Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Pronounced eme-bal, it means “language turner.” In classical Latin, too, what translators did was vertere, “to turn” (Greek) expressions into the language of Rome. We still use the same image in English when we ask a lawyer to turn the small print on a contract into something comprehensible, or when a teacher asks a student to turn a sentence into German. Tanimtok, the word for “translation” in Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea, is also made of the same elements, “turn” (tanim) and “talk” (tok).[14] Of course, “turning” is almost as slippery as “carrying across,” but because you can also turn milk into butter, a frog into a prince, and base metal into gold, the history of translation (as well as the status and pay of translators) might have been significantly different in the West had the job always been thought of as a “turning.”

There are two verbs in Finnish that translate translate: one, kääntää, being the same as the Finnish word for “to turn” (as in Latin); the other, suomentaa, meaning “to make Finnish” (just as verdeutschen, “to make German,” is one of the German ways of saying “translate” [into German]). A witty Finnish writer took a German sight-poem by Christian Morgenstern titled “The Fish’s Lullaby” and which looks like this:

Fisches Nachtgesang

and “turned” it into a Finnish poem that looks like this:

Kalan yölaulu

Suom. Reijo Ollinen

The joke is that the (abbreviated) word used at the bottom to state that it has been “translated by Reijo Ollinen” is not the one meaning “to turn” (over) but the one meaning “to Finnishize,” suggesting that all you need to have a fish dream in Finnish is to be turned upside down.[15]

In ancient China, on the other hand, what you were called if you were employed as an official translator depended on which of the empire’s borders you dealt with.

Those in charge of the regions of the east were called ji (the entrusted; transmitters); in the south, xiang (likeness-renderers); in the west, Didi (they who know the Di tribes); and in the north, yí (translators/interpreters).[16]

The division of a translation bureaucracy into geographical parts may sound as if it had been invented by Jorge Luis Borges, but it is not much stranger than our having separate terms such as Sinologist, Arabist, and Africanist for people working at different desks at the State Department. But it seems fairly clear from the source quoted that the use of different names for the offices held by these language people did not give rise to the view that they were each doing something different. That’s to say, before there was anything like a collective noun to describe them, the “northers,” “southers,” “easters,” and “westers” were all understood to be doing the same kind of work.

However, as Buddhism made its way into China by means of translation, the notions connected to the word yí expanded beyond the original definition relating to government positions dealing with the languages of the north. Here, in chronological order, spread over several centuries of classical Chinese civilization, are explanations of the character yí given in word lists and annotations of ancient texts:

1. Those who transmit the words of the tribes in the four directions.

2. To state in an orderly manner and be conversant in the words of the country and those outside the country.

3. To exchange, that is to say, to change and replace the words of one language by another to achieve mutual understanding.

4. To exchange, that is to say, to take what one has in exchange for what one does not have.[17]

The point here is not to engage with ongoing debates among Sinologists about the history and meaning of the sign now pronounced fanyí (an augmentative form of yí), and which serves as the Chinese translation of translation, but simply this: in a culture more ancient than ours that has engaged with the practical and theoretical problems of translation with subtlety and erudition over several millennia, it occurred to no one to gloss translation as “the transfer of meaning from one language to another.”