Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Notes

1

Douglas Hofstadter, Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 1a.

2

Harish Trivedi, “In Our Own Time, on Our Own Terms: ‘Translation’ in India,” in Translating Others, ed. Theo Hermans (Manchester, U.K.: St. Jerome, 2006), 1:102–19.

3

Claire Blanche-Benveniste, “Comment retrouver l’expérience des anciens voyageurs en terres de langues romanes?” in S’entendre entre langues voisines: vers l’intercompréhension, eds. Virginie Conti and François Grin (Chêne-Bourg, Switzerland: Georg, 2008), 34–51. On lingua franca, see John Holm, An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

4

Different authorities give different figures, ranging from five to seven thousand. We’re using the higher estimate, but the actual figure doesn’t really matter for the argument of this book.

5

These figures, taken from Wikipedia, include nonnative users of the languages concerned. Because many people speak two or more of the world’s major languages, the total population of the “top thirteen” may exceed the total population of the world. Figures for total native or first-language speakers show a different picture: Mandarin Chinese, 863 million; Hindi, 680 million; English, 400 million; Spanish, 350 million; Arabic, 280 million; Russian, 164 million; Japanese, 130 million; German, 105 million; French, 80 million; Turkish, 63 million; Urdu, 60 million; Indonesian, 17 million; Swahili, 10 million—a total of 3.2 billion, or just over half the world’s population.

6

One obvious answer is: Portuguese. But despite its importance for large and far-flung communities in Europe, South America, and Africa, its role as a vehicular language is minimal.

7

J. N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), gives a detailed portrait of the relations between Latin and the other languages of Rome and its possessions. Many texts discussed by Adams show Latin in contact with other languages, but none of his material could be classed even approximately as a Latin translation of a non-Latin text.

8

Georges Perec, “Experimental Demonstration of the Tomatotopic Organization in the Soprano,” in Cantatrix Sopranica et autres écrits scientifiques (Paris: Seuil, 1991).

9

According to Claude Hagège, Dictionnaire amoureux des langues (Paris: Plon, 2009), 109, Konstantin Päts, the last president of independent Estonia, also made a broadcast in Latin in August 1939, for the same reasons.

10

Elisabeth and Jean-Paul Champseix, 57, Boulevard Staline. Chroniques albanaises (Paris: La Découverte, 1990).

11

Adapted from Georges Perec, Life A User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David R. Godine, 2009), 125.

12

Michael Emmerich, “Beyond Between: Translation, Ghosts, Metaphors,” posted online at www.wordswithoutborders.org, April 2009.

13

Ibid.

14

Bambi B. Schieffelin, “Found in Translating: Reflexive Language Across Time and Texts in Bosavi,” in Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies, eds. Miki Makihara and Bambi B. Schieffelin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 141–65.

15

From Andrew Chesterman, Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997), 61.

16

From The Book of Rites, after 206 B.C.E., as quoted by Martha Cheung in Target 17, 1 (2005): 29.

17

Taken respectively from the first Chinese dictionary, second century C.E.; Kong Yingda, seventh century C.E.; Jia Gongyan, also seventh century; and a Buddhist monk, Zan Ning, as quoted (and translated) by Martha Cheung in ibid., 33, 34.

18

For the time being, I am using translation to refer to interlingual communication of all kinds, spoken and written. Interpreting, which deals exclusively with speech, is the subject of chapter 24.

19

“A small man’s son is astounded by the food market,” from Luis d’Antin van Rooten, Mots d’heures: Gousses, Rames (New York: Grossman, 1967).

20

See Leo Spitzer, Essays on Seventeenth-Century French Literature, trans. and ed. David Bellos (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 253–84, for the whole story.

21

Quoted in Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1984), 78.

22

Lev Loseff, “The Persistent Life of James Clifford: The Return of a Mystification,” Zvezda (January 2001), in Russian.

23

Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995), 20 and passim.

24

Jean Rond d’Alembert, “Observations sur l’art de traduire,” in Mélanges de littérature . . . (Amsterdam: Chatelain, 1763), 3:18. My translation.

