It all started with the Word….
From the language files: The Case of Words, Words, Words.
Did you know… that the very essence of our thinking requires words? That’s a trite
observation, I know, yet consider that in normal circumstances, what cannot be named cannot be thought. Being neither cognitive scientist, nor neuropsychologist, I am not speaking about the transmission of impulses across neural networks in the brain that might account for various nonverbal behaviors. At that level, notional artifacts or instinctive signals might pass that do not correspond to conscious, deliberate cogitation. I am speaking about what has always been understood throughout human cultures, at least intuitively: in order to think about something, it must be named. For that we need words.
Are words important, then? The Latin expression facta non verba privileges deeds over words, but does that mean words are less valuable? Maybe the truth lies in how we have come to regard our relationship with words. Deeds are tangible, have patent effects, and must be responded to in real time. In contrast, people are quick to say that words are just words. Words, however, inhabit our mental environment so completely, that we are often unaware of their presence as we think about our situation and respond to the world, to the deeds around us.
Perhaps, then, we take words for granted. There are times, to be sure, when we are sensitive to words, to what is said to us, about us, for and against us, good and bad. There are words that convey the most sublime emotions and words that convey nonsense, words that bind us to others and words that divide us. Words are the names we give to things, concrete and abstract, to actions and states of being. In the film version of Taras Bulba, the Cossack hero’s son protests a duel to the death that takes place because one man insulted another “They were just words!” the son says. His father replies, “There are some words for which men must die.” Sometimes we have to watch our words.
Words are how we interact with the life experience in our minds. And human language is the gift that enables us to make sense of the world—through words. Rather than disparage locution as “just words,” perhaps we could modify the Latin phrase to read non solum facta sed etiam verba (not only deeds but also words). One might even argue that words are prior to deeds. Thus, we can fully appreciate that the writer of the fourth Gospel, John, opens his narrative by referring to the eternal Logos existing before time, and, echoing the first line of Genesis, begins with, “ΕΝ ΑΡΧΗ ΗΝ Ο ΛΟΓΟΣ” (en archē ēn ho Logos) In the beginning was the Word.1
18 July 2013
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1 The Latin text reads, “In principio erat Verbum.” This helps explain why, interestingly enough, the grammarians gave the name “verb” to the key part of speech, i.e., the word of the sentence.
It all started with the Word…
From the language files: “Traduttore Traditore” – The Case of the Traitorous Translator
Did you know… that while translation has a hoary history spanning millennia, critics have decried translation as no more than a deception, a poor approximation of the truth, at best? No one denies that all translation involves tradeoffs among features such as form, style, and terminology when moving between languages, but it is also true that competent translation reproduces an original text with significant accuracy and care for the meaning and intention of the original author.
Contrary to some criticism, the translator’s task is not to translate every word in a text, but rather to account for each word’s contribution to the meaning of the piece. Often that means that the form of the target text will be quite different from the source. Verbs and verb phrases are transformed into nouns or noun phrases. Adverbs and prepositional phrases replace clusters of adjectives, or vice versa, and voice is shifted from passive to active while subjects become objects. Context might demand adding something to make what is implicit in a source phrase fully comprehensible in the target language, while metaphors will try the translator’s cultural knowledge and creativity. Other times, florid or formulaic expressions demanded in high context cultures will be simplified or eliminated to make a passage more at home in a less formal culture.
And those examples only scratch the surface of the more common practices of the working translator, whose copious toolbox includes controlling language properties such as collocation, equivalence, semantics, relevance, and much more. Indeed, for the literary translator these issues are just the beginning; next comes the creative imperative of capturing the literary art of the author—a daunting demand that requires special gifts. The legal translator, on the other hand, will most often adhere to more literal rendering of a statute or court case, assisted by specialized glossaries and knowledge of legal proceedings. Medical and scientific translators and a host of other specialties confront similar professional constraints.
So is the translator deceptive and traitorous, as the Italian expression, traduttore traditore, might have us believe? Not at all. The translator is, in fact, a linguistic engineer who builds bridges that allow you to cross over language barriers. Some bridges might be austere or elegant, some plainer or sport more elaborate design, but they will all get you to the other side.
8 April 2013
It all started with the Word…
From the Language Files: The Case of the Unattested Etymologies.
Did you know…the expression “tallyho”, the traditional cry of the English fox hunting party, is derived from Arabic? Some philologists in the past have claimed that it stems from the call of the Arab falconers who called out, “ta’al la-hon”/ “come here!” to their prized hunting birds. The Crusader knights, avid hunters themselves, are said to have brought the expression over into English when they returned from Outremer. Webster’s New College Dictionary, on the other hand, claims that it has probably come into English from the French expression, taïaut, through the Norman French (OFr) thialau. But then, might not thialau itself have derived from the Arabic and gone home with the Frankish knights?
