Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Mardrus’s translation was therefore the “literal” version of an essentially oral source. His written word in French stands for the spoken word of Arabic culture. If academic critics insist on having a textual source for the authentic Arabian Nights, which he wrote, well, no problem: “One day, in order to please M. Demombynes, I want to settle once and for all the Arabic text of The Arabian Nights by translating my French translation into Arabic.”

What stands out from this literary squabble is that the idea of what a literal translation consists of is culturally conditioned to a high degree. Mardrus wanted to say that his work was authentic, that it gave the true voice of the Arabic culture that he rightly or wrongly regarded as his special native privilege to possess. His solution to the argument—to manufacture a source to give textual scholars the evidence they demanded—may appear quite nutty, but it is not illogical from Mardrus’s point of view.

What all other Western commentators mean by “literal translation,” on the other hand, is unrelated to authenticity, truthfulness, or plainness of expression. It really refers only to the written form of words, and even more particularly to the representation of words in an alphabetic script. When that technology for the preservation of thought was still relatively new, and for those many centuries when it was not widely shared and was used for a restricted range of needs and pursuits (law, religion, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and, occasionally, the entertainment of the elite), it made sense to attach high prestige to the writtenness of written texts.

But in a world of near-universal literacy, that’s to say, for the last two or three generations, where alphabetic script is used for entirely ordinary tasks (to label packaged food; to advertise underwear; and to write blogs, horror comics, and pulp fiction), the fact that something is worthy of being written down in letters gives it no added value at all. “Literal” isn’t “Word Magic” anymore, it’s just a hangover from the past. The terms of debate about translation and meaning need to be updated, and the long-lasting scrap between literal and free should now be laid to rest.

However, there is one important area where the transposition of meanings at the level of individual words is a valuable, inescapable tool: in school and, more particularly, in foreign-language lessons.

There are many different ways of teaching languages. The Ottomans rounded up youngsters in conquered lands and brought them back as slaves to be trained as dil oğlan, or “language boys,” in Istanbul. Modern direct methods are gentler but rely on the same understanding of how languages are best learned—through total immersion in a bain linguistique, a kind of baptism of the brain.

Throughout the period of learned Latin in Western Europe, immersion was not an option. There was no environment in which everybody spoke Latin as a native tongue, and so the language had to be taught by teachers, in classrooms, through writing. Reprising Roman methods in the teaching of Greek, the European language-teaching tradition was heavily skewed toward the use of translation as the means of imparting written skills in the foreign tongue, and also as a means of assessing students’ progress toward that aim. The teaching of modern European languages in schools and universities got off the ground toward the end of the nineteenth century and borrowed its methods from the translation-based traditions in the teaching of Latin and Greek. It is generally reckoned to have been a disaster. However, if the aim of learning Latin (or French, or German) is to be able to read texts in that language fluently and also perhaps to be able to compose and thus to correspond with other users of Latin or French or German (whose native languages may be quite varied), then translation and composition skills are quite appropriate educational aims.

Translation-based language teaching is no longer in fashion, but its ghost still inhabits a number of misconceptions about what translation is or should be.