25

M. C**** de L***, Dangerous connections: or, letters collected in a society, and published for the instruction of other societies (London, 1784).

26

Fred Vargas, Have Mercy on Us All, trans. David Bellos (London: Harvill, 2003).

27

Directed by David Ka-Shing for the Yellow Earth Theatre and Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, performed in Stratford-upon-Avon, London, and Shanghai in 2006.

28

Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Über-setzens,” a paper read in 1813 to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin, in a new translation by Susan Bernofsky, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004). An earlier and more widely available translation by Waltraud Bartscht omits several passages.

29

From chapter 2 of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

30

Mariagrazia Margarito, “Une valise pour bien voyager … avec les italianismes du français,” Synergies 4 (2008): 63–73.

31

Antoine Volodine, “Écrire en français une littérature étrangère,” chaoïd 6 (2002).

32

David Remnick, “The Translation Wars,” The New Yorker, November 7, 2005.

33

Ibid. See also Gary Saul Morton, “The Pevearsion of Russian Literature,” Commentary (July–August 2010), which takes a much harsher line.

34

Mariusz Wilk, The Journals of a White Sea Wolf, trans. Daniusa Stok (London: Harvill, 2003), uses the device to great effect.

35

In some countries the children of immigrant parents are not even granted a nationality. Statelessness can be seen as the “zero condition” of what is acquired by the fact of being born—and also an infringement of international conventions on fundamental rights.

36

G. T. Chernov, Osnovy sinkhronnogo perevoda (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1987), 5–8.

37

Lynn Visson, Sinkhronni perevod s russkogo na angliiskii (Moscow, 2007), 15–16; summary version in English in Lynn Visson, “Teaching Simultaneous Interpretation into a Foreign Language,” Mosty 2, 22 (2009): 57–59.

38

From LINGUIST List 2.457, September 3, 1991, available at http://linguistlist.org/issues/2/2-457.html.

39

Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in On Translation, ed. Reuben Brower (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 232.

40

This is just a simple explanation of Zipf’s law, which says that the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word and three times as often as the third most frequent word. As a result, just 135 different words account for half of all the word occurrences in an English-language corpus of about one million words.

41

Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1933), 140.

42

It may not be arbitrary at all from a historical point of view: the two words light come from quite different origins, whereas all the meanings of head come from a single source.

43

Additional subrules apply to alphabetic sequences that include the symbols - and * (as in “back-up” and the proprietary name “E*Trade”); in some languages there are additional typographical marks such as ¿ or ¡, but these and other features found in languages with alphabetical or syllabic scripts don’t alter the structure of the rules or the basic idea of what a word is—for a computer.

44

Hayley G. Davis, Words: An Integrational Approach (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2001), has many hilarious examples of English speakers’ utter confusion about what a word is.

45

Anna Morpurgo Davies, “Folk-Linguistics and the Greek Word,” in Fest-schrift for Henry Hoenigswald, eds. George Cardon and Norman Zide (Tübingen: Narr, 1987), 263–80.

46

Jonathon Green, Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), 40–41.

47

Jan Assmann, “Translating Gods: Religion as a Factor of Cultural (Un) Translatability,” in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, eds. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 25–36.

48

Information from Christoph Harbsmeier, Language and Logic in Traditional China, forming volume VII.1 of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 65–84; and Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual (Harvard University Press, 1998), 62–94.

49

Philitas of Cos, Átaktoi glôssai, or “Disorderly Words,” explains the meanings of rare Homeric and other literary words; the oldest surviving full Homeric lexicon is by Apollonius the Sophist, from the first century C.E. The first Sanskrit word list, Amarakośa, was written by Amara Sinha in the fourth century C.E.

50

Georges Perec, Life A User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David R. Godine, 2009), 327.

51

According to Naomi Seidman, “One would be hard put to name a major defence of word-for-word translation before the modern period.” Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 75.

52

George Steiner, After Babel, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 251.