Similarly, the English word cake has been attributed to a derivation from the Arabic, ka’k, a shortening bread or sweetened bread usually shaped in a circle with a hole in the middle, the taste and style depending on the region and the occasion, not to mention the secret recipe of the baker. Once again, Webster is the spoiler claiming the word is Middle English through the Old Norse word, kaka. But for fans who might once have followed the adventures of Prince Valiant in the Sunday comics, you will recall that this noble knight of the round table, beyond doing battle with Viking invaders from the north, often ventured south into the Arab-ruled lands of the Mediterranean. So might not the Arabic word ka’k
be, in fact, the ancestor of the Old Norse, kaka?
Which etymologies are true? We leave it to you: research and decide.
15 March 2013
It all started with the Word…
From the Language Files: The Case of the Punitive Password.
Did you know…that ancient armies used regional speech differences and dialects to distinguish friend from foe? One of the oldest examples of this comes down to us from the Hebrew Bible. In the conflict between Gilead and Ephraim, the battle was going badly for Ephraim. Many of the Ephraimites were trying to flee over the Jordan, but the Gileadites had captured the fords across the river. When an
Ephraimite fugitive came to the ford to cross over, the Gileadite guards told him to say the word for an ear of corn, which in Gilead was pronounced, shibboleth.
“When he said, sibboleth, for he could not pronounce it right, they seized him and slaughtered him at the fords of the Jordan.” (Judges 12: 5-6).
Tough luck for the hapless Ephraimite, who must not have traveled far from his village and so, was unfamiliar with the speech of his Gileadite neighbors.
Winston Churchill (was he perhaps quoting George Bernard Shaw?) is reputed to have remarked that the English and the Americans are two peoples separated by the same language. But that separation isn’t exclusive to the Anglophone world, as the above biblical story dramatically illustrates.
And while we’re on the subject, consider that even today, the Hebrew and Arabic languages have a similar opposition of sibilant consonants. Both Shalom and Salam are cognates out of ancient Semitic and mean, “Peace.” Could today’s strife between these “sh” and “s” -speakers bear a resemblance to the story of Gilead and Ephraim? It’s something to think about.
18 March 2013
It all started with the Word…
From the Language Files: The Case of the Orthographic Oddities.
Did you know… that English spelling conventions have drawn the attention of scholars and writers for centuries? It took roughly until the eighteenth century for conventional spelling rules to start taking hold. In fact, some writers took umbrage at what they considered the unnecessary, indeed, tyrannical constraint of being forced to spell a word in only one way. Think of that, spelling rules deemed an assault on freedom!
But consider the other side of the coin. A beginning student of French won’t hesitate to inform you that French spelling is problematic, unlike the phonetic spelling of other Romance languages such as Spanish or Italian. Although somewhat confusing at first, French spelling has a consistent logic that once learned makes it a reliable guide to pronunciation whenever a French word is encountered.
Ah but English! English spelling has been the bane of learners, natives and foreigners alike. Consider the cluster “–ough” (a segment of speech linguists refer to as a morphophoneme.) Look what it gives us: cough, through, plough, though, tough, hiccough, lough (the phonological variations are shown below). Pronouncing English by the way it is written has been considered such a nightmare, that it drove one legendary Frenchman in utter frustration to murder his punctilious English teacher by “hitting him wiz a rough!”
Who knows? Maybe phonics, used to teach reading to small children in day care and in kindergarten, will become the wave of the future.
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The sounds of –ough in order of occurrence in the text:
– awf as in awful
– oo as in moon
– ow as in wow (plough is an old form little used today)
– oh as in go
– uf as in puff
– up as in cup (hiccup has largely displaced the spelling hiccough)
– ock as in rock (lough is an old form little used today)
19 March 2013
It all started with the Word…
From the Language Files: The Case of the Speech Spoilers
Did you know… that the Roman grammarian Quintilian, author of the Institutio Oratoria, a textbook on education and rhetoric, fretted over the deterioration of the Latin language of his day? A renowned teacher of rhetoric in his own time, he complained that inelegant usages in speech and writing were becoming commonplace and introduced nothing but “barbarismi”— barbarisms—forms that were ruining the good Latin of Roman society’s revered and well-spoken ancestors (viri boni et dicendi periti). In one of his passages in a work entitled, De Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae, (On the Causes of Corrupted Eloquence), he displays an array of commonly used forms that he traces back to the spoken language of the marketplace, the army, and the provincials. He gives examples of pronunciation anomalies such as substitution of the “m” sound for the “b” sound (bilabial metathesis!) in several expressions, as well as loan words from around the Empire, and colloquialisms. Nearly all of these features of the popular language, we later discover, have become staples in the modern languages that developed from the Latin of the people—the Romance languages.
