Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

There is obviously more to meaning than the meaning of words, and here’s a simple story to show why. Jim is out hiking with friends. He wanders away from the group and finds himself in thick woods. He’s lost his bearings entirely. Then the smell of coffee reaches his nose. What does that mean? It means that camp is not far away. It’s a real and important meaning to Jim—but it has nothing to do with words.

The kind of meaning that things have just by themselves is called symptomatic meaning. Smells, noises, physical sensations, the presence of this or that natural or manufactured object, have symptomatic meanings all the time. In daily life, we pick up a thousand clues of that kind every day but retain only those that endow our world with the meanings we need. In like manner, anything said also has symptomatic meaning from the simple fact of it having been said. If I go into a coffee shop and order an espresso, what does that mean? As a symptom, it means I speak English, that the barista does, too, and so forth. That’s obvious. Most of the time, the symptomatic meaning of an utterance is just too obvious to be noticed. But not always.

The Great Escape, a film made by John Sturges in 1964, tells the almost-true story of a mass breakout from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. The leader of the plot, Squadron Leader Bartlett, has good language skills in French and German and teams up with Flight Lieutenant MacDonald, who has only English, to get from the tunnel exit to the Channel coast. Camouflaged as a pair of French businessmen, they are in line to board a bus that will take them farther on. There’s a security check. Bartlett bluffs his way through in very plausible French and German. He has already begun to get inside the bus when the canny policeman wishes the pair of them “Good luck”—in English. MacDonald, still on the step, instinctively turns around, smiles, and blurts out, “Thank you”—and that’s the end of his great escape. It’s not the linguistic meanings of the policeman’s expression or MacDonald’s response that catch the fugitives out but the symptomatic meaning of the language used.

It is not possible to reproduce the symptomatic meaning of the use of a given language in a language other than the one being used. You can’t use Finnish, for example, to re-create the force of “speaking in English when escaping from a German prison camp.” In the French-language version of the film, “good luck” and “thank you” stay in English—French audiences are expected to recognize the sounds of English and to know the symptomatic meaning of using English in wartime Germany. But in versions intended for audiences for whom spoken English, French, and German just have the sound of “Average West European,” the overall meaning of the sequence can’t be saved by not translating the spoken sentences (as in French) or by translating them, since the use of any language other than English would miss the point. Some other layer or channel of communication has to be added, such as a subtitle or a surtitle. The supplementary stream would give a metalinguistic description of the utterance, such as “The German policeman is speaking English,” or “The authorities use the native language of the fugitive, who foolishly replies in like manner.” Would that count as translation? It surely must, since its purpose and real effect is to provide rapid access to the meaning of a work in a foreign language. But it doesn’t fit the simple definition of translation given at the start of this chapter. The subtitle doesn’t reproduce the meaning of the utterance made in another tongue. It just gives you the information you need to grasp not so much what is actually said but what is going on in the saying of it.

Understanding anything always involves relating what is said (MacDonald’s “Thank you”) to the meaning of its having been said. That’s the basic framework of all acts of communication. The trouble is that the relationship of what’s been said to what the saying of it means is unstable, and often extremely murky. After all, the English fugitive would have been caught out in exactly the same way whatever he had said in reply to the German policeman’s “Good luck!” if he had said it in English. In that specific context, “Thank you,” “Get lost!” and “You’re a real gentleman” could be said to have the same meaning, and you could prove that outrageous assertion by showing that they would have to have identical subtitles in Chinese.