Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

• they can take one part of the expression and replace it with a dummy, an abbreviation, a short form, or nothing at all (contraction)

• they can take one part of the expression and move it to a different position, rearranging the other words in appropriate ways (topic shift)

• they can use the relevant tool from their language kit to make one part of the expression stand out as more important than the others (change of emphasis)

• they can add expressions that relate to facts or states or opinions implicit in the original in order to clarify what they (or their interlocutor) just said (clarification)

• but if they try to repeat exactly what has been said with the same tone, pitch, words, forms, and structures, they do not succeed (unless they are also gifted, sharp-eared, and well-trained impersonators, and probably employed in the music hall)

Translators do exactly the same things when they repeat the words of another, and the fact that their “afterspeech” is in what we call another tongue makes no difference at all to the range of discursive devices they use.

But they use these tools to support an overriding aim that is not necessarily relevant to voluntary or inadvertent repetition in interaction in the same tongue. They seek to preserve the force of the original utterance—not only the overall meaning of what has been said but the meaning that the saying of it has, and to do so in a way that is appropriate to the specific context in which the second formulation is to be heard or used. They are not trying to change anything—whereas when we repeat something without translating it, we usually intend to make some small or large difference to it.

Here’s a tiny example of the kind of changes translators make in order not to change anything much at all. In the multilingual “in-flight magazine” supplied to travelers on the Eurostar train, a page is devoted to graphics demonstrating the size and achievements of the whole enterprise of high-speed rail through the Channel Tunnel. One of the bubbles features “334.7 km/h,” which is glossed in English as “The record breaking top speed (208 mph) a Eurostar train reached in July 2003 when testing the UK High Speed 1 Line.” It is followed by the following French text:

Le record de vitesse d’un train Eurostar établi en juillet 2003 lors du test d’une ligne TGV en Grande-Bretagne.

The suppression of the “miles per hour” speed in the French translation might be seen as simply conventional—but the obvious reason for its omission is that it is of no relevance to French readers, who do not generally know how far a mile is anyway. More interesting is the French assertion that 208 miles per hour was the top speed of the train doing the test, whereas the English asserts that the train’s top speed broke a record. What record? Well, in Britain, just about every record—no train had ever gone faster on a British track. But it’s not a record for France, where TGVs have exceeded that speed many times. So for the French not to be frankly counterfactual, the translator has to rephrase and recontextualize. However, the real subtlety in the recontextualization is when the “UK High Speed 1 Line” becomes just “a high-speed line in Great Britain” in French. French readers do not need to know the embarrassing fact that Britain still has only one such line, when the French have many, and so they had also better not be told the proper name of a piece of railway engineering that is unique exclusively in British terms. Now linked more closely than ever by a fast train, Britain and France still provide two quite different contexts of use for even the simplest expressions. Translations naturally rephrase the message to adapt it to its alternative context of use.[172]

Literary translators have a less clear idea of the “context of use” of their work than translators of all other kinds. Actually, they don’t know for sure that it will have any end use at all. Many translated works (including many of great merit) sell pitifully small numbers of copies and disappear into a black hole. The only real “client” of a literary translation is an imaginary reader—the reader that each translator invents in his head.

That’s the real reason why, when it comes to the transmission of cultural goods, translators tell themselves they are trying to produce an equivalent effect.

There are two difficulties with this commonly mentioned criterion of translation art: “equivalent” and “effect.”

Translations do have effects. They may make readers laugh or weep or rush to the library to find more books of the same kind. They can even have quite sinister effects, as the following historical anecdote shows.