Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

This visual representation of linguistic interaction does not, in fact, require A and B to be speaking the same language. As long as both A and B know languages L1 and L2, then the process of understanding speech that is displayed—translating a sound stream into a mental image, then producing a sound stream to represent a mental image for the interlocutor to translate inwardly in turn—would be exactly the same. You come to the same conclusion that language is thought in translation and thought is language translated if you extend the diagram to introduce person C, a translator mediating between A and B speaking in different tongues. C would look exactly the same, with identical lines of transmission between mouth, ear, and brain. Adding translation makes no difference to the model because the model already says that everything is translation already. As a consequence, Saussure’s Course, as well as the bulk of work on language that has taken place in its shadow, pays no attention to translation between languages at all.

I don’t know whether language is possible without thought—on the face of it, it must be, since so many people speak without thinking—and I wouldn’t dare contribute to the unending argument about whether thought is possible without words. The sole contribution I feel confident of making is to say that assimilating all uses of language to translation on the grounds that all speech is a mental translation of thought seriously diminishes our capacity to understand what the practice of translation between languages is about.

To avoid such objections, some scholars use the term transcoding to refer to the transformation of work in one medium into an altogether different thing (a play into a movie, a musical into a film, but most often a novel into anything else). It’s a tactic that has even more damaging effects, since it leads people into thinking that all expressions can be treated as instances of some kind of code. Codes are clever and useful things, but as early adventures in machine translation proved without appeal, languages don’t behave like codes at all. Turning a play into a movie has not the slightest analogy to or connection with turning a coded message into another code, and to call it transcoding is to use a figure of speech based on not bothering to think what you might mean by “code.”[173]

The fellows of Oxford colleges inspect the properties the colleges own in various parts of the country by annual outings when (in principle if not in fact) they process around the perimeter. It’s called “beating the bounds,” and that’s what we’ve now done with translation.

One of its sides is as unbounded as the line of a shore—tides rise and fall, and coasts can change shape. But other boundaries are clearly marked. Translation does not extend in every direction. Its own field is quite large enough.

THIRTY Under Fire: Sniping at Translation

By always saying some other thing a second time, and saying it in a different way, an act of translation inevitably makes the new utterance your own. A journalist rephrasing an agency wire, a lawyer-linguist readjusting the expression of an opinion given by a judge at the European Court of Justice, a writer putting Pushkin into English verse or prose—translators of these and all other kinds possess the outcome of their work in a personal way. Translation cannot but be, in some measure, an appropriation of the source.

Possession, appropriation, making something your own—these are words from the language of the passions. What then of desire and its natural companions, jealousy and hurt?

It’s a curious fact that much translation commentary in Western languages contains unmistakable signs of anger and hurt. Schoolmasters, book critics, even theorists routinely disparage other translators—bad translators, “servile,” “mechanical,” second-rate translators—with a range of insults that could easily be thrown about in a lovers’ tiff. You have a tin ear! You write dull, wooden, clunky prose! You have taken one liberty too many! What makes you think such license is allowed? What you have done, young man, is called betrayal! Ignoramus! Cheat! Commoner! Thief!

In 1680, John Dryden, in his thoughtful translator’s preface to Ovid’s Epistles, cast anathema on a rival translator, Spence, for having replaced “the fine raillery and Attic salt of Lucian” with the “gross expressions of Billingsgate.”[174] How uncouth!

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer denigrated those “people of limited intellectual abilities” who “use only worn-out patterns of speech in their own language, which they put together so awkwardly that one realizes how imperfectly they understand the meaning of what they are saying … so that [their translations are] not much more than mindless parrotry.”[175] Oafs!