Why did that happen? Because language is alive. And as with all living things, evolution and change are afoot. Language doesn’t exist only on paper (or more likely today in a .doc file). It grows as it is used, but it is never used up. In the mouths of artists and rappers, publicists and pundits, tinkers and tailors, teachers and preachers, teenagers and shoppers, and yes, even politicians—everyone—it renews itself, gives birth to new forms and fresh usages, and accommodates itself to the changing rhythms of life. No rules, then? Why yes, of course there are. Grammar and syntax still provide the architecture and discipline necessary for embodying ideas, shaping coherent thought, and communicating with others. But languages, unlike old soldiers, don’t simply fade away, they evolve, and like a phoenix arise anew.
And so with all due respect for his disapprobation of declamatory decay, we say at last, vale, Quintiliane, (Quintilianus, farewell).
21 March 2013
It all started with the Word…
From the Language Files: The Case of Scribbling on Scrolls
Did you know… that the direction in which writing flows has come about simply by convention? The fourth entry for “convention” in Webster’s New College Dictionary defines it as “a practice or procedure widely observed in a group, esp. to facilitate social interaction: CUSTOM.”
So, the direction of writing is not written in stone, if you will, it has been adopted by custom. Excuse the shameless pun, but note that in ancient times, writing systems were not confined to one direction or the other: left to right, or right to left. They went both ways.
Cast your gaze on the hieroglyphs inscribed on Egyptian monuments or written on papyri, and you will see alternation of direction from line to line. How do you know which direction to read? Easy. Determine which direction the characters are facing—indeed many do have faces—and begin reading toward the characters. It’s as though you are facing them and they are heading toward you. Later, languages in the Near East that developed alphabetic systems followed this practice, a practice continued by the ancient Greeks, who borrowed their writing system from the Phoenicians. Did you know this method of writing had a name? It’s called boustrophedon, meaning “as the ox plows,” up one row, down the other.
Writing systems eventually settled on one direction, right to left (Semitic), or left to right (European) by custom. Too bad. Had boustrophedon continued in practice, left handers might have had parity in a world dominated by right-handed writers. But perhaps today’s world of keyboards and mice has transcended that disadvantage once and for all.
26 March 2013
It all started with the Word…
From the Language Files: The Case of the Orthographic Oddities, reprise
Did you know… that although grammarians set down rules for the spelling of words in English, as we mentioned in a previous article[i] , the reasons were antiquarian rather than utilitarian? Specifically, the grammarians were concerned to preserve the historical spelling of English words, even though the contemporary pronunciation of those words had changed, often radically. When Chaucer was writing his Canterbury Tales, a period referred to as Middle English (ca 1100 – 1500), writers tended to spell words according to their own preferences, usually approximating the sound of the spoken word. To the meticulous scholar, the idiosyncratic spellings created nothing short of chaos with numerous written variants for the same word— sometimes in the same work by the same author! So, spelling conventions were adopted to stem this chaotic and sometimes colorful tide of writing as one wished.
An interesting question arises when one asks if the spelling conventions laid down by the grammarians actually relieved the chaotic situation for the reader, for those scholars settled on spellings that reflected archaic pronunciations of English. Indeed, the spellings reflected the more “Germanic” pronunciations of Old English far more than the uninflected and more streamlined language that had evolved into Modern English. And among the most common of those ancestral features that have remained with us are the words spelled with clusters containing the letters “gh” such as: -ough, -augh, -eigh, -igh, etc. As we said in the previous article, these have been among the most troublesome for learners of English.
But this has led to some humorous speculation, too. Many years ago, when this writer was in the eighth grade, I took a required course that all of us students called, “GP of L,” General Principles of Language. It was a sort of “linguistics light,” which taught the basic structures of Latin and other languages, and compared many linguistic features. In discussing some peculiarities of spelling, the author recounted an old story where a writer (was it perhaps George Bernard Shaw?) proposed that English spelling allowed for the possibility of writing the word, ghoti to mean a common aquatic animal. That is, he took the “gh” from the word “laugh,” the “o” from the word “women,” and the “ti” from the word “nation,” and put them together to spell:
………. fish.
That old GP of L anecdote saw many years of service as an icebreaker in my project planning workshops. It never failed to stimulate animated discussion and lots of smiles.
29 March 2013
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[i] See above: The Case of the Orthographic Oddities
It all started with the Word…Vol. 1, Case #1: Deconstructing Deconstruction: A Translator’s View, Part One
Readers might remember the expression, “As for me, I only know that I know nothing.” Right, it was Socrates who said that—at least that’s what Plato tells us.[1] We cannot know anything for certain, Socrates warns us, except that we do not know.
