard to handle, why not have everyone learn the same one? The plan seemed obvious to the Romans, who made little attempt to learn the languages of the many peoples they conquered, with the sole but major exception of the Greeks. Barely a trace of interest has been found among ancient Romans in learning Etruscan, Umbrian, the Celtic languages of what is now France and Britain, the Germanic languages of the tribes on the northeastern borders of the empire, or the Semitic languages of the Carthage they deleted from the map and the colonies in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea area. If you got taken over by Rome, you learned Latin and that was that. The long-term result of the linguistic unification of the empire was that the written version of the Romans’ language remained the main vehicle of intercultural communication in Europe for more than a thousand years after the end of the empire. Imperial blindness to the difference of others did a huge favor to Europe.[7]

Linguistic unification of the same order of magnitude has taken place in the last fifty years in most branches of science. Many languages have served at different times as vehicles of scientific advance: Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Syriac, Latin, and Arabic from ancient times to the Middle Ages; then Italian and French in the European Renaissance and early modern period. In the eighteenth century, the advances made by Linnaeus in the description and classification of botanical species, as well as Berzelius’s research in chemistry, made Swedish a language of science, and for about a hundred years it kept a respected place. English and French continued to be used for numerous disciplines, but German burst onto the scene in the nineteenth century with the new chemistry invented by Liebig and others; and Dmitri Mendeleyev, who created the periodic table of elements, helped to put Russian among the international languages of science before the end of the nineteenth century. Between 1900 and 1940, new scientific research continued to be published, often in intense rivalry, in Russian, French, German, and English (Swedish having dropped off the map by then). But the Nazis’ abuse of science between 1933 and 1945 discredited the language they used. German began to lose its status as a world science language with the fall of Berlin in 1945—and many leading German scientists were of course whisked off to America and Britain in short order and functioned thereafter as English speakers. French entered a slow decline, and Russian, which expanded in use after the Second World War and continued to be cultivated for political reasons during the remaining years of the U.S.S.R., dropped out of the science scene in 1989. So we are left with English. English is the language of science worldwide; learned journals published in Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, Berlin, and Paris are now either entirely in English or else carry English translations alongside foreign-language texts. Academic advancement everywhere is dependent on publication in English. Indeed, in Israel it is said that God himself would not get promotion in any science department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Why not? Because he has only one publication—and it was not written in English. (I do not really believe this story. The fact that the publication in question has been translated into English and is even available in paperback would surely overrule the promotion committee’s misgivings.)

Despite this, efforts are being made to allow some languages to serve once again as local science dialects. A U.S.-government-sponsored Web service, for example, WorldWideScience.org, now offers searches of non-English-language databases in China, Russia, France, and some South American countries together with automatic retranslation of the results into Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. The asymmetry of sources and targets in this new arrangement gives an interesting map of where science is now done.

The reasons for English having made a clean sweep of the sciences are not straightforward. Among them we cannot possibly include the unfortunate but widespread idea that English is simpler than other languages.

However, you can’t explain the history and present state of the language of science as the direct result of economic and military might, either. In three instances, languages became science vehicles because the work of a single individual made advances that could not be ignored anywhere else in the world (Liebig for German, Berzelius for Swedish, Mendeleyev for Russian). One language lost its role because of the political folly of its users (German). What we seem to have experienced is not a process of language imposition but of language elimination, in a context where the scientific community needs a means of global communication among its members. The survivor language, English, is not necessarily the best suited to the job; it’s just that nothing has yet happened to knock it out.

One result of the spread of English is that most of the English now spoken and written in the world comes from people who do not possess it natively, making “English speakers” a minority among the users of the language. Much of the English now written by natural and social scientists whose native language is other is almost impenetrable to nonspecialist readers who believe that because they are native English speakers they should be able to understand whatever is written in English. So clumsy and “deviant” is international scientific English that even nonnative wits can have fun with it:

Pastiche and parody notwithstanding, international scientific English serves an important purpose—and it would barely exist if it did not serve well enough the purposes for which it is used. It is, in a sense, an escape from translation (even if in many of its uses it is already translated from the writer’s native tongue). Now, if the natural and social sciences can achieve a world language, however clumsy it may sound, why should we not wish all other kinds of human contact and interchange to arrive at the same degree of linguistic unification? In the middle of the last century, the critic and reformer I. A. Richards believed with great passion that China could become part of the concert of nations only if it adopted an international language, Basic English, standing for “British-American-Scientific-International-Commercial English” (as its name suggests, it consists of a simplified English grammar and a limited vocabulary suited for technical and commercial use). Richards devoted much of his energy in the second half of his life to devising, promoting, teaching, and propagandizing on behalf of this utopian language of contact between East and West. He was in a way following in the footsteps of Lejzer Zamenhof, a Jewish intellectual from Białystok (now in Poland), who had also invented a language of hope, Esperanto, which he believed would rid the world of the muddles and horrors caused by multiple tongues. In the nineteenth century, in fact, international languages were invented in great number, in proportion to the rise of language-based national independence movements in Europe. All have disappeared for practical purposes, except Esperanto, which continues to be used as a language of culture by perhaps a few hundred thousand people scattered across the globe—though what they use it for most of all is not science or commerce but to translate poetry, drama, and fiction from vernacular languages for the benefit of other Esperantists around the world.

Modern Europeans seem to be haunted by a folk memory of the role of Latin in the Middle Ages and beyond. But Latin itself has continued to have a limited use as an international medium for the speakers of “small” European languages. Antanas Smetona, the last president of Lithuania before it was overrun by Soviet and then Nazi armies in 1941, used Latin to make his last unsuccessful appeal for help from the Allies.[9] From the other side of the Baltic Sea, a daily news bulletin in Latin is broadcast by Web radio from Helsinki even now.