53

Nicolas Herberay des Essarts, translator’s preface to Amadis de Gaule (1540), ed. Michel Bideaux (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006), 168. My translation.

54

Octavio Paz, Un poema di John Donne: Traducción literaria y literali-dad (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1990), 13.

55

Quoted by one of Kelly’s former colleagues at Ottawa University on Unprofessional Translation (blog).

56

Mark Twain, The Jumping Frog, in English, then in French, then clawed back into a civilized language once more by patient, unremunerated toil (New York: Harper & Bros., 1903), 39–40.

57

Michael Israel, “The Rhetoric of ‘Literal Meaning,’” in The Literal and Non-Literal in Language and Thought, eds. Sean Coulson and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 147–238.

58

See Dominique Jullien, Les Amoureux de Schéhérézade: Variations sur les Mille et Une Nuits (Geneva: Droz, 2009), for a discussion of the cultural issues surrounding Mardrus’s translation.

59

Quoted in ibid., 107. My translation.

60

André Gide, in La Revue blanche, XXI:475 (January 1900), quoted in Jullien, Amoureux de Schéhérézade, 110.

61

J.-C. Mardrus, letter to the editor in Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature XLI.26:515 (June 1900), quoted in Jullien, Amoureux de Schéhérézade, 85.

62

Roy Harris, The Origin of Writing (London: Duckworth, 1986), 177. Writing has been invented four times: by the Maya, in pre-Columbian America; in China; in ancient Egypt; and in Mesopotamia. All modern writing systems derive from just two of these inventions, and all alphabetic scripts from just one.

63

The term primary orality was coined by Walter J. Ong. See his Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982).

64

Universal literacy was first achieved in most Western European countries at some point between 1860 and 1920. In other parts of the world it is even more recent than that; and in many of them it remains a long way off.

65

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Penguin Books, 1957), 1153.

66

In practice, when relations are cordial, the ancient protocol is often abandoned, and the two translators take it in turn to translate both ways in twenty-minute shifts, just as they would when working in more public encounters. But for discussions on major topics between heads of state and of government, there can be no question of having only one translator present.

67

Ismail Kadare’s Palace of Dreams (New York: William Morrow, 1993) is an ironic fiction about Ottoman dream records with some basis in historical fact.

68

See E. Natalie Rothman, “Interpreting Dragomans: Boundaries and Crossings in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51:4 (2009): 771–800, for far more detail than is possible here.

69

Ziggurat (a pyramidal temple) is generally reckoned to be the only other word of Akkadian in English, but it came into the language only in the nineteenth century.

70

The Three-Arched Bridge (New York: Arcade, 1997) and “The Blinding Order” (published in Agamemnon’s Daughter, New York: Arcade, 2006) complement The Palace of Dreams in this respect.

71

French started to be used in this role in the seventeenth century, and in the nineteenth it displaced Italian entirely.

72

The example is from Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 29.

73

Ibid., 27.

74

George Abbott, Under the Turk in Constantinople (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 46, quoted in Judy Laffan, “Navigating Empires: ‘British’ Dragomans and Changing Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Levant,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Queensland, Australia.

75

Ibid.

76

Preface to Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache, trans. Douglas Hofstadter (New York: Basic Books, 2009).

77

See Allan Cunningham, “Dragomania: The Dragomans of the British Embassy in Turkey,” Middle Eastern Affairs 2 (1961): 81–100.

78

Stephen Owen, “World Poetry,” a review of Bei Dao’s The August Sleepwalker, trans. Bonnie McDougall, New Republic, November 1990.

79

For a list of foreign film stars and their established German voices, see the Deutsche Synchronsprecher website, www.deutsche-synchronsprecher.de.

80

Le Monde, August 7, 2010: 14.

81

Vladimir Nabokov, “Introduction,” in Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin (New York: Routledge, 1964), I:vii–ix.

82

Vladimir Nabokov, “The Servile Path,” in On Translation, ed. Reuben Brewer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 97–110.

