‘Is that a fish in your ear? The amazing adventure of translation’

This is the title of David Bellos’ recent book that addresses translation. To clarify, this is not a guidebook on how to translate texts, but an exploration into the problems that translators face and the translations themselves.

Bellos is a translator himself (from French to English) and he won the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005 for his translation of Ismail Kadare’s work. He also teaches French and Comparative literature at Princeton and he incorporated his personal experiences into the book where appropriate. 

The first chapter explores the different meanings of translations and how no definition is suitable or accurate. There are so many different ways to ‘translate’ a text, that they cannot be classed as the same process.  For example, when translating poetry, lines need to maintain the correct metre and rhyme, so not only pragmatics need to be conveyed. In contrast, when translating the bible, not only should you convey meaning but condense it to make it more engaging, simplify it so that it can be widely understood and modernise it for today’s audience. Later in the book, Bellos explains that there are many different types of translation – in fact the Japanese have more than 21 different words for ‘a translation’, including teiyaku which means ‘a standard translation that seems unlikely to be replaced’ (page23).

It is also amazing to see the amount of words that cannot be translated between two languages. An amusing example is there is no single word to translate the word ‘cheese’ into Russian because the Russian languages has an array of very specific words, the translator cannot tell from the word ‘cheese’ alone which Russian word to use.

In some texts, it is essential to maintain some sense of ‘foreignness’ to the translation. However, in many cases, the most successful way to do this, is to keep the foreign word and do not give a translation. Although, I think that this does defeat the point of a translation, common foreign words are ubiquitous in translated texts. This technique is actually a method to change the lexicon of the target language as if the translation is popular, many readers will have a higher knowledge of the original language. It is shocking that 40% of the headwords in the OED are imports from other languages and this method in translation will have been one of the reasons. In some cases, the foreign appeal is so important that people get their work translated and then use the translation as the original.  This may take hundreds of years to detect showing that the apparent ability to detect whether a text is an original is likely to be a myth.

The only negative part of this book is that many examples are in foreign languages and are not translated (weirdly), so it is difficult to follow when he refers to the meaning. However, a large proportion is in French, which are quite accessible for those who have studied it.

To conclude, this is a brilliant book for those interested in ‘the art of translation’ and I am sure that it will make any reader reconsider their preconception that translation is simple, showing how the babelfish will always only be a fictional fantasy.  

Picture based on 'A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', retrieved from: http://www.intomobile.com/2011/10/14/video-google-translate-android-now-supports-14-languages-experimental-conversation-mode/.