Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

However, wording is not what people mean when they call something a literal translation. The so-called literal translation of У меня большой дом is not “At me big house” but “I have a big house.” That’s to say, all that is actually meant by calling something a literal translation is a version that preserves meaning in grammatical forms appropriate to the language of the translation. Octavio Paz was right to say that there is no such thing as a literal translation! It’s just a translation—a plain, ordinary, actual translation of the source. The left-side player in the long and frustrating game of squash between “literal” and “free” doesn’t really exist. It’s just the shadow of another, more ancient world. But shadows can be quite frightening even when you know they don’t exist.

ELEVEN The Issue of Trust: The Long Shadow of Oral Translation

There used to be many good reasons to mistrust translators. War, diplomacy, trade, and exploration are activities where trust is both crucial and difficult to grant—and also the key fields in which translators work. If you don’t know the language of your enemy or your partner, you depend entirely on the people who do—and there’s nothing like dependency to foster resentment and fear.

The user’s mistrust is a big issue in all kinds of translation, but its role ought to be rather different in the two main branches of language work: oral translation and the translation of written texts. Oral mediation—the translation of live speech, straightaway and in situ—has been around for much longer than writing. In all likelihood it’s been a human language skill since the emergence of speech itself, tens if not hundreds of thousands of years ago. For up to 90 percent of its history, translating, alongside language itself, has been an exclusively spoken affair. The inheritance of oral translating affects how we think about translation even now.

Writing transformed and multiplied the uses of language and naturally affected the ways in which it is possible to think and talk about it. We are now so thoroughly accustomed to the existence and use of script that it’s hard to imagine what life is like for someone who does not know how to read or write. It’s harder still to imagine living and speaking in a society in which nobody has an inkling that anything like writing could exist. But those are the circumstances in which translation first emerged, and where it stayed for tens of thousands of years. Indeed, the archaeological evidence that we have of the origins of script suggests that alphabetic writing emerged in multilingual cities and empires in the Middle East, where translation was already of paramount importance.[62]

The fundamental difference between oral cultures and those that have writing is that only in the latter can an utterance be brought to life a second time. In “primary orality,” language is nothing other than speech, and speech vanishes without a trace the moment it is done.[63] Translation likewise. You can check, evaluate, test, or trust a translation only when you have a means of returning to it later on.

This would be of purely antiquarian interest if everything had changed overnight upon the invention of script. But that was obviously not the case. The mental transformation that writing prompted did not happen all at once; in some respects, it did not begin to affect the vast mass of humanity until a few generations ago.[64] Residues of the older oral order persisted for millennia, and persist even now. They affect our feelings and fears about translation quite directly.

A clue to the enduring presence of orality in our now thoroughly typographical world is the way we still use the word word. It does not always mean the hazy and problematic items you find printed as headwords in dictionaries. In fact, in much of our everyday use of language it means something else.

When I “give you my word” that I’ll do the washing-up tonight, I am not giving you a “word” in the dictionary sense. I am making a promise, and grounding your trust in the promise thus made in the fact that the person speaking the promise is me.

“My word” is simply my saying of it. In this usage, word means not a unit of speaking but the act of speech itself. Similarly, when I call a friend “a man of his word,” I make no reference to his using some particular lexical item. I mean to say that whatever my friend undertakes to do by an act of speech is to be taken seriously, because it was he who said it.

In French, the distinction between “word as act” and “word as unit” is made clearer by the general use of parole for the first and mot for the second. In German, too, there is a trace of the fundamental divide in the meaning of the word word in the two different plurals of Wort—Worte for acts of speech and Wörter for entries in a Wörterbuch.