Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

English-language translations of French critical theory from the 1960s to the 1990s, for example, have made abstract discourse about literature in English sound much more like French than it ever did before. In the reverse direction, the language of celebrity journalism in French has been quite transformed by the mass import of English-language styles: la presse people (pronounced pi-pol) exhibits unmistakable signs of what is now denounced as the homogenization of tongues.

It’s not just a matter of vocabulary. A small but quite profound change in the way dialogue is introduced in Swedish narrative can be traced back to its source in translations of English-language novels.[112] Constructions of the following type are ten a penny in modern English fiction of all kinds:

1. “Don’t try,” she said with disdain.

2. “It doesn’t matter,” he said calmly.

3. “And now you must go to sleep,” he said in a tone that was friendly but authoritative.

4. “Get out,” said Frank abruptly.

The grammar of Swedish does not make this kind of construction impossible. However, placing a verb of saying together with a modifier (“with disdain,” “calmly,” “abruptly”) after direct speech is fairly unusual in Swedish novel-writing style. In a representative corpus of thirty novels written originally in Swedish, the construction occurs 64 times, but in a parallel corpus of about the same size consisting of novels translated into Swedish from English, it occurs 484 times. This “fingerprint” of English—of one of the English novel’s habitual “dialogue props”—has now been integrated into original writing in Swedish, where it is characteristic not of literary fiction in general but of detective fiction in particular. It’s one of those small yet significant merg-ings of language and style that are often attacked as unintended results of globalization. But Swedish detective fiction has had sweet revenge. Its language may have been infiltrated by an English-language device for the presentation of dialogue, but hard-boiled Swedish crime fiction by Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson has now conquered the world’s bestseller lists.

Merging of another kind has been vigorously proposed by the American lawyer Preston Torbert. In his work for U.S. companies doing business in China, he has had to deal with hundreds of contracts that had to be written in two languages—English and Chinese—and have equal validity and force in two jurisdictions. It’s a tall order because their legal traditions have grown up in isolation over many centuries and don’t have many matching terms.[113]

One difficulty arises from what is called the “class presumption” in American law. If a contract says that one of its clauses applies to “any house, apartment, cottage, or other building” on some piece of land, for example, that “other building” means, by the force of the class presumption, only another building of the class constituted by “house, apartment, cottage”—that is to say, a residential building. This construction of the sentence is contrary to English usage in a nonlegal context, where “other building” may plausibly refer to a factory, a space station, or a folly.

Chinese does not have a term for “class presumption,” and its legal culture does not allow for it, either. If the restriction expressed in English is translated without additional modification, the Chinese characters for other building refer equally plausibly to a factory or a workshop as to a residential building, a meaning that the “class presumption” of American legal English specifically excludes. You could, of course, insert additional Chinese characters to say “or any other similar building,” “or any other building of the same class,” “or any other residential construction.” But if it came to a dispute in court, a smart lawyer might be able to claim that the two versions of the contract were not exactly equivalent, since the English contains no words that correspond to the added characters.

The solution proposed by Torbert is to draft the English in such a way that its Chinese translation is not a problem—that is to say, to modify the source-language text to make it better suited to translation into the target language. Moreover, such a change would make American legalese less arcane, which is of benefit to everybody. The solution is so simple that it makes you wonder why American contracts have not always said “house, apartment, cottage, or other similar building.” Torbert’s answer is that it is because legal drafters have not had Chinese to help them until now. Chinese can teach English-language lawyers how to say what they mean.