Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

What he doesn’t say, however, is how the mounted couriers turned the information they bore from Flemish into German, which is what people understand in Aix. In ages past, news rushed from any European A to B would most likely have been issued and received in French. But nowadays we are accustomed to receiving topical information in print and on radio, television, and the Web in our home languages, with minimal lag between event and report. But how do good and bad tidings now get from Shenzhen to Chicago, from Marseille to Melbourne, from Rio to Ryazan? Electronic media account for the speed but do not explain how political and human events deemed to be news happen in a language that is rarely our own but reach us almost instantaneously in the language that is.

The quantity of information flowing around the globe in uncountable languages might be taken to suggest that in some hidden anthill a busy troop of language insects lives on permanent standby, ready to turn news from any of the world’s languages into all the others at the drop of a hat. But it can’t be so, because that would require almost 49 million separate teams of language ants (see here)—and a human anthill of that size would be difficult to hide. Even if a hypothetical global news translation HQ served only 80 vehicular languages, it would still require 6,320 different language desks. Given a forty-hour workweek for each translator and allowing for sudden peaks in demand when great events happen in Paris or Peoria, you couldn’t house the enterprise in anything less than the Empire State Building. But no skyscraper in New York, London, or Rio houses a world news translation center. In fact, news bureaus the world over have hardly any translators on their staff at all. Like the lawyer-linguists at the European Court of Justice, language mediators in the news business are almost always something else as well.

Most of the world’s languages are spoken by quite small groups, and news media do not exist in many of these tongues. Even so, there are hundreds of languages—perhaps more than a thousand—that have some modest level of news service in print or on the air. Latin, for example, has daily thirty-minute news bulletins broadcast from Helsinki; Gaelic has seven hours of programming per day, part of which is news, on BBC Alba TV. But most consumer news media don’t make the news, save on rare occasions. Most of them are themselves consumers of worldwide agency services, called wires, which process and put out news in no more than half a dozen tongues. The main hubs are Reuters (the first news agency in the world, founded in 1851), Associated Press (AP), Agence France-Press (AFP), and Inter Press Service (IPS), massively supplemented in recent years by CNN, Al Jazeera, the BBC on the Web, and, for financial news especially, the Bloomberg wire.[144]

News of flooding in Bangladesh or a coup d’état in Rwanda or Kyrgyzstan does not come to you, wherever you are, from Dhaka, Kigali, or Bishkek. It comes to your local news source from the agencies, in English, French, Spanish, German (all agencies), Portuguese (Reuters, AFP), Dutch (AP only), or Arabic (Reuters since 1954 and AFP since 1969). It is rewritten almost instantaneously by journalists working for your local paper or radio station from whichever language version they receive from one or more of the wires. The global transmission languages are those of the colonial empires of the nineteenth century, plus Arabic. Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Indonesian, and all other languages are not in the game.

Journalists who compose the articles and stories you actually read often have language skills, but they do not think of themselves as translators. They would be offended if you said that’s what they are—even if some news stories you can read in the London press, for example, are very close indeed to what you read in yesterday’s Le Monde. Journalists think of their jobs as turning plain information into arresting, entertaining, or readable prose suited to the culture, interests, and knowledge of the people who read them—and that’s more than what most people think translation is. The pecking order is reflected in pay and conditions of service the world over: “journalist” outranks “translator” everywhere.