83

Georges Perec, letter to Denise Getzler (circa 1963), Littératures (Toulouse) 6 (spring 1983): 63.

84

See www.packingtownreview.com/blog, post dated December 2, 2007.

85

Thom Satterlee, “Robert Frost’s Views on Translation,” Delos (1996): 46–52; Satterlee finds a kind of source in an essay by Ezra Pound, “How I Began” (1913), but which claims the opposite: “I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry was ‘indestructible,’ what part could not be lost in translation.”

86

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921), Proposition 74: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, davon muß man schweigen.

87

English-language philosophers since Willard Van Orman Quine have treated this issue at length. My position reflects that of Donald Davidson as I understand it from the commentary provided by J. E. Malpas in “The Intertranslatability of Natural Languages,” Synthese 78 (1989), 233–64.

88

Romain Gary, White Dog (1970; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5.

89

Marshall Sahlins, The Western Illusion of Human Nature (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2008), takes this argument much further. Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (New York: Penguin, 2007), gives an up-to-date report on current research that is fast undermining the distinction between “language” and “signal” and between human and nonhuman communication.

90

Mark E. Laidre and Jessica L. Yorzinski, “The Silent Bared-Teeth Face and the Crest-Raise of the Mandrill (Mandrillus sphinx): A Contextual Analysis of Signal Function,” Ethology 111 (2005): 143–57. A standard introduction to the field of animal sign systems is Thomas A. Sebeok, How Animals Communicate (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977).

91

Laura Martin, “‘Eskimo Words for Snow’: A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example,” American Anthropologist 88:2 (1986): 418–23, explained and defended by Geoffrey Pullum in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 159–73.

92

Inuit languages are agglutinative and typically express what would be complex expressions in English by suffixes and prefixes added to the stem word. As a result, Inuits have uncountably many “words” for everything. Each word form contains indicators of qualities and roles that in English would be expressed by many separate words. It’s as pointless to say that some Inuit language has twenty or sixty or eighty words for “snow” as to say that Hungarian has seventeen words for “Anna.”

93

Published in The Works of Sir William Jones (London: Robinson and Evans, 1799).

94

Wilhelm Freiherr von Humboldt, Prüfung der Untersuchungen über die Urbewohner Hispaniens vermittelst der vaskischen Sprache (Berlin: Dümmler, 1821).

95

Wilhelm Freiherr von Humboldt, Über die Entstehung der gramma-tischen Formen und ihren Einfluss auf die Ideenentwicklung (Berlin: König. Akad. der Wissenschaften, 1823).

96

See Lera Boroditsky’s report on this language at www.edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html.

97

Edward Sapir, “Abnormal Types of Speech in Nootka” (1915), in Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality, ed. David G. Mandel-baum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 179–96.

98

Hilary Henson, British Social Anthropologists and Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 11.

99

Mildred L. Larson, Meaning-Based Translation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 158.

100

E. J. Payne, History of the New World Called America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), II:103, quoted in Henson, British Social Anthropologists, 10.

101

See Michael Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999).

102

Figures from Philip Noss, ed., A History of Bible Translation (Rome: Edizioni di Storia et letteratura, 2007), 24.

103

Jan de Waard and Eugene A. Nida, From One Language to Another: Functional Equivalence in Bible Translating (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 1986).

104

Edesio Sánchez-Cetina, “Word of God, Word of the People,” in Noss, History, 395.

105

Daud Soeslo, “Bible Translation in Asia–Pacific and the Americas,” in Noss, History, 165–66, 175.

106

Eugene Nida, Fascinated by Languages (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003).

107

Richard Rohrbaugh, The New Testament in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2007), quoted in The Social Sciences and Biblical Translation, ed. Dietmar Neufeld (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), ix.

108

Neufeld, Social Sciences, 3.

109

Leora Batnitsky, “Translation as Transcendence: A Glimpse into the Workshop of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible Translation,” New German Critique 70 (1997): 87–116.

