Foreign Concepts

One of the greatest problems for translators is translating concepts that simply do not exist in the other language or culture. Examples in Polish include kombinować or lustracja, województwo or szlachta zaściankowa. English examples include elevenses or hoody. There are different ways to attempt to translate these terms, but no translation can be regarded as truly equivalent. Of course, some may argue that no translation is ever truly equivalent, but there are equivalents that might be regarded as more (or less) faithful than other ones. We might also argue that there is a continuum of correctness that allows us to speak of a better or worse translation.

All of the words mentioned above can be translated in some way or other but that does not necessarily make them good equivalents. Kombinować might be to wheel and deal; lustracja might be lustration or vetting; województwo could be province or district; szlachta zaściankowa might be petty nobility or disenfranchised noblemen. On the other hand, elevenses might be drugie śniadanie and a hoody could be a łobuz or zbir. We might argue that all of these suggestions are poor and inadequate but we may also argue that they perform a certain function and they kind of do the job. Is this enough? Is translation always about doing enough? Should we be aiming for perfection, satisfaction, or adequacy?

Another fine example of a word which does not have an altogether elegant translation into English is the Polish koleiny. These are ruts in the road caused by poor tarmac surfaces being over-used making driving difficult and often extremely dangerous. Due to the poor quality of roads in Poland (especially in communist times) and weather extremities (hot summers, cold winters), the tarmac surfaces had/have a tendency to become soft and give under the weight of traffic. Problems in translation begin when we see road signs in Poland warning of koleiny. Could this be rendered as simply ruts? Or perhaps road ruts? Perhaps even grooves? It is only when we see this kind of road sign do we realise how difficult this could be to translate. German seems to have Spurrille as a possible equivalent. English however does not offer such contextual equivalence.

Arabic Explosion

The next great quantum leap in translation will most surely take place in the Arabic-speaking world. Throughout history religious upheaval, military conquest and foreign domination have often had immense implications on the linguistic point world.

When the nations of Europe began to feel the need to express themselves, it was only when the Christian religion caved in and allowed the use of the vernacular that these national identities (together with their languages) really took off allowing for a veritable blossoming of literature written in the vernacular as well as a new flourishing of translation.

The liberalisation of religious shackles in Judaism had an analogous effect on Ashkenazi Jewry allowing for the flowering of Yiddish, in much the same way that Luther and the Reformation affected the languages of Christendom.

Similarly, the future of translation in North Africa and the Near East and many other countries (that use Arabic) may be dependent on a similar liberalising movement. It is difficult envisaging such a movement in Islam due to the important position Arabic holds in the religion of Muḥammad, but should such a change occur, the repurcussions will be huge.

If and when the nations under Islam get the urge to begin translating the Qur’ān into their own varieties of Arabic (be they dialects or languages) we will most certainly see a linguistic explosion the like of which we have not seen for a long time.

There are over twenty known, widely spoken varieties of Arabic including Maghrebi, Egyptian, Sudanese, Iraqi, Hijazi, Chadian, Nigerian and Judeo-Arabic to name just a few. The question really is not if but more when, how and where the language explosion will take place. The effects of this Arabic linguistic renaissance will most certainly rock the world.‎‎

Ephemeral Translation

One of the most difficult aspects in translation is understanding and dealing with ephemeral expressions and concepts. How do we cope with phrases that may only last for a week, month and then disappear never to be heard of again? How do we even begin translating something which is scribbled down on a scrap of paper and has a useful life of thirty minutes at the most?

The successful translation of ephemera relies, obviously, on the translator’s ability to nigh on perfectly understand the source text and culture. More importantly, understand the sociolect or jargon that is being used. Ephemera are often used in specific environments and are often particular to a given field or domain. The understanding of context is therefore paramount and perhaps more important than his/her knowledge of the target text.

Within corpus linguistics the study of ephemera is seen as both important but at the same time one of the most difficult tasks in the creation of corpora. How does one systematically collect ephemera? What is/are ephemera? Post-it notes? Memos? Text messages

Ephemeral language and the study of it (what we might term ephemero-linguistics) would give us valuable insights into the day-to-day working of language. Knowledge of the structure of ephemera (thats is once we have reliably defined the term) would help us understand how ephemeral language is formed and, in turn, would help us in its translation.

