Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.[38]

Nowadays the expression “colorless green ideas” could perhaps refer to the topics of negotiation at the Copenhagen Climate Summit of December 2009; to say that they “slept furiously” may be no more than to name the paltry outcome of the conference. The point of this is not just to say that people play with language and often make mincemeat of authoritative generalizations about it. It is this: no grammatical sentence in any language can be constructed such that it can never have a context of utterance in which it is meaningful. That also means that everything that can be said or written—even nonsense—can (at some time or another) be translated. Verdi idee senza colore dormono furiosamente.

To translate utterances that perform a conventional action by the fact of being uttered—greeting, ordering, commanding, and so on—requires the target language to possess parallel conventions about things you can do with words. But there are significant differences between cultures and languages in how people do things with words. A promise may be a promise the world over, but the conditions of felicity, as well as the forms of language that are appropriate to the making of a promise, may vary greatly between, for example, Japan and the United States. It’s not the linguistic meaning of “I promise, cross my heart and hope to die” that needs to be translated if the aim is to make a similar commitment in the target language. Once again, the expression uttered (in speech or writing) is not the sole or even the primary object of translation when the force of an utterance is what matters, as it always does.

These considerations don’t affect just the set of verbs that Austin called performatives. The range of things you can do with words goes far beyond the promising, warning, knighting, naming, and so on that attracted the philosopher’s attention, and it would be better to see those not-so-special verbs of English as only one way of grasping a more general aspect of language use. When I say “How are you?” to an acquaintance I run across, I am performing the social convention of greeting with an utterance that is conventionally attached to it. Whether I use a performative verb (as in “Salaam, your highness, I greet you most humbly”) or not (as in “Hi!”), the expression that constitutes the action of greeting has a meaning only by virtue of the kind of action I am performing with it. “Greeting” could be thought of as a kind or register or genre of language use. It’s not hard to see that translating “How are you?” into any other language is to translate the convention of greeting, not to translate the individual items how, are, and you. But what is widely understood as appropriate for the kind of language use that tourist phrase books always include is no less appropriate in many other translation contexts. A knitting pattern that does not follow target-language conventions for knitting patterns is completely useless, just as a translated threat of retribution that does not conform to the conventions of threatening in the target culture is not a threat, or a translation.