110

Gott sprach zu Mosche / Ich werde dasein, als der ich dasein werde. / Und sprach: / So sollst du zu den Söhnen Jifsraels sprechen: / ICH BIN DA schickt mich zu euch / Und weiter sprach Gott zu Mosche: / So sollst du den Söhnen Jifsraels sprechen: / ER, / der Gott eurer Väter / der Gott Abrahams, der Gott / Jitzchaks, der Gott Jakobs / schickt mich zu euch. / Das ist mein Name in Weltzeit / das mein Gendenken, Geschlecht für / Geschlecht.

111

Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Über-setzens,” trans. Susan Bernofsky, in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2004).

112

Martha Gellerstam, “Fingerprints in Translation,” in In and Out of English: For Better, for Worse, ed. Gunilla Anderman (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2005), from whom the following material is taken.

113

Preston M. Torbert, “Globalizing Legal Drafting: What the Chinese Can Teach Us About Ejusdem Generis and All That,” The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing (2007): 41–50.

114

All the information in the following paragraphs is borrowed and summarized from Bambi Schieffelin, “Found in Translating: Reflexive Language Across Time and Texts in Bosavi,” in Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies, ed. Miki Makihara and Bambi B. Schieffelin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 141–65.

115

Quoted by Scott L. Montgomery, Science in Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 68.

116

Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995).

117

Sara Laviosa, Corpus-Based Translation Studies: Theory, Findings, Applications (New York: Rodopi, 2002).

118

Mairi McLaughlin, “(In)visibility: Dislocation in French and the Voice of the Translator,” French Studies 61:2 (2008): 53–64.

119

Exceptions include Rosemary Edmonds’s translation of War and Peace (London: Penguin Books, 1957), in which Platon Karataev speaks a generic folk dialect of English vaguely indebted to Yorkshire.

120

See Ineke Wallaert, “The Translation of Sociolects: A Paradigm of Ideological Issues in Translation?,” in Language Across Boundaries, eds. Janet Cotterill and Anne Ife (London: Continuum in association with British Association for Applied Linguistics, 2001), 171–84.

121

Simon Gaunt, “Translating the Diversity of the Middle Ages: Marco Polo and John Mandeville as ‘French’ Writers,” Australian Journal of French Studies XLVI.3 (2009): 235–48.

122

Claude Lanzmann and Simone de Beauvoir, Shoah: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film (New York: Da Capo, 1995), provides an English translation of the subtitles only. Crosslinguistic interactions can be studied only by watching the film.

123

Cyril Aslanov, Le Français au Levant (Paris: Champion, 2006), resurrects the often-forgotten “Empire of French” that spread from Sicily and Cyprus to the (French-speaking) Kingdom of Jerusalem between 1100 and 1400 C.E.

124

Gaunt, “Translating the Diversity,” 237.

125

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Penguin Books, 1957), 417.

126

The figure is remarkably stable for other major or central languages. Gisele Sapiro (“Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market,” Poetics 38:4 [2010]: 419–39) logs forty-two source languages for literary translations published in France between 1984 and 2002. A relatively new American adventure in literary translation on the Web—WordsWithoutBorders.org—has widened the net to include more than seventy source languages, but it has yet to affect book publishing in traditional form to any significant degree.

127

For a brief exposition of the dollar delusion, see Michel Onfray’s article “Les deux bouts de la langue,” Le Monde, July 10, 2010.

128

See Gideon Toury, “Enhancing Cultural Change by Means of Fictitious Translations,” available at spinoza.tau.ac.il/~toury/works.

129

Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Tijariyya al-Kubra, 1928), III:152, quoted in Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 31.

130

Katharina Rout, “Fragments of a Greater Language,” in Beyond Words: Translating the World, ed. Susan Ouriou (Banff, AB: Banff Center Press, 2010), 33–37.

131

Jessica Ka Yee Chan, “Translating Russia into China: Lu Xun’s Fashioning of an Antithesis to Western Europe,” paper given at the MLA Conference, Philadelphia, 2009.

