Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Back-translation of the foreignism “positive researches” into a number of other languages, among them Modern Greek, would produce the same result—that is to say, would allow its meaning to be identified as “empirical investigation.” Without the information that the work in question has been translated from language A, foreignizing translation styles do not themselves allow the reader to identify which foreign language A is.

Foreignizing translation styles bend English into shapes that mirror some limited aspect of the source language, such as word order or sentence structure. But they rely for their foreignizing effect on the reader’s prior knowledge of the approximate shape and sound of the foreign language—in the quoted case of Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak’s translation of Derrida given above, specific items in the vocabulary of the foreign tongue.

Imagine a novel translated from a language such as Hindi, where there are three ways of saying “you”: tu, tum, and ap, corresponding to the intimate, the friendly, and the formal. Alternation among the three forms of address is a significant part of the way the characters of our imaginary novel relate to one another. Could a translator create a linguistic anomaly in English that corresponds to this triple division of “you”? Yes, of course. But would we know that it was a mark of Hindi? Not without a translator’s footnote—because we do not know any Hindi.

Since the majority of translations take place between languages spoken by communities that have quite a lot to do with each other, culturally, economically, or politically, formal and lexical borrowings from the source have often been used to represent the foreignness—and the prestige—of texts imported from abroad. In the sixteenth century, for example, many works of literature and philosophy were brought from Italian into French, just as many Italian craftsmen were imported to beautify palaces and castles across the land. The translators of that era wrote French with a wealth of Italian words and turns of phrase, because they felt that their readers either did or really should know the words and phrases they imported. More than that: they thought French would be positively improved by being made a little more like Italian. And in fact the process of making French more like Italian has continued down to the present day. The caban (pea jacket) and the caleçon (underpants) in your closet and, if you’re lucky, the cantaloup and the caviar in your refrigerator, like a huge number of other ordinary, scholarly, refined, and delicious things, are all named in French by words taken from Italian, and for the majority of them the taking was first done by translators.[30]

A similar kind of lexical enrichment took place in the nineteenth century when German-speaking peoples sought to constitute themselves as a distinct and increasingly unified nation. German translators consciously imported a quantity of words from Greek, French, and English not only to make European classics accessible to speakers of German but also to improve the German language by extending its range of vocabulary. The issue as they saw it was this: French and English were international languages already, propped up by powerful states. That was why nonnative speakers learned French (and, to a lesser extent, English). How could German ever be the vehicle of a powerful state unless nonnatives learned to read it? And why should they learn to read it unless it could easily convey the meanings that arise in the transnational cultures held to represent the riches of European civilization?

In today’s world, translators into “small” languages also often see their task as defending or else improving their own tongues—or both at the same time. Here’s a letter I received just the other day from a translator in Tartu:

My mother language, Estonian, is spoken by about a million people. Nevertheless I am convinced that Life A User’s Manual and my language mutually deserve each other. Translating Perec I want to prove that Estonian is rich and flexible enough to face the complications that a work of this kind brings along.