Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

However, not all empires treat the language of the conquerors as the conquering language. In many known instances, a culture of translation sprang up that gave prestige and authority to the language of the conquered. When the Akkadians overran Sumer around 2250 B.C.E., they did not sweep away the much older culture and language of their new subjects. They adopted Sumerian script—the wedge-shaped letters made by incising wet clay with the sharpened tip of a reed—and treated the (linguistically unrelated) Sumerian language as a cultural asset. Laws and legends, rules and chronicles were translated from Sumerian into Akkadian, and knowledge of Sumerian became the mark of an educated man throughout the many centuries of Akkadian and Assyrian civilization. Despite having ceased to be associated with any political, military, or economic authority, and progressively disconnected from any identifiable ethnicity as well, Sumerian went on being used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary, and scientific language in Mesopotamia until the first century C.E.—giving it a life span as a source of translations DOWN of approximately three thousand years. English has a long way to go to equal that.

Between the fifth and third centuries B.C.E., Greek-speaking seafarers spread their language far and wide in small pockets stretched out along coastlines from Marseilles to Odessa, and Alexander the Great took it overland as far as Egypt and Afghanistan. But the role of Greek as a source language for translation has nothing to do with Macedonian military might. Even before it conquered and occupied the Greek peninsula at the start of the second century B.C.E., Rome became eager to take possession of Greece’s culture and thought. In due course the language of the conquered was recognized as a repository of cultural and intellectual prestige. The learning of Greek became the main content of a proper education in ancient Rome and translation into Latin the main skill associated with high rank.

The stories of Sumerian and Greek oblige us to be more than doubtful about economic, military, and political explanations of the translation map of the world today. In one sense, of course, these ancient examples of the languages of subject peoples being invested with cultural prestige through translation are exceptional, because there don’t seem to be any good examples in medieval or modern times. When the Normans conquered England, they did not adopt Anglo-Saxon as their language of culture—they carried on using French and let the common folk speak a Franco-Saxon mishmash that eventually turned into English. When the French seized the throne of Sweden in the Napoleonic Wars, they didn’t start translating from Swedish. In fact, the new Swedish royal family and its court carried on speaking French for more than a hundred years—and their descendants still maintain a palace in Nice.

But we could just as easily take the opposite view. The general history of translation in the European sphere in the last few hundred years may itself be an exception to a longer-running norm. And even within that domain there are examples of languages of culture and translation being retained against political or military logic. Latin remained dominant, both as the source language of translations DOWN and as the target language of many vernacular texts principally for the purpose of retranslation into other vernaculars that had no translation relations between them for more than a thousand years after the fall of Rome. Jews have continued to use Hebrew for more than three millennia despite having had a thousand practical reasons for dropping it like a hot brick.

What makes a language culturally dominant, today as at all other times, has no relationship to the number of centurions, tanks, or missiles it has to back it up or the quantity of gold in its treasury. A culturally dominant language is one that maintains significant volumes of translation activity between itself and a significant number of languages that have smaller bilateral translation relations between them. The dominance of Latin in fourteenth-century Europe, for example, is not just exemplified by the way in which The Travels of Marco Polo was spread; it was created and maintained by just that kind of use, as the interlanguage that enabled the same (or a similar) text to be made available in languages such as Czech and Gaelic, between which bilateral translation skills were practically nonexistent. It had nothing to do with the economic or military power of “native Latin speakers,” of whom there were precisely none.