Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Douglas Hofstadter once asked, “How do you say ‘jazzercise’ in Aramaic?” He meant it as a mind game, not as a question about what the small group of Aramaic speakers in contemporary Jerusalem would say if they joined a gym and found themselves doing aerobics to a Dave Brubeck track. There is no reason why speakers in the ancient world should have had a word for a thing they did not have, but speakers of Aramaic or any other language today would have to choose one of three ways of making up a word for jazzercise. They might import the word as it stands, making whatever modifications in form that are needed to allow it to function in a sentence. Or they might take two Aramaic words with meanings analogous to “syncopated music” and “exercise” and run them together to make a new compound in imitation of the English. Finally, they might take an existing Aramaic word and expand its use to include musical stretch-and-jump. Those are the three ways in which new things can be represented in any receiving language—by a foreignism (the first option), a calque (second option), or a semantic expansion. Each of them changes the target language by one item, with possible repercussions over time on the use and form of other words. But cultural substitution would simply put some other, more or less analogous activity current in the world of Aramaic speakers in the place of “jazzercising.”

That’s what Ruyl did to Malay: he didn’t invent a new word for a new thing (“fig”), he used an existing word to say something else (“banana”). It worked only because there are no figs on Sumatra. When the referent of a term is available, such as a musical gym in an Aramaic-speaking quarter of Tel Aviv, cultural substitution can’t work as a way of translating an exotic term.

Imagine: Sir Walter Raleigh presents Queen Elizabeth I with an amazing root vegetable he’s brought back from the New World and beseeches Her Majesty to reward him for the discovery of … the turnip. It wouldn’t have worked because it was not a turnip. When you have a potato in your hand, you can’t call it by the name of anything that you could be holding in your other hand. “Cultural substitution” is a naming and translation device that is suited exclusively to things that aren’t there. You can’t just expand the meaning of turnip by using it to name things that aren’t turnips. Similarly, when Ruyl wrote pisang for “fig,” he did not expand the meaning of the Malay term. No new class of tree suddenly arose that included both bananas and figs. What this kind of cultural substitution really says is that you can’t really understand, and we’re not going to try to explain. Have a banana instead.

Analogy-based substitutions are frequent in non-European Bible translations. “White as snow” in the Bible text may become “white as a cockatoo’s feathers” in languages spoken in areas where snow has never been seen, or “white as a cotton boll” in some languages of South America. In Asmat, a language spoken in a swampy area of Indonesian Papua where houses are all built on stilts, the parable of the wise builder who builds on stone and the foolish builder who builds on sand turns into a story about a wise builder “who builds a house on stilts made of iron wood … while the foolish builder is the one who builds a house on stilts made of white wood” (white wood being used only for temporary hunting shacks, because it rots quickly).[105]

Nida reports examples of even more extensive cultural transpositions he encountered and approved. In many parts of Africa, he says, casting branches in the path of a chief expresses contempt, whereas in the Gospels it is done to mark Jesus’s return to Jerusalem as a triumph. Similarly, fasting is not easily seen as a form of devotion in many parts of the world—it is more likely to be understood as an insult to God.[106] Revision of the Gospel’s account of Palm Sunday and of the role of fasting in the Old Testament is both absolutely necessary to avoid giving the wrong message to African readers and at the same time impossible without profoundly altering the story being told. Nida’s job was to help produce texts that were functionally equivalent to the Bible considered not as sacred script but as the repository of a sacred story.

Nida also promoted the use of native speakers of indigenous languages as full partners and, wherever possible, as prime movers in Bible translation projects. That’s because reliable judgments about the appropriateness of cultural substitutes are not easily made by L2 speakers. If acceptability is the paramount aim, then L1 speakers are in a much better position to invent and adapt. Their intuitions about acceptability are the ones that count.