Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

In practice, Japanese speakers do have a way of translating the English term translation into Japanese. The word hon’yaku is used for that purpose in Japanese translations of English-language works about comparative literature and translation theory, and also in the world of publishing and the international book trade. But its range of uses makes it an imperfect match for the word translation. Hon’yaku covers translation from foreign (non-Japanese) languages into Japanese (or vice versa), sometimes more specifically translations from Europe or the United States, but not most other meanings of translation. According to Michael Emmerich, “Those like myself who attempt to translate ‘translation’ with the word hon’yaku are … subtly carrying out the type of translation known in Japanese as goyaku, or ‘mistranslation.’”[13] Hon’yaku is more like a term of art, whereas we think that the English term translation names something general of self-evident reality.

The Word Magic effect of a category term is that it leads unwary users to believe that the category thus named really exists. One way of looking at this is to say that the category or class—any category or class—really does exist as a mental reality if a name for that category exists in the language. But that is not at all the same thing as saying that the category thus created is a reliable, useful, appropriate, or truly meaningful way of talking about the world. The absence of a category term clearly makes it harder (but not necessarily impossible) to think about what a set of entities distinguished by different words have in common. In the case that concerns us, we do have a single, very general word for translation, whereas Japanese has many. That does not mean to say that in Japanese you cannot think about translation in general. But it does mean that European questions about the “true nature of translation” when translated into Japanese tend to ask a question about an aspect of European culture (called “translation,” or hon’yaku), not about what we think the question really is—the nature of “translation itself.”

You can’t talk about it easily if you don’t have a word for it, and that is why any intellectual inquiry invents a terminology for the things that exist, or need to be held to exist, within that particular field of specialization. But translation is not an invented, technical, or borrowed term like hydrogen, megabyte, or chiaroscuro. It’s a common noun and an ordinary, unmarked term available for general use. What exactly does it name?

The conventional way of tackling this question is to have recourse to etymology, the history of the word itself. Translate comes from two Latin words, trans, meaning “across,” and the past form latum of the verb ferre, “to bear.” The result of the word history is to give translate the meaning of “bear across” or “bring over.” Several European languages have similar words from similar roots, such as the German übersetzen (“to put across”) or the Russian переводить (“to lead across”). From the etymologies of these words come formula-like proclamations in textbooks on translation, encyclopedias, and so forth of the following familiar kind: “Translation is the transfer of meaning from one language to another.”

That seems so obvious as to be not worth commenting upon. But the history of a word does not tell you much about its actual meaning. Knowing, for example, that divorce comes from Latin divortium, “watershed” or “fork in the road,” does not tell you what the word means now. Etymologies obscure essential truths about the way we use language and, among them, truths about translation. So let’s be clear: a translator “carries [something] across [some obstacle]” only because the word that is used to describe what he does meant “bear across” in an ancient language. “Carrying across” is only a metaphor, and its relation to the truth about translation needs to be established, not taken for granted. There are lots of other metaphors available in many languages, including our own, and they have just as much right to our attention as the far from solid conceit of the ferry operator or trucker who carries something from A to B.

What if we used a word with a different set of historical roots? What if we had lost all trace of the history of the word? Translators would no doubt carry on translating, and the problems and paradoxes of their profession would not be altered one bit. But if we were to change the word we use to talk about translation, large parts of contemporary discourse about the phenomenon would become meaningless and void.

In Sumerian, the language of ancient Babylon, the word for “translator,” written in cuneiform script, looks like this: