Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Knowing two languages extremely well is generally thought to be the prerequisite for being able to translate, but in numerous domains that is not actually the case. In the translation of poetry, drama, and film subtitles, for example, collaborative translation is the norm. One partner is native in the “source-text language,” or L1, the other is native in the “target language,” or L2; both need competence in a shared language, usually but not necessarily L2. Also, the target-language translator needs to be or to believe he is in expert command of the language of the genre—as a playwright, as a poet, as a skilled compressor of meanings into the very restricted format of subtitles, and so on. Even in the translation of prose fiction, there are celebrated translation teams—Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, for example, who together have produced new English versions of many classic works of Russian literature. A different form of collaborative transmission is involved in my own work with the novels of Ismail Kadare, who writes in Albanian, a language I do not possess beyond phrase-book level. I work from the French translations done by the violinist Tedi Papavrami and then raise my own queries with both Papavrami and Kadare, through the medium of French, which Kadare speaks well enough to discuss allusions, references, questions of style, and so on.

In cultures other than those of Western Europe, the prejudice against translating into a language that is not native is less profound, and in some places it is rejected outright. For many decades, Soviet Russia insisted that the speeches of its UN delegates be interpreted not by native speakers of the other official languages but by Russian speakers who were expert interpreters and translators into Spanish, French, English, Arabic, and Chinese. The translators’ school in Moscow developed a theory—or a cover story—to justify this politically motivated practice, according to which the essential skill of an interpreter is her complete comprehension of the original.[36] Most professionals disagree, regarding unreflecting fluency in the target language as the real key to getting away with the almost unimaginably brain-taxing act of simultaneous interpretation—but for more than forty years the Russian booths at the UN were indeed staffed with what are called “L2 interpreters,” who coped with the job very well.[37]

L2 translation—writing in a language that is not “native”—is also quite widespread for languages that do not belong to the small group of Western tongues with established traditions of teaching one another’s languages in schools and long-standing two-way translation relations. Few “native” writers of English, French, Spanish, or German are fluent readers of Tamil, Tagalog, Farsi, or Wolof, and among them fewer still wish to devote their time to translation. For writers in these and most of the other languages of the world, the only way to get an international hearing is to put the work into a world language learned at school or else through emigration or travel. The effort often backfires. L2 translations from contemporary China and Albania are notoriously dreadful. Many of the sillier examples of translation mistakes in commercial material and tourist signage are visibly produced by L2 translation. But it would be futile to insist that the iron rule of L1 translation be imposed on all intercultural relations in the world without also insisting on its inescapable corollary: that every educational system in the world’s eighty vehicular languages devote significant resources to producing seventy-nine groups of competent L1 translators in each cohort of graduating students. The only alternative to that still-utopian solution would be for speakers of the target languages to become more tolerant and more welcoming of the variants introduced into English, French, German, and so forth by L2 translators working very hard indeed to make themselves understood.

SEVEN Meaning Is No Simple Thing

Whether done by a speaker of L1 or L2, an adequate translation reproduces the meaning of an utterance made in a foreign language.

That sounds straightforward enough. It corresponds entirely to the service that contemporary translators and interpreters claim to provide. But it doesn’t provide an adequate understanding of what translation is, because the meaning of an utterance is not a single thing. Whatever we say or write means in many ways at once. The fact is, utterances have all sorts of “meanings” of different kinds. The meaning of meaning is a daunting topic, but you can’t really study translation if you leave it aside. It may be a philosophical can of worms—but it’s an issue that every translation actually solves.