Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Translation UP is toward a language of greater prestige than the source. The prestige may be the fruit of ancient tradition—as it was when Akkadian was translated into Sumerian in the Assyrian era, for example, or when translation into Latin was used to spread news of Marco Polo’s adventures far and wide (see here). At other times UP may be toward a language with a larger readership—typically, when then the target tongue is used, like French in nineteenth-century Russia, as a vehicle of intercultural communication. It may also simply be the language of the conquerors, or of a people with greater economic power, such as Russian in the Central Asian lands in the period of the U.S.S.R. Prestige can be located in a language also because it is the preferred vehicle of religious truths. Arabic, Latin, and Sanskrit, among others, have played this role at different times.

Translation DOWN is toward a vernacular with a smaller audience than the source, or toward one with less cultural, economic, or religious prestige, or one not used as a vehicular tongue. Translation from German into Hungarian during the dual kingdom of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, was DOWN, as is translation from English nowadays into any other tongue.

The rank order of languages when seen as pairs is extremely hard for any individual act of translation to shift, but it is not stable over long periods of time. Sumerian, Greek, Syriac, Latin, English, and French, to take obvious examples, have seen their places in the pecking order change dramatically over the centuries. In addition, the ranking is often not all-encompassing. In specific fields, the relationship can be reversed or substantially modified. The standing of German as the language of a prestigious philosophical tradition means that shifting Kant, Hegel, or Heidegger into English (or French) is usually handled by translators as if they were translating DOWN; the translations of French novels into English in the nineteenth century exhibited the most obvious signs of that same direction of travel.

What distinguishes translating UP from translating DOWN is this: translations toward the more general and more prestigious tongue are characteristically highly adaptive, erasing most of the traces of the text’s foreign origin; whereas translations DOWN tend to leave a visible residue of the source, because in those circumstances foreignness itself carries prestige. When Marcel Duhamel launched the Série Noire crime-fiction imprint in Paris just after the Second World War, for example, he ensured that the translations of the American novels he aimed to make popular in France used plenty of Americanisms in French. He went further: he insisted that his French-language authors (who provided more than half the texts) adopt American-sounding pseudonyms to deceive readers into thinking they were getting the real thing.

However, the complexity and contradictions of language hierarchies are most richly illustrated by the history of Bible translation—in the West, to begin with, but subsequently worldwide.

Bible translation got off to a slow start. The first foreign-language version of the Jewish Torah was the Septuagint, written in koiné Greek around 236 B.C.E. (see here). Other Greek-language versions followed, but it was not until shortly before the start of the Christian era that it came into Latin, around the same time that the Jews themselves began writing down the oral translations they had long practiced to make their holy texts accessible in Aramaic. Five centuries later there were still only eleven languages possessing versions of the Old and New Testaments (Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Old Gothic, Ge’ez, and Persian); and five more centuries were needed for the total to grow to nineteen, around the end of the first millennium. By the time printing was invented in the late fifteenth century, there were maybe fifty; by 1600 there were sixty-one, by 1700 there were seventy-four, and by 1800 there were eighty-one. A remarkable number, admittedly, but small change compared to what happened thereafter. In the course of the nineteenth century, more than five new languages were added every year, bringing the total to 620 by the turn of the twentieth century. Then things really began to shift. On average, one new Bible translation was completed every month between 1900 and 1999, and so, by the year 2000, the number of languages possessing all or part of the Old and New Testaments in translation shot up to 2,403.[102]

Despite its roots in ancient and medieval times, in quantitative terms Bible translation is a preponderantly twentieth-century affair. Throughout many decades of that era, much of it was overseen by one man, Eugene Nida, who has long been the most respected authority on Bible translation in the world.