132

Arnold B. McMillin, “Small Is Sometimes Beautiful: Studying ‘Minor Languages’ at a University with Particular Reference to Belarus,” Modern Language Review 101:4 (October 2006): xxxii–xliii.

133

Anonymous editorial, Yomiuri Shimbun, June 23, 1888, translated by Michael Emmerich.

134

“The Wu Jing Project: A New Translation of the Five Chinese Classics into the Major Languages of the World; an International Project Sponsored by the Confucius Institute Headquarters, Beijing, China,” project description kindly supplied by Martin Kern.

135

There are two English translations: Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin and Peter Owen (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960); and Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983). The second is to be preferred.

136

See Rosemary Moeketsi, “Intervention in Court Interpreting: South Africa,” in Translation as Intervention, ed. Jeremy Munday (London/New York: Continuum, 2007), 97–117.

137

Like Japanese, however, it does have unofficial status. The German Translation Section, funded jointly by the German, Swiss, Lichtenstein, and Austrian governments, provides German-language services at UN headquarters in New York.

138

Quoted in Sir Frederick Pollock, A First Book of Jurisprudence for Students of the Common Law (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1896), 283.

139

Karen McAuliffe, “Translation at the Court of Justice of the European Communities,” in Translation Issues in Language and Law, eds. Frances Olsen, Alexander Lorz, and Dieter Stein (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 99–115 (specifically, See Here). Emphasis is mine.

140

The separate Directorate-General for Interpretation also has a huge budget—it is the largest interpreting service in the world by far.

141

Karen McAuliffe, “Translation at the Court of Justice of the European Communities of the European Communities,” in Translation Issues in Language and Law, eds. Frances Olsen, Alexander Lorz, and Dieter Stein (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 105.

142

Lubella v. Hauptzollamt Cottbus, quoted in Lawrence Solan, “Statutory Interpretation in the EU: The Augustinian Approach,” in Olsen, Lorz, and Stein, Translation Issues, 49.

143

Ibid., 35–53.

144

Susan Bassnett and Esperanca Bielsa, Translation in Global News (New York: Routledge, 2009), is the principal source of information and examples given in this chapter.

145

See Michael Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), for a well-documented account of the intelligence-gathering machinery of the period.

146

Warren Weaver, “Translation,” in Machine Translation of Languages: Fourteen Essays, eds. W. N. Locke and A. D. Booth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1955), 15.

147

Weaver, quoted in MT News International 22 (July 1999): 6.

148

Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, “A Demonstration of the Nonfeasibility of Fully Automatic High-Quality Translation” (1960), in Language and Information (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1964), 174.

149

See www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GdSC1Z1Kzs.

150

Available at www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/nec/StrategyforAmericanInnovation, section 3.D.

151

Martine Behr and Maike Corpataux, Die Nürnberger Prozesse: Zur Be-deutung der Dolmetscher für die Prozesse and der Prozesse für die Dolmetscher (Munich: Meidenbauer, 2006), 25–30.

152

Richard W. Sonnenfeldt, Witness to Nuremberg (New York: Arcade, 2006), 51.

153

Francesca Gaiba, The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation: The Nuremberg Trial (Ottowa: University of Ottawa Press, 1998), 110.

154

Provisional Rules of Procedure of the Security Council (1946), Rule 42.

155

Annelise Riles, “Models and Documents: Artefacts of International Legal Knowledge,” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 48:4 (October 1999): 819.

156

Denis Peiron, “La France à court d’interprètes,” Le Monde, March 8, 2010, raised a cry of alarm at the shortage of French candidates for language jobs in the European Union; Brigitte Perucca, in “Un monde sans interprètes,” Le Monde, March 19, 2010, reports that barely 30 percent of candidates for interpreter posts in all international organizations pass the first-stage tests.

157

The Council of Europe is distinct from the European Parliament, though it also sits in Strasbourg. Its official languages are English and French, but it provides German, Italian, and Russian interpreting as “additional working languages” at its own expense.