But throughout his teachings, it appears that he knows a lot about how to know and how to validate what one knows, or claims to know. He imparts knowledge to students—or rather teaches them to discover knowledge on their own—through his Socratic method, the dialectic, and uses that method systematically to confound fools who are cocksure of their opinions, absolutely certain about what they think they know.
The point is that all phenomena are mysteries; sometimes they reward the dedication of the one who probes them, but never do they reveal themselves completely. So we can say that Socrates counsels men to ask critical questions, suspend final judgment before examining all of the evidence, and even then to stay humble before the vast unknown.
What does any of that have to do with translation? The translator does not philosophize about the text he works on. Or does he? Translation theorist Douglas Robinson asks, “Who translates?” in his book of the same title.[2] He raises questions about the significance for translation of the roles played by the author and the source-language reader, the translator and the target-language reader, and the peculiarities of the respective languages, as well. Is he suggesting that we don’t know what a translation really means, or who is the real translator? That might be going too far, but Robinson’s approach opens the door to the matter of critical theories of text and narrative analysis.
Here we seem to be venturing into the world of literary deconstruction and the doctrine of its iconic theorist, Jacques Derrida. Do we hear an echo of Socrates in Derrida’s assertion that nothing can be known except what is in the text? —a bold assertion that nothing more than the text is available to the reader, critic, or even the author. In contrast to applying more familiar literary analysis such as close reading to emphasize unity within texts, the deconstructionist seeks out disunities and contradictions that reveal subliminal or unconscious meanings deep within the text that tell a story different from the one the author claims to tell. The text, says Derrida, contains more levels of meaning than what is signified on the surface. One view suggests that the text goes out of the author’s control and becomes a new text produced by the reader, whose encounter with the text transforms it in the light of his own experience.
In the next issue we examine what, if any, relevance these notions have for practicing translators.
[1] Some classical scholars dispute this usual attribution to Socrates in Plato’s Apology, and locate it in Plato’s Meno or Phaedrus, while others trace it to a paraphrase of the remark found in a work by Diogenes Laertes. We avoid any academic partisanship here, but simply record the usual attribution for the purposes of this article.
[2] State University of New York Press, Albany, 2001. One of Robinson’s key concepts, based on the inherent incongruity of source and target languages, is the idea that the translator doesn’t so much convert the original text, but actually creates a new product out of his own response to the text in ways relevant to his audience.
It all started with the Word… Vol. 2, Case #2: Deconstructing Deconstruction: A Translator’s View, Part Two.
Well, here we go again, traduttore traditore. The more that translation theory comes to embrace or rather resemble literary theory, such as we saw in the previous discussion, the more translators could face the criticism of betraying the original work. In translation circles it is customary to asseverate that the translator’s role is to represent transparently and faithfully the meaning and, to the extent possible, the form and style of the source text. But as we saw in the previous article, precisely what that meaning is can be somewhat opaque. Reflecting on Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist notion that a “text contains more levels of meaning than what is signified on the surface[1],” Douglas Robinson opines that the “translator surrenders to forces beyond his or her rational control.” He claims that the translator, in a certain sense, channels the author to re-create the latter’s original text in the target language[2] . In so doing, Robinson believes, the translator is a writer like any other responding to the author’s work and subjectively choosing words, structures, and nuanced expressions to convey what (and even how) it means in his target language. He is no different from the author whose own subjective responses to the world were crafted by him into the original text in the first place.
To such notions challenges abound from translators, authors, and consumers of translated literature. For translation outside of the literary space, they insist, the translator has a duty not to stray into highly subjective realms of creativity when approaching the source text. While some admit that overstressing the point risks constraining translation so much that the result is stilted and unappealing to the target audience; nevertheless, they say, there are limits to be respected, and exotic notions like deep structures and deconstructed signifiers and signified go well beyond them.
The literary translator has her work cut out for her, of course, for the cross-cultural challenges of translating literary texts and poetry that affect the target language reader as the original affects the source language reader are manifold. But the translator working outside of the literary realm finds that the core of workplace translation clusters primarily around technical topics: science, technology, business, medicine, law, media, and numerous other specialties. In these areas translation strategies tend to have more in common with technical writing, placing a high value on accurate transfer of concepts common to a profession or discipline and precise selection of words and expressions with strong equivalence across languages.
Although possessing an ancient lineage as a profession, translation as an academic discipline is young. As the discipline matures, we will hear more about the development of translation theory. Deconstruction, semiotics, narrative theory and so on will populate the vocabulary of both academics and practitioners alike, but theories aside, in the end, mediating between the text and the reader, stands the translator, indispensable—traduttore conduttore.
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[1] See text and footnote in previous article, Case #1 Deconstructing Deconstruction: A Translator’s View, Part 1
[2] See Who Translates? Cited in previous article, see footnote 1 above.
Richard L. Marrash 