Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Is this a translation? Well, it might be if instead of “translation” we said “mouthing” or “after-speaking.” Sound translation (also called homophonic translation), of which this is an example, may have few practical uses at present, but in historical terms it is one of the main ways in which our vocabulary has grown. English speakers have had contact over the centuries with dozens of other cultures, have listened to the words that they used, then said them again using the sound system of English, creating new words such as bungalow, cocoa, tomato, potato, and so on. Similarly, speakers of other languages having fruitful commercial and cultural contact with English-speaking peoples currently sound-translate all sorts of English terms, producing new words in Chinese ( kù, “fashionable”), French (le footing, “jogging”), Japanese (smāto, “svelte”), German (Handy, “mobile phone”), and so forth that English speakers understand imperfectly or not at all.

Loanwords (and, more generally, the leakage of vocabulary, syntax, and sounds between languages whose speakers are in contact with one another) are not usually thought of as relevant to the study of translation. Indeed, from a conventional point of view the probably universal device of repeating with approximation what you do not properly understand is the opposite of translation—which is to say something else in the place of what you do understand. On the other hand, linguistic borrowing between cultures in contact with one another is a fundamental fact of intercultural communication—and that is the very field of translation.

In reality, professional translators have frequent recourse to sound translation. The translator of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s unprecedented exposé of the Soviet gulag experience, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, had to decide what to say to refer to the inmates of the camps, who were called, and also called themselves, (singular: , from заключенный, “locked up”) in Russian. He decided to call them zeks. Zeks is not a possible word of Russian. It is a sound translation of a Russian stem, altered in a way that marks it as an English plural. If translation is just the transfer of meaning from one language to another, then zeks is not a translation at all, and it is not English, either. But that clearly will not do. Translation involves many things that don’t fit common definitions. It is much more interesting to expand our understanding of translation than to reject the work of Solzhenitsyn’s translator on the grounds that it is incompatible with the dictionary. That would be to throw out the baby instead of the bathwater.

FOUR Things People Say About Translation

It’s a well-known fact that a translation is no substitute for the original.

It’s also perfectly obvious that this is wrong. Translations are substitutes for original texts. You use them in the place of a work written in a language you cannot read with ease.

The claim that a translation is no substitute for an original is not the only piece of folk wisdom that isn’t true. We happily utter sayings such as “crime doesn’t pay” or “it never rains but it pours” or “the truth will out” that fly in the face of the evidence—Russian mafiosi basking on the French Riviera, British drizzle, and family secrets that never get out. Adages of this sort don’t have to be true to be useful. Typically, they serve to warn, console, or encourage other people in particular circumstances, not to establish a theory of justice, a weather forecasting system, or forensic science. That’s why saying a translation is no substitute for the original misleads only those who take it to be a well-known fact. It’s truly astounding how many people fall into the trap.

When you say “crime doesn’t pay” to a teenager caught filching a DVD from a market stall, it does not matter whether you believe this to be true or not. You are trying to steer the young person toward acceptance of the eighth commandment and using a conventional phrase in the service of that moral aim.

Similarly, a schoolteacher who has just caught his students reading The Outsider in English when they were supposed to be preparing their lessons by reading Camus’s novel in French may well admonish them by saying in an authoritative tone of voice, “A translation is no substitute for the original!” The students know it’s not true because they have just been caught using the translation as a substitute for the original. But they also understand that the teacher used a piece of folk wisdom to say something else that really is true—that only by reading more French will they improve their language skills. The teacher means to spur them into greater assiduity, not to speak the truth about translation.