Language unification, if it ever comes, will probably not be achieved by Latin, Esperanto, Volapük, or some yet-to-be-invented “contact vehicle” but by one of the languages that possesses a big head start already. It will probably not be the language with the largest number of native speakers (currently, Mandarin Chinese) but the one with the largest number of nonnative users, which is English at the present time. This prospect terrifies and dismays many people, for a whole variety of reasons. But a world in which all intercultural communication was carried out in a single idiom would not diminish the variety of human tongues. It would just make native speakers of the international medium less sophisticated users of language than all others, since they alone would have only one language with which to think.

Second or vehicular languages are learned more quickly and also forgotten more easily than native tongues. Over the past fifty years, English has been acquired to some degree by countless millions across the continent of Europe and is now the only common language among speakers of the different native languages of Belgium, for example, or on the island of Cyprus. Russian, on the other hand, which was understood and used by the educated class across the entire sphere of influence of the U.S.S.R., from the Baltic to the Balkans and from Berlin to Outer Mongolia until 1989, has been forgotten very fast and, even when not forgotten entirely, is now usually left to one side for contact with foreigners. If language unification does proceed further in the twenty-first century, its course will be mapped not by the qualities or nature of the unifying language or of the languages it displaces; it will hang on the future course of world history.

Beyond multilingualism and language unification, the third path that leads away from translation is to stop fussing about what other cultures have to say and to stick to one’s own. Isolation has been the dream of many societies, and some have come close to achieving it. During the Edo period (1603–1868), Japan restricted contact with foreigners to a handful of adventurous Dutch, who were allowed to maintain a trading station on an island in Nagasaki harbor, and the Chinese. In Europe, Britain often seemed to wallow in “splendid isolation”—The Times of October 22, 1957, famously ran the headline FOG IN CHANNEL, CONTINENT CUT OFF—but that was more pose than reality. Not so in the tiny land of Albania. Enver Hoxha, the country’s Communist ruler from 1944 to 1985, first broke off relations with his nearest neighbor, Yugoslavia, in 1948, then with the Soviet Union in 1960, and then with Mao’s China in 1976. Albania remained committed to total isolation for many years thereafter, and at one point in the early 1980s there were no more than a dozen foreigners (including diplomatic staff) in the whole country.[10] Televisions were tuned so as to disable the reception of broadcasts from outside the state; only those books that confirmed Albania’s own view of its position in the world were translated (and there were not many of those); no foreign books were imported; commercial exchanges were as limited as cultural and linguistic contacts; and no foreign debts were contracted. On the very doorstep of Europe, just a short hop from the tourist sites of Corfu and the swankier resorts of the Italian Adriatic, Albania’s half century of voluntary isolation shows that relatively large groups of people are sometimes prepared to forgo all the supposed benefits of intercultural exchange.

The dream of isolation comes in many forms, but its recurrent shadow falls over the many stories that anthropologists have told us about preliterate societies living in remote parts of the world. Barely pastiching scientific work of this kind, Georges Perec uses chapter 25 of Life A User’s Manual to narrate the life of Marcel Appenzzell, a fictional pupil of the real Marcel Mauss, who set off to the jungle of Sumatra to establish contact with the Anadalams. After a debilitating journey through tropical forests, Appenzzell finally encounters the tribe. They say nothing. He leaves out what he believes to be traditional gifts and falls asleep. When he awakes, the Anadalams have disappeared. They have left his gifts, upended their huts, and walked away. He tracks them through the jungle, catches up with them, and repeats his procedure, believing it to be the right way to establish communication with these “precontact” people. But the result is the same. They leave. And so it goes on, week after terrible week, until the ethnographer grasps that the Anadalams do not want to engage in communication with him, or with anybody else. That is indeed their privilege. A people may choose autarchy in place of contact. Who are we to say that is wrong?

However, in Perec’s telling of this story, the Anadalams exemplify not only pride and self-sufficiency but also linguistic and cultural entropy. They possess a few metal tools they are no longer capable of fabricating themselves, suggesting they are dropouts from a more developed civilization. Their language also appears to have had a large part of its vocabulary cut away:

The reader can of course jump straight from this description of lexical entropy to the almost moral conviction that isolation is bad, for it leads (as the story shows) to the impoverishment and death of a language and the culture it supports, and ultimately to the extinction of a whole people. But Perec catches such sentimentality on the hop:

Perec’s tight-lipped carpenter may serve as a warning for people who too loudly lament the loss of language proficiency among (for example) today’s teenagers and students. The carpenter’s skill as a carpenter is unaffected by the form of words he uses to go about his trade, because there is no relationship of cause and effect between linguistic entropy and cultural riches of most other kinds. The loss of a vocabulary, or its replacement by a less refined one, has no generalized impact on what people can do.

It would similarly be unwise to think that isolation causes languages to wither and die. Indeed, isolation may be the most fertile ground for the diversification and enrichment of forms of speech—the innumerable distinctive jargons created by clannish teenagers in every culture provide a good example of that.

Indeed, there are many richly rewarding activities we perform in contact with others, including others who speak different languages, that don’t need any words at all.

My father once took a trip to Portugal. On unpacking his suitcase he realized he had forgotten to bring his bedroom slippers. He went out, found a shoe shop, selected the footwear he was lacking, got the assistant to find the right size (39E), paid for his purchase, checked the change, expressed his thanks and gestured farewell, and went back to his hotel—all without uttering a word in any language. Every user of a human language must have had or been close to having a language-free intercultural communication of a similar kind. We do use language to communicate, and the language that we use certainly has some bearing on what, with whom, and how we communicate. But that’s only part of the picture. It would be as artificial to limit our grasp of communication to written or even spoken language as it would be to restrict a study of human nutrition to the menus of restaurants in the Michelin Guide.