Examples might include Back in 5, CU l8r, Gr8 idea. Language always seeks economy and the language of post-it notes, memos and text messages are great evidence of this. In everyday speech what do we delete? Verb? Nouns? Other parts of speech? How is grammar affected? Can we define an ephemeral grammar in much the same way that we can talk of the headline grammar of newspapers?

Knowledge of everyday language and a future ephemero-linguistics could give us valuable insights into the real working of language. We all concede that the translation of idioms are difficult but ephemera are perhaps the most difficult nut to crack. Research into the subject is scarce and published material on the subject is practically non-existent. Does this mean there is no such thing as ephemera or does it mean we need to invest more time into this area?

All You Need is Love

It is fascinating how equivalents in different languages like to overlap but are never exactly perfect equivalents. They are akin to templates that do not quite fit, like trying to pour two pints of water into a one litre jug.

Research shows that certain languages have a tendency to use particular semantic fields more often than other languages. For example, the German language may employ more words from the arts and crafts semantic field than English. Polish, on the other hand, may use more words connected with love than German.

Corpus evidence shows us that even two texts, one of which is a translation of another do not perfectly share identical semantic fields. Different languages use different lexical and semantic tools to deal with different linguistic problems which creates shifts in the semantic map of a text. Not only do translated texts have different semantic fingerprints but words also.

For example, let us look at different words for love, desire, have, want, need etc in German, French, Polish, English. The differences in these words may hinge on faint nuances between them but that does not change the fact that they are slightly different from one another.

We can talk of Liebe, amour, miłość and love. But do these all mean the same and are they always used in the same context? What about Wunsch, désir, pragnienie and desire? They may be dictionary equivalents but are they contextual equivalents?

Corpus evidence shows us that these words, though seemingly equivalent, are used in fractionally different semantic fields and used with a different frequency in each of the languages.

Word Mobbing/Borrowing

A delightful phenomenon in translation is the transfer of words from and into other languages. As we all know languages are remarkably flexible systems and it is an enjoyable sight when we see a word break free of one language and migrate into another system and then take on a new life. Making the break from one system and moving to another is the simple part. Putting roots down in another system is a little more complicated.

The hegemony of English has meant that other languages readily steal or are sometimes compelled to borrow from English. New dictionaries that use English, be they Polish-English, German-English, French-English or otherwise often contain false friend sections where we can learn how we should avoid certain words and constructions. Countless lists of such false friends can be easily found on the internet.

An interesting transfer that has occurred relatively recently is the term mobbing. The verb to mob means ‘to jostle, hustle’; ‘to crowd into’ or ‘to attack in large numbers’. However, the word mobbing has decided to burrow into the rich, fertile ground of several other languages including German and Polish wherein it has come to mean something different.

In these two languages, mobbing can refer to mental and physical attacks and generally intimidation found in the workplace. This has led to a situation where German and Polish translators often translate the word mobbing straight into English without considering its context whereas a more appropriate English equivalent for this English loanword would be bullying, intimidation or harassment.

Cultural Equivalents

One of the greatest problems in our profession is in the transferal of cultural elements from one language to another. In order to highlight this fact it is worth taking a look at a specific example. The Polish noun lustracja and its verb lustrować, which are so often used nowadays especially Polish political discourse and in a modern historical context are typical of cultural terms which have no direct equivalent in, let us say, English.

Lustracja in Polish in its most general sense means examination or inspection. The verb, therefore, means to examine or inspect. However, in a political sense it means a little more than this and is directly related to the inspection and examination of individuals connected to the communist regime. Two words are often used as equivalents for the Polish lustracja. The first is lustration and the second is vetting.

Lustracja or the English lustration comes from the Latin word lustratio which means purification. This was originally a purification by ablution in water. This rite undertaken by the Ancient Romans and Greeks was almost always connected with sacrifices and other religious rituals. Lustrations were often made by people who needed purification by ‘polluting’ themselves though a criminal act. Even cities and states would undergo lustrations to cleanse themselves of crimes committed by a member of their community.

The English words lustration and lustrate do figure in contexts relating directly to post-soviet cleansing but the historical Ancient overtones and connotations in English make it a difficult equivalent. Words are generally like writhing animals and are always difficult to pin-down. The English lustration is a particularly tricky creature.

Vetting, however, seems to be more of an appropriate translational possibility due to the fact that the word often refers to inspection and evaluation through the gathering of intelligence and background checking, something often undertaken by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN).

Translation is not a binary process where one equivalent is correct and the other is not. The same pertains to lustracja and lustrować. Two equivalents are most common: vetting and lustration, although, we can also talk of inspection and examination.

