Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

In 1870, Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, released a statement to the press about his sovereign’s negative reaction to a request from the French ambassador that the German royal family should commit itself to never accepting the throne of Spain. The statement also reported that the Kaiser didn’t want to talk to the French ambassador again and had sent him a message to stay away by the hand of the “adjutant of the day”:

Seine Majestät der König hat es darauf abgelehnt, den französischen Botschafter nochmals zu empfangen, und demselben durch den Adjutanten vom Dienst sagen lassen, daß Seine Majestät dem Botschafter nichts weiter mitzuteilen habe.

The “adjutant of the day”—Adjutant vom Dienst—names a high-ranking courtier, an aristocratic aide-de-camp. But it happens to be almost identical to a word of French—adjudant. When Bismarck’s statement was received in Paris it was instantly translated by the Havas news agency service and wired to all newspapers, which reprinted it in the “special extra” that went on sale straightaway. In the Havas version, Adjutant is not translated, but left in its original form. The effect of that one word was enormous. French adjudant means “warrant officer” (“sergeant-major” in Britain). It therefore seemed that the French ambassador had been treated with grievous disrespect by having had a message from the Kaiser taken to him by a messenger of such low rank. The French were outraged. Six days later, they declared war.

It’s likely that the overall effect—the outbreak of war—was what Bismarck intended at that time, but it is implausible that he sought to achieve it by drafting a statement in such a way as to lead to its being misunderstood through the existence of a false cognate of a German word in French. After all, Bismarck didn’t decide to leave Adjutant in German in French translation—the Havas agency did.

In life generally, and in translation in particular, we are not very good at calculating the effects that our words and actions will have.

When translating a crime novel by Fred Vargas, I came across a comically grandiloquent passage of direct speech that recycled a famous line from Victor Hugo. To re-create what I thought would be an equivalent effect of misplaced hyperbole I substituted a barely altered quotation from a speech by Winston Churchill. It didn’t work. A reviewer reprimanded me for inserting Churchillian language where the original had none. Can I blame her for not knowing what motivated the effect that I sought? Of course not. Using “Churchill” for “Hugo” was just an entertaining mind game. You can’t require readers to notice that the switch was supposed to produce an equivalent effect, because there’s no way of assessing whether it does that or not.

A similarly futile submission to the doctrine of equivalent effect can be found among the cans of sound recordings used by Jacques Tati for his Oscar-winning movie, Mon Oncle. Before it was released, Tati conceived the ambition of producing an English-language version himself. He reshot several scenes that included public signage, painting over École, Sortie, and so on with School, Exit, et cetera. It was then pointed out to him that the change of visible language would create confusion as to where the action was really located. His solution to that problem was to change the background music track of the English-language version to make it sound more French, and that’s why the Tati archive contains cans labeled ambiance française pour version anglaise—“French atmospheric music for the English version.” That didn’t work, either. Despite the care with which it was done, My Uncle never had an “equivalent effect” because distributors and audiences loved the French original so much. The English version with its “French effects” ran for a few weeks in a single movie theater in New York and then disappeared for fifty years.