Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

A second threat to maintaining current language practice in international organizations is that some states may become unwilling to finance simultaneous interpretation into languages that are ceasing to be global vehicular tongues—but the replacement of Russian (for example) may prove politically impossible for many decades yet, and nobody has a clear idea of what might replace French.

But the bigger threat looming on the horizon is something that’s going on right now in research labs in New Jersey and elsewhere. Using the technology of speech recognition that allows a widely available word processor to generate text from speech, alongside the speech synthesis systems that power today’s automated answering machines, the FAHQT target that current U.S. science policy encourages could well become FAHQST—fully automated, high-quality speech translation. Experimental systems not very far from commercial release already produce running English text from Spanish speech. I may not live to see or hear it, but many of you probably will: automated interpreting for the secondary orality of predictable international diplomatic prose, for tourist inquiries at hotel reception desks, and maybe for other uses as well.

You will then enter the era of tertiary orality. It will be another world.

TWENTY-FIVE Match Me If You Can: Translating Humor

A relatively uncontentious way of saying what translation does is this: it provides for some community an acceptable match for an utterance made in a foreign tongue. This doesn’t go very far, but as it applies equally well to conference interpreting, comic strips, legal contracts, and novels, it’s a reasonable place to start.

What it leaves open are three huge questions:

1. What makes a match acceptable?

2. Which of the infinite catalog of qualities that any utterance has are those that a translation may or must make match?

3. What do we mean by “match,” anyway?

Those are the questions that translation studies has always sought to answer, sometimes under heavy academic disguise. “Translation quality evaluation criteria,” for example, is a label for answers to question 1. But whatever way you ask these three questions, the answers are not easy to provide.

All sorts of criteria may be involved in judgments made by different people at different times about the acceptability of a match—theoretical criteria, or practical, social, or cultural ones, and no doubt, on occasions, purely arbitrary ones, too (such as the translator is a famous prizewinner and must have got it right). Trying to rank these criteria or to distribute them to classes of situations where they might apply seems too complicated by half. It is perhaps more fruitful to work in from the outside edge and to begin by looking at places where matches are commonly believed to be extremely difficult to find.

One area flagged by nearly all translation commentary as being match-poor is utterances that raise a laugh or a smile. Here’s an old Soviet joke about Stalin:

Stalin and Roosevelt had an argument about whose bodyguards were more loyal and ordered them to jump out of the window on the fifteenth floor. Roosevelt’s bodyguard flatly refused to jump, saying, “I’m thinking about the future of my family.” Stalin’s bodyguard, however, jumped out of the window and fell to his death. Roosevelt was taken aback.

“Tell me, why did your man do that?” he asked.

Stalin lit his pipe and replied: “He was thinking about the future of his family, too.”[158]

Well, that’s a translation (from Russian), and even in Russian it’s a translation already, because exactly the same joke has been told over the centuries about other brutal potentates, starting with Peter the Great. We can safely assume that this joke form can be preserved together with its point in any human language under two conditions that are only incidentally linguistic ones: the target language must possess an expression for “thinking about your family” that can apply to two slightly different projects (to provide support for your spouse and children, and to protect them from persecution); and that the listener understands or can guess that evil potentates punish disobedient underlings by persecuting their relatives. These two conditions may not be met in all cultures and languages in the world, but they are surely widely available. The “untranslatability of humor” hasn’t survived the very first dig of the spade.

Provided the two general conditions given above can be met, the jump-for-Stalin joke can be rejiggered to fit a wide variety of other historical and geographical locales in the same language or any other, and still be the same joke. There are very many transportable, rewritable joke patterns of that kind—including those politically incorrect ethnic disparagements of near neighbors that you hear in structurally identical form when the French talk about Belgians, Swedes about Finns, the English about the Irish, and so on.