Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

“Turning,” “transmitting,” “speaking after,” “mouthing,” and “exchanging” are not necessarily more revealing or more accurate ways of understanding translation. But if you inherit any of these other ways of naming acts of interlingual communication, you do not even think of defining translation as “the transfer of meaning from one language to another.” That standard English (and French, German, Russian …) definition is simply an extrapolation from the composition of the word that is used to name it. The definition tells us nothing more than the meaning of the word’s etymological roots.

The metaphor of “bearing across” has generated a wide range of words, thoughts, sayings, and banalities that may have no more reality than the idea that translation “transfers meaning” from A to B. Would we have ever thought up the idea of a “language barrier” if our word for translator did not imply something like “truck driver”? Would we have ever asked what it is that a translator “carries across” the “language barrier” if he or she were called a “turner,” “tongue man,” or “exchanger”? Probably not. The common terms of translation studies are metaphorical extensions—elaborations of the metaphor—of the etymological meaning of the term translation itself.

But we cannot escape our own world. We do say translate, and we do think transfer, and because we think transfer, we have to find the complement or object of that verb. And in the mainstream tradition of Western thought about language, only one candidate has ever been thought suitable for the role: meaning.

However, “meaning” is not the only component of an utterance that can in principle and in practice be “turned” into something else. Far from it. Things said are always said in some tone of voice, with some pattern of pitch, in some real context, with some kind of associated body use (gestures, posture, movement) … Written language is always presented in a particular layout, in some font or hand, in some physical medium (poster, book, back panel, or newspaper) … However, most of the dimensions that an utterance necessarily possesses are not often treated as part of the translator’s task. Like so much else, the boundaries of translation are best illuminated by a good joke.

Spanglish is a sentimental comedy film directed by James Brooks that depicts a language situation that is no doubt familiar to many readers of this book and probably as old as the history of human society itself. The heroine is a Mexican single mother who works as a maid for a prosperous American family. She speaks no English—but her ten-year-old daughter does. At a crucial moment, the mother needs to express her thoughts and strong feelings to her employers, so she enlists her daughter to act as translator.[18] The girl is linguistically well equipped to perform the task but has no knowledge of current translation conventions. Instead of just translating the meanings of what her mother says, she replicates with gusto her mother’s theatrical body movements, in a time-lapse pas de deux. Speaking perfect English, she waves her arms, stamps her foot, and raises the volume of her voice and modulates its pitch to imitate her mother’s performance in Spanish. The sketch makes us laugh wholeheartedly. Why? Because only an intelligent but ill-educated child could imagine that’s what translation is—for us.

Despite this, there are ways of reenacting in another language some of the dimensions of an utterance that don’t fall within the rather limited idea of meaning that makes translation less complex than it would otherwise be, but also much less fun. For example, take the sounds—and not the word meanings—of a familiar rhyme:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

and try to say those sounds—not their meanings—in French. Obviously, you can’t do that exactly because French uses a different set of language sounds. But we can re-say them using those French sounds that most nearly approximate the English sounds represented. We can then write them in a way that those approximately equivalent sounds would be written in French if they were the sounds of French words:

Un petit d’un petit
S’étonne aux Halles[19]