Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

It’s Complicated is a romantic comedy starring Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep, playing characters who have a romantic fling in sun-drenched Santa Barbara despite having been divorced for some years. The complications alluded to in the title include Baldwin’s slinky and suspicious young wife, her five-year-old son with uncannily acute ears, as well as the three children of the refound lovers’ original marriage, now aged between eighteen and twenty-five. Can the two parents really get back together again? As Baldwin says in his closing lines, in a sentimental scene on the swing seat in the front garden: “It’s complicated.” As a sentence abstracted from any context of utterance, “It’s complicated” can be adequately represented in French by C’est compliqué. That would get full marks in a school quiz.

In the context of utterance as it occurs in the film, Baldwin’s resigned, evasive, and inconclusive “It’s complicated” can also be plausibly rendered in French by the same sentence: C’est compliqué. But the French release of the movie itself is not titled C’est compliqué. The distributors preferred to call it Pas si simple! (“Not so simple!”).

It’s not that the meaning is very different. Nor is it because the context of utterance alone changes the meaning: film titles, by virtue of being titles, have, in a sense, no context at all. Titles of new works announce and constitute the context in which the work’s meaning is to be construed. Title making, in other words, is a particular use of language—a genre. As in any other genre, a translated title counts as a translation only if it performs its proper function—that is to say, if it works as a title in the conventions of title making that hold sway in the target language. That’s no different from saying that the most important thing about the translation of a compliment is that it fulfills the function of the kind of language behavior that we call a compliment.

In languages and societies as close as French and English, it’s often the case that sentences having much the same shape and similar verbal content in the two languages fulfill the same genre functions as well. But not always. The task of the translator is to know when to step outside.

In contemporary spoken French, compliqué has connotations that the English complicated does not. Its sense in some contexts may verge on “oversophisticated” and “perverse.” A more likely way of suspending a decision, of getting off a hook, of lamenting the unstraightforwardness of life, is to say: It’s not so simple. Of course, you could say that in English, too, in the right context. But could it be a film title? “Not so simple!” doesn’t work nearly as well, and that’s no doubt why the original producers of the movie didn’t use it. In French it works just fine and avoids the unwanted additional suggestions of perversity that cloud C’est compliqué. Judgments like these don’t only call for “native-speaker competence” in the translator. They rely on profound familiarity with the genre.

What it comes down to is this: written and spoken expressions in any language don’t have a meaning just like that, on their own, in themselves. Translation represents the meaning that an utterance has, and in that sense translation is a pretty good way of finding out what the expression used in it may mean. In fact, the only way of being sure whether an utterance has any meaning at all is to get someone to translate it for you.

EIGHT Words Are Even Worse

In Russian, there are two words, голубой and синий, that mean “blue,” but they do not have the same meaning. The first is used for light or pale blue hues, the second for darker, navy or ultramarine shades. So both can be translated into English, subject to the addition of words that specify the quality of blueness involved. But you can’t translate plain English blue back into Russian, because whatever you say—whichever of the two adjectives you use—you can’t avoid saying more than the English said. The conventions that hold sway among publishers and the general public do not allow translators to add something that is not in the original text. So if you accept those terms of the trade, you could quickly arrive with impeccable logic at the conclusion that translation is completely impossible.

Observations of this kind have been used by many eminent scholars to put translation outside of the field of serious thought. Roman Jakobson, a major figure in the history of linguistics, pointed out that сыр, the Russian word for “cheese,” cannot be used to refer to cottage cheese, which has another name, творог, in Russian. As he puts it, “the English word ‘cheese’ cannot be completely identified with its Russian heteronym.”[39] As a result, there is no fully adequate Russian translation of something as apparently simple as the word cheese.