Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

It’s an indisputable fact about languages that the sets of words that each possesses divide up the features of the world in slightly and sometimes radically different ways. Color terms never match up completely, and it’s always a problem for a French speaker to know what an English speaker means by “brown shoes,” since the footwear in question may be marron, bordeaux, even rouge foncé. The names of fishes and birds often come in nonmatching sets of labyrinthine complexity; similarly, fixed formulae for signing-off letters come in graded levels of politeness and servility that have no possible application outside of the culture in which they exist.

These well-known examples of the “imperfect matching,” or anisomorphism, of languages do not really support the conclusion that translation is impossible. If the translator can see the sky that’s being called blue—either the real one or a representation of it in a painting, for example—then it’s perfectly obvious which Russian color term is appropriate; similarly, if the cheese being bought at the shop is not cottage cheese, the choice of the Russian term is not an issue. If, on the other hand, what’s being translated is a sentence in a novel, then it really doesn’t matter which kind of Russian blue is used to qualify a dress that exists only in the reader’s mental image of it. If the specific shade of blue becomes relevant to some part or level of the story later on, the translator can always go back and adjust the term to fit the later development. The lack of exactly matching terms is not as big a problem for translation as many people think it is.

Pocket dictionaries contain common, frequently used words, and their larger brethren are fattened up with words used less often. Most of those additional words are nouns with relatively precise and sometimes recondite meanings, such as polyester, recitative, or crankset. It’s trivially easy to translate words of that sort into the language of any community that has occasion to refer to synthetic fibers, Italian opera, or bicycle maintenance. Large authoritative dictionaries thus create the curious illusion that most of the words in a language are automatically translatable by slotting in the matching term from the dictionary. But there’s a huge difference between most of the headwords in a dictionary and the words that occur most often in the use of a language. In fact, just two or three thousand items account for the vast majority of word occurrences in all utterances in any language—and they aren’t words like crankset, recitative, or polyester at all.[40]

If translation were a matter of slotting in matching terms, then translation would clearly be impossible for almost everything we say except for our fairly infrequent references to a very large range of specific material things. Conversely, those many people who come up with the false truism that translation is impossible certainly wish that all words were like that. A desire to believe (despite all evidence to the contrary) that words are at bottom the names of things is what makes the translator’s mission seem so impossible.

The idea that a language is a list of names for the things that exist runs through Western thought from the Hebrews and Greeks to the man in the street by way of many distinguished minds. Leonard Bloomfield, a professor of linguistics who dominated the field in the United States for more than twenty-five years, tackled the problem of meaning in the textbook he wrote in the following way. Let us take the word salt. What does it mean? In Bloomfield’s book, the token salt is said to be the label of sodium chloride, more accurately (or at least, more scientifically) designated by the symbol NaCl. But Bloomfield was obviously aware that not many words of a language are amenable to such simple analysis. You can’t get at the meaning of words such as love or anguish in the same way. And so he concludes:

In order to give a scientifically accurate definition of meaning for every form of a language we should have to have a scientifically accurate knowledge of everything in the speaker’s world … [and since this is lacking,] the statement of meanings is the weak point in language study.[41]

Indeed it is, if you go about it that way.