Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The language of translations in English is therefore not a representation of a language spoken or written anywhere at all. Because its principal feature is to be without regional features, it’s hard to see from outside—and that’s precisely the point of this sophisticated stylistic trick. “Tranglish” is quite different in nature from the clumsy International English of social science and global journalism. It’s smooth and invisible, and it has some important advantages. Detached with skill and craft by professional language doctors from any regional variety of the tongue, it is much easier to translate than anything actually written in “English” by a novelist from, say, Queensland, Ireland, Wessex, or Wales. But as it is already translated (from French, in my case, but this would be just as true if I were working from Russian or Hindi), any remaining strangeness in the prose, in the ears of a speaker of any of the myriad varieties of English the world over, is automatically construed as a trace of the foreign tongue, not of the translator’s identity. The “translator’s invisibility,” eloquently denounced by Lawrence Venuti as a symptom of the anti-intellectual, antiforeign bias of Britain and America,[116] is also the unintended result of the unbounded nature of the English language itself.

The suspicion that the language of translated works is not quite the same as the language the translations purport to be in has given rise to scholarly work based not on anecdotes and intuition but on the automated analysis of quite large bodies of translated texts in machine-readable form. These techniques allow insights into what is now called the “third code”—the language of translations seen as a dialect that can be distinguished from the regular features of the target language.[117] In one such investigation, it’s been found that English novels in French translation have at least one language feature that seems quite at variance with novels originally written in French.

When you want to add emphasis to one part of a French sentence, you take it out of its normal grammatical place and put it right at the start, replacing it in its ordinary location with a pronoun or dummy word. For example, if you want to disagree with what your children ask for as a treat at the fair, you can say—in English—“But I want ice cream,” using the tone of your voice to stress that ice cream is what you want when the kids are clamoring for cotton candy. The regular way to do this in French is to put I in a special form at the head and then to repeat it: Moi, je veux une glace. “Left dislocation,” as this feature of French is most often called, is pretty common in all sorts of circumstances in speech and writing, not just in arguments with kids. In a corpus of extracts from recent prizewinning novels written in French, it occurred 130 times in an expanse of around 45,000 words. But in a parallel corpus extracted from similarly well-seen novels translated around the same time into French, it occurred only 58 times. The difference is quite marked and can’t be explained by any individual translator’s style. A “third code” does seem to exist.[118]

What’s even more interesting and especially relevant to understanding translation is that the use of left dislocation in the corpus of translations into French is highly concentrated in one kind of context—in dialogue. In the corpus of texts originally written in French, however, more than half of the occurrences crop up in third-person narrative. None of the occurrences of left dislocation in the entire double corpus is grammatically wrong or stylistically inappropriate, but it seems clear that the language norm to which translators of English novels in French adhere (whether they know it or not) is not identical to the language use of novel-writers in French.

The reason for this particular feature of the “third code” in French is not difficult to find. French grammar books and the teaching of French in schools have traditionally categorized left dislocation as typical of oral speech. Translators seem to have internalized that lesson, even though it runs counter to the observable practice of native writers of French. Translators therefore tend to write in a normalized language and are more attentive to what is broadly understood to be the correct or standard form. In fact, anyone who has personal experience of translation work knows this truth. Translation tends toward the center—to whatever linguistic regularities are conceptualized as belonging to the standard language, irrespective of what native speakers typically say. The plight of the English translator edited into “English-minus” is therefore not exceptional in the world of translation. French translators seem to get to the same place even before copy editors go over their work.