Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Tok Pisin uses na long bel belong, literally “in belly of them,” to express “in their hearts” or “in their minds,” and in the Nupela Testamen this phrase stands together with tingting, “think,” to express the fact that the teachers of the law “thought” something without saying so. The Bosavi oral translators couldn’t say anything quite so ungrounded in evidence. One recorded version has Jesus knowing by direct visual evidence what the men of law were thinking—the evidential suffix -lo: b is added to the verb for “think.” Also, it adds a tag, a: la: sa: lab, to the whole line, meaning something like “it says,” or at any rate grounding the source of the knowledge not in the actual speaker but in some external authority. But versions varied among different preachers and occasions quite considerably, until a formal borrowing (a syntactic calque) from Tok Pisin became accepted as a new way of referring to “inner thought,” thought not evidenced by words spoken aloud: kufa, literally, “of belly,” prefixed to the verb for “think.” The effort of translation has altered the language of Bosavi, and with it, a whole mental world. “Private thoughts” are now “belly-think” in Bosavi, or, to put it the other way around, thanks to frontline and improvised language mediation, what a speaker of Bosavi can now do with his belly has undergone a huge change.

Changes brought about in the life of the Bosavi by the missionary effort obviously go far beyond the grammar and vocabulary of their language. However, the change in the way speakers of Bosavi can now conceptualize and refer to “inner life” is not only an effect of conversion to Christianity but also a direct impact of translation—the translation of the gospels from Tok Pisin into the Bosavi tongue.

Most commentaries on the effects of translation on receiving cultures of the remote or recent past use words such as enrich, extend, and improve to describe how the target was hit. But when we can see and hear it happening in our own present time, quite other metaphors crop up: distort, mangle, and homogenize come to mind. The role of evidentials in Bosavi grammar has been irreparably diminished by the improvised calques from Tok Pisin that provide a way of talking about things that have no evidential status at all. From some points of view that has mangled a unique and irreplaceable mental world. Similarly, we could say that the mass import of English-style celebrity gossip into French media has produced a stylistic monstrosity that cheapens the language itself. However, in other times and places, much greater lexical and stylistic changes of the same nature have given rise not to lamentation but to feelings of the opposite kind. For example, Japanese translators imported many scientific terms from European languages in the late nineteenth century, and most users of those new terms considered their language had been enriched by them. Similarly, in the fourth to eighth centuries C.E., Syriac (a Semitic language closely related to Aramaic) is said to have flowered in the hands of Severus Sebokht, a bishop, scholar, and translator who imported quantities of Greek words and expressions together with the mathematical, medical, and astronomical knowledge of the ancient Greeks that the Latin West had ignored (and would not rediscover for centuries, until Arabic translations of those Syriac translations of Greek science were translated once again in the middle of the twelfth century C.E., in Toledo [Spain], by Gerard of Cremona, into Latin, for wider distribution throughout Europe).[115]

The Christian fundamentalists who converted the Bosavi people may indeed believe they enriched the language of the souls they have saved; and I suppose there may have been Syrian naysayers all those years ago who thought the mass import of Greek terms had wrecked their own ancient tongue. But the fact is that attitudes toward language change induced or accelerated by translation are not motivated exclusively by feelings about language or about translation. They arise from deeply seated and far less tractable ideas.

The first of these is the place you think your language ought to occupy in the hierarchy of translation tongues. For many people, especially those caught in the mind-set of a monolingual European nation-state, this is a sensitive topic; because the imagined rank of a language often conflicts with reality, this can give rise to collective hypocrisy and spite. French people who look down on the use of English words that they nonetheless import by the bucketload are in this kind of plight. They are not alone.