Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

This costly double dose of oral interpreting is rare, but not solely because it is expensive. Outside of private head-of-state encounters, almost all speech by politicians, diplomats, and public figures begins and ends its life on the page. Delegates at the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council, for example, read from prepared texts, and often the interpreters translating the speech simultaneously into (any five out of) English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic have the original text in front of them. All six language versions are recorded on tape and these recordings are used by the UN Documentation Division to produce the “Verbatim,” the official written record of what was said. This allows translation errors to be trapped and corrected, but, more significantly, it allows delegates to correct what they actually said. The “Verbatim,” the final official repository of UN proceedings, is not actually verbatim at all—it’s a rewritten version of a written text that passed through an untrusted oral stage in the interim. In large areas of national and international affairs, speech has now become a secondary medium, a by-product of writing. But this is a very recent state of affairs. Our thoughts and feelings about language and translation, together with many of the things we say about it, have much older sources.

Between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Ottoman Empire held in its not always steady sway mostly illiterate populations speaking a great number of different languages. Throughout these five centuries, the administration of this vast and elaborate state was carried out in Ottoman Turkish—a partly artificial hybrid of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic vocabulary held together by Turkish grammar, with some Persian syntax added on, written in an adapted Arabic script that was not particularly well suited to it. It was the official language of the court at Istanbul, but outside the circle of imperial grandees and civil servants Ottoman Turkish did not have many speakers. Its written form was of course used for the state’s labyrinthine archives—by some accounts, the Ottomans even kept records of people’s dreams.[67] However, one characteristic of Ottoman society was a paranoid suspicion of forgery, and as a result writing was not used for all purposes of state. Strong residues of orality—of a trust in personal speech over the impersonal technology of writing—affected the management of public affairs and, most especially, its use of translators.

Ottoman society, like those of the Greeks and the Romans, made slaves of a significant proportion of its subjects, and it recruited translators from among the young boys sent back from the provinces to Istanbul as obligatory payment for the protection the empire provided. Most of these enforced bilinguals served the internal needs of the empire, since they spoke one of its regional languages and received an education in Ottoman Turkish. Its external translation needs for trade, war, and diplomacy were served mostly by other means.

The Ottomans were Muslims and could therefore communicate with many of the peoples on the southern and eastern borders of the empire in Arabic, which was either a native or a vehicular tongue over a wide area. But contact with Western Europe was not so easy. In no region of the empire were any of the Western languages taught. Initially, therefore, the training of cadres who could handle relations with the West was farmed out to the Republic of Venice, which had long-standing ties with many parts of the Mediterranean that had fallen into Ottoman hands.

From the late fifteenth century on, Venice dispatched plenipotentiaries on two-year postings to Istanbul to run the bailo, which was something like a translator’s school. It recruited adolescent apprentices called “language boys”—giovani di lingua, a translation of the Turkish dil oğlan—across the Venetian and Ottoman territories and turned them into loyal, Italian-speaking Venetian subjects capable of talking to the Turks. Many of the recruits came from the Greek-speaking Roman Catholic community that had settled in a quarter of Istanbul called Pera, or Phanari in Greek, and Phanariots eventually became a hereditary “translation caste” within the stratified world of Ottoman society. By the early seventeenth century, the whole business of translation at the highest levels of the Ottoman state was in the hands of closely linked families of Phanariots, whose status was partly protected by the fact that many of them also held Venetian citizenship by inheritance. But they did not translate very much into or out of Greek: they were trained to translate Ottoman Turkish into Italian, and sometimes Arabic as well. They became richly rewarded grandees. Based in Istanbul, they sent their sons to Italian universities before bringing them back to continue the family trade.[68]