Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

In the summer of 2008, The Wall Street Journal ran a hot story under the headline GOP VEEP PICK ROILS DEMS. To make sense of this you need a lot of knowledge of American political events in the run-up to the last presidential election, including the conventional nicknames of the two main parties, as well as familiarity with the alphabetical games played by editors on night desks in Manhattan. Should we pity the poor translators the world over who needed to reproduce the bare bones of the story in double-quick time? Not really. The meanings of the words in that headline are not important. What’s important is that it works as a headline. Like any headline in the English-language press, GOP VEEP PICK ROILS DEMS is explained by the story that follows it in less compressed language. The task of the translator—if indeed it is the translator, not the editor, who performs this function—is to understand the story first and only then invent an appropriate headline within the language of headlines holding sway in the target culture. “Le choix de Madame Palin comme candidate républicaine à la vice-présidence des États-Unis choque le parti démocrate” conforms quite well to French headline-writing style, for example, and is a plausible counterpart to The Wall Street Journal’s nutshell quip. The original and its translation must conform to the general conventions of headline writing in their respective cultures, because headline writing is just as much a genre—a particular kind of language use restricted to particular contexts—as promising, christening, threatening, and so forth.

How many genres are there? Uncountably many. How do you know what genre a given written sentence is in? Well, you don’t, and that’s the point. No sentence contains all the information you need to translate it. One of the key levels of information that is always missing from a sentence taken simply as a grammatically well-formed string of lexically acceptable words is knowledge of its genre. You can get that only from the context of utterance. Of course, you know what that is in the case of a spoken sentence—you have to be there, in the context, to hear it spoken. You usually know quite a lot in the case of written texts, too. Translators do not usually agree to work on a text without being told first of all whether it is a railway timetable or a poem, a speech at the UN or a fragment of a novel (and few people read such things in their original languages either without being told by the cover sheet, dust jacket, or other peritextual material what kind of thing they are reading). To do their jobs, translators have to know what job they are doing.

Translating something “from cold,” “unseen,” “out of the blue,” or, as some literary scholars would put it, “translating a text in and for itself” isn’t technically impossible. After all, students at some universities are asked to do just that in their final examinations. But it is not an honest job. It can be done only by guessing what the context and genre of the utterance are. Even if you guess right, and even granted that guessing right may well be the sign of wide knowledge and a smart mind, you are still only playing a game.

Many genres have recognizable forms in the majority of languages and cultures: kitchen recipes, fairground hype, greeting people, expressing condolences, pronouncing marriage, court proceedings, the rules of soccer, and haggling can be found almost anywhere on the planet. The linguistic forms through which these genres are conducted vary somewhat, and in some cases vary a great deal, but as long as the translator knows what genre he is translating and is familiar with its forms in the target language, their translation is not a special problem. Problems arise more typically when the users of translation raise objections to the shifts in verbal form that an appropriate translation involves. Translators do not translate Chinese kitchen recipes “into English.” If they are translators, they translate them into kitchen recipes. Similarly, when a film title needs translating, it needs translating into a film title, not an examination answer.