Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The second major constituent of attitudes toward language change propelled by translations is the value you place on what it is that the new vocabulary brings. Translation impacts on a receiving language can’t really be separated from the impact that the translated material has. At different times, translations may flood receiving cultures with Hollywood glitz, shipbuilding techniques, religious salvation, saucy stories about Marie Antoinette—just about anything that’s ever been thought worth writing down. The value you attach to the linguistic traces of such flows is subordinate to your need or desire for the material that the translations in question make available for the first time.

The damage done to other cultures by lopsided translation flows is no different from the benefits brought to receiving languages by lopsided translation flows. The real damage and the real benefits lie not in translation as such, or in its impacts on receiving languages, but in the nature of the works that translation spreads.

SEVENTEEN The Third Code: Translation as a Dialect

What language do you speak? That sounds like a merely factual inquiry with an uncomplicated answer, whatever it is. But as I was reading an American newspaper during the financial crisis of 2008, I learned that the U.S. treasury secretary was about to unveil the big megillah to put an end to the tsunami that was rocking Wall Street at the time. What language was that? Well, English—but only sort of. It was also, marginally, in Hebrew (mediated by Yiddish) and in Japanese, too. I can translate it into French—M. Paulson s’apprête à dévoiler la bonne méthode pour calmer la tourmente des marchés—but that doesn’t prove the sentence was in English, only that I understood it. I can back-translate the French sentence in any number of ways—but that would only show that “English” is a far from determinate thing.

Translators working into English are confronted on every page with decisions about the nature, scope, identity, and audience of the language they are writing. I write in a personal idiom that bears traces of my upbringing in England, my long stay in Scotland, and my present life on the East Coast of the United States. When I write a translation, however, I have to make choices in every paragraph about what variety of written English to use. As is well known, spellings, numbering systems, greetings, and curses, as well as several hundred common vocabulary items, have different forms in different parts of the English-speaking world. It drives me mad. How do I know what is “English” and what is something else?

The practical solution is this: I write the way I like, and then a skillful copy editor amends my prose to make it conform to the style appropriate to the output and the target audience of a particular publishing house. But that is only the outward form of the solution. The target audience of most English-language publishing houses, for most of the books they put out, is indeterminately large, and includes American, Australian, Indian, Canadian, and South African readers—each large grouping feeling most at home in significantly different varieties of the spoken and written tongue. So what gets edited out in any of my translations—and in any translated literary or nonfiction work of more than local interest—are those quirks of language that mark it as belonging to any geographical variety of English. In other words, I get de-Britted if I am being edited for U.S. publication and de-Yanked (a less difficult job, since my Americanisms are few and far between) when a London publisher takes the lead. What you get at the end of the process is “English-minus”—ideally, a common center ground of the English language, stripped of vocabulary and turns of phrase that are not understood or understood in different ways in any part of the messy spread of what is still called, for want of a better word, the English tongue.