Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The movement of translation toward the standard form of the receiving language can be highlighted by the fate of regional and social dialects. Bournisien, one of the minor characters of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, speaks with turns of phrase and vocabulary items that are comically typical of the region where the action is set—rural Normandy in the 1830s. English obviously does not have a conventional way of representing the speech of nineteenth-century countryfolk from Normandy. In principle, a translator could make Bournisien speak in English like a Wessex farmer out of Thomas Hardy or a Scottish preacher invented by Walter Scott. But representing one regional dialect of the source by some regional dialect of the target is rarely attempted in translation.[119] Most people currently think it is just silly to make a Bavarian dairy farmer use Texas cowboy slang, or to have a woman on the St. Petersburg tram express herself in Mancunian in order to suggest her geographic and linguistic distance both from the capital and the standard language. The culture of translation as it presently exists in English as well as in French and many other languages eradicates regional variation in the source. It drives written representations of dialectal speech toward the center.

An obvious case of movement toward the center occurs in Charles Baudelaire’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug.” The African American slave in the story, Jupiter, is represented as speaking in this manner: “Dar! dat’s it!—him never plain of notin—but him berry sick for all dat.” Baudelaire doesn’t try to find a dialect of French to fit, he just says what Jupiter means to say in standard French: Ah! Voilà la question!—il ne se plaint jamais de rien, mais il est tout de même malade.

What else could Baudelaire have done? No resources were available in nineteenth-century French to match an English convention for the representation of African American vernacular.[120]

Strange to say, the same treatment is not generally accorded to variations in form and style that correspond not to region but to social class. High-flown, pompous, elegant, or regal forms of language in the source are generally represented by forms of corresponding social rank in the target. Real difficulties arise only when the class register is low, and especially when the language of the source represents the speech forms of uneducated folk. This difficulty runs through all kinds of translating, not just literary prose. No consecutive interpreter, for example, would think of adopting lower-class diction to reproduce for the benefit of a visiting foreign dignitary the kind of language spoken to him by a factory hand or collective farm worker: it would surely seem disrespectful and cause a mighty scandal. In written prose, too, translators shy away from giving the uncouth truly uncouth forms of language in the target text. The reason is obvious—grammatical mistakes, malapropisms, and other kinds of “substandard” language must not be seen to be the translator’s fault. It’s actually easier to translate the ravings of a certified lunatic than the intentionally rude and vulgar language of many modern novels. The outright sanitization of bawdy classics carried out in seventeenth-century France (see here) is quite out of fashion—but something of the same sort goes on in almost any translation project.

The “third code” effects that have been revealed in translations (in French, but also in Norwegian, Swedish, and English) and the strong prejudice against regional variation are, even so, mere sidelights on the less easily pinpointed but far more general tendency of all translations to adhere more strongly than any original to a normalized idea of what the target language should be. To put that a different way: translation always takes the register and level of naturally written prose up a notch or two. Some degree of raising is and always has been characteristic of translated texts—simply because translators are instinctively averse to the risk of being taken for less than fully cultivated writers of their target tongue. In important ways, translators are the guardians and, to a surprising degree, the creators of the standard form of the language they use.

EIGHTEEN No Language Is an Island: The Awkward Issue of L3