158

Arvo Krikmann, Netinalju Stalinist—Интернет-анекдоты о Сталине—Internet Humour About Stalin (Tartu, Estonia: Eesti Kir-jandusmuuseum, 2004), joke no. 11, quoted by Alexandra Arkhipova in “Laughing About Stalin,” paper given at a conference, Totalitarian Laughter, Princeton, NJ, May 2009.

159

For a fuller discussion of this thorny field of study, see W. D. Hart, “On Self-Reference,” Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 523–28.

160

Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties, trans. David Bellos [1965] (Boston: David R. Godine, 1990), takes his exercise in Flaubert to an unusual pitch of intensity by incorporating a dozen or so sentences that really are by Flaubert.

161

Jean Rouaud, Fields of Glory, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Arcade, 1998), is a good example of how an imitation of Proust’s “inimitable” French style can be represented as such in another language.

162

Adam Thirlwell, The Delighted States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

163

Henri Godin, Les Ressources stylistiques du français contemporain (1948; 2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1964), 2, 3.

164

R. A. Sayce, Style in French Prose: A Method of Analysis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 5.

165

Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. De-Bevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

166

Spanish could plausibly take over the role of “first interlanguage” in literary translation, but I see no sign of that happening yet.

167

See www.penguinclassics.co.uk/static/penguinclassicsaboutus/index.html.

168

Ibid.

169

English-language rights may be acquired for the entire world and they are then called WELR (World English Language Rights) or else, for one or another of its territories, “U.K. and Commonwealth” or “North America,” sometimes further subdivided into “U.S.A.” and “Canada.”

170

See Mark Solms, “Controversies in Freud Translation,” Psychoanalysis and History 1 (1999): 28–43.

171

Elisabeth Roudinesco, “Freud, une passion publique,” Le Monde, January 7, 2010.

172

Eurostar Metropolitan, June 2010: 5. The changes make it clear that this sentence was translated from English into French, and not vice versa. A back-translation of the French would probably give “Top speed reached in July 2003 by a Eurostar train during testing of a high-speed line in the U.K.”

173

Roman Jakobson and Abraham Moles proposed an influential Communication Model in which the role of natural language is played by something they called a “code.” They didn’t really mean a code as such, but the metaphor has stuck.

174

John Dryden, “On Translation,” in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, eds. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 31.

175

Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena (1800), extract translated by Peter Mollenhauer as “On Language and Words,” in Schulte and Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation, 34.

176

Vladimir Nabokov, “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English,” Partisan Review 22:5 (Fall 1955), reprinted in Schulte and Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation, 137, 140.

177

José Ortega y Gasset, “La Miseria y el esplendor de la traducción,” La Nación (Buenos Aires) (June 1937), trans. Elisabeth Gamble Miller, in Schulte and Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation, 98.

178

For a counterexample where the character count is respected in translation line by line, see chapter 51 of Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David R. Godine, 2009); and chapter 12 of this book, See Here, version 11.

179

A small selection: Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (1923), in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, eds. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); George Steiner, After Babel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Paul Zumthor, Babel ou l’inachèvement (Paris: Seuil, 1997); Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” in Psyché: L’Invention de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 2007).

180

For example, François Ost, Traduire: Défense et illustration du multilinguisme (Paris: Fayard, 2009). Ost’s long first chapter runs through many of the possible interpretations of the Babel story.

181

See Arika Okrent, In the World of Constructed Languages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), for a witty and accessible account of the long history of language-improvement schemes.

182

That is not to say that neogrammarians have been wasting their time. The epic adventure of transformational grammar that began in 1957 remains for many people more stimulating than all the legends of the Arthurian Cycle put together.

183

For a fuller discussion of gesture in the evolution of language, see Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (New York: Penguin, 2007), 123–38.

184

The classic statement of the evolutionary relationship between grooming and language is Robin Dunbar’s Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (London: Faber, 1996). Although Dunbar remains committed to monogenesis (a single origin for all varieties of speech), his work provides numerous valuable insights that have been borrowed in simplified form in various places in this book.