As inappropriate as the word lustration may seem it does have its advantages spawning the word lustrati which might very adequately describe the people responsible for what is commonly termed the political witch-hunt in Poland.

Multi-layered Equivalence

As mentioned in a previous entry - Translation Equivalence - in order to understand the translation process we must also understand the term that is “equivalence”. It is essential that we realise the fact that equivalence is a multifaceted phenomenon. It follows therefore that not realising this fact leads to bizarre or even erroneous translations. An example might be in order here. Inadequate translation is not as simple as getting the words wrong or not understanding the original. More often than not an inappropriate, inadequate or odd translation is one which does not take into account all the various types of equivalence.

The fact that equivalence is multifaceted can be seen when watching/listening to television programmes that translate the original text through subtitling or dubbing. Not only are we dealing with translation proper but we are also having to cope with the transmutation of the original into another form - change of speaker (subtitling) or change of mode (dubbing). It is here that the fault lines are most often visible.

In a recent programme on Discovery Channel, the narrator of the documentary was discussing the possibility of life on other planets and the use of radio telescopes as well as the analysis by scientists of deep-space radio signals. Scientists in the mid-90s found very odd radio signals coming from a particular point in space. On screen we see a list of numbers and in red ink the word “Wow!” written by one of the scientists. Interestingly, the Polish dubbed translation rendered this word as “No, no…” which is, of course, inappropriate and inadequate both contextually and stylistically. A more adequate translation might be “Kurcze!”, “Ale czad!” or a phrase of similar force. The example shows how when moving from one mode to another, the style has undergone a significant change and we cannot talk about true connotative, pragmatic or contextual equivalence.

Power of a Single Letter

Much has been said about the consequences of mistranslation. Historians have commented on the fact that the Japanese attempted to warn the Americans of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but the information was incorrectly translated. Wars more ancient than that one have known to have begun as a result of a slip of the translator’s pen. What happens when an original text is incorrect, contains mistakes or is simply badly written? It seems that most translators either seek to duplicate the mistakes or even poor quality of a source text or they make the decision to ignore this fact and plod on in an attempt to do justice to the real intent of the author.

The same might be said of those legions of linguists who translated Neil Armstrong’s famous sentence when he left the Lunar Module “Eagle” and stepped onto the moon on the 20th July 1969. Mission control relayed the message to the rest of the world: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”.

Some people noticed the mistake immediately, some ignored it. The mind has a wonderful capacity for ignoring what is not needed, what is surplus to requirements. Strictly speaking Armstrong’s sentence did not make sense because “man” and “mankind” mean the same, of course. He should have said “a man”.

However, translators around the world all translated this word as “human being”. The Polish translation reads: “Zaledwie jeden krok dla człowieka lecz olbrzymi krok dla ludzkości”. The translator ignored his little grammatical mishap.

Let us move forward now to the 30th September 2006. Peter Shann Ford, a computer programmer from Sydney, Australia undertakes a scientific analysis of Armstrong’s recording and discovers Neil Armstrong’s missing ‘a’. Armstrong himself had been adamant that he did actually say ”a man”. The Anglophone history books will have to be re-written. Interestingly enough, most others history books, written in all the other languages of the world, will not.

Haircuts

Language has a quirky way of throwing up bizarre cultural references when you’re not looking. Especially when we decide to juxtapose equivalents in two different languages. Let us take the hairstyle made famous by the Red Indians of North American. The reference is, of course, to the Mohican or Mohawk hairstyle. The very fact that there are two terms for this particular haircut is, in itself, fascinating. What is interesting is the fact that this terminology is rather confused and confusing. What Westerners and Europeans refer to as Mohican is in fact an artificial amalgam of both the Mahican and Mohegan tribes and languages, not helped by James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans which confuses the two tribes. Commonality between the two languages can be found in their shared roots as both Mahican and Mohegan belong to the Algonquian language family.

To make matters more confusing is the other term, that is Mohawk, which refers to yet another language and tribe coming from a completely different language family - Iroquoian. Therefore, in English alone we have two terms for one hairstyle that in some way reference three different native American tribes and languages belonging to two different lanaguge families.

The Polish term for the Mohican or Mohawk hairstyle is Irokez, which of course is a reference to the Iroquais Indians, a cover term which includes the Mohawks (but not the Mohegans nor the Mahicans). What is fascinating is the level of generalisation and specification used in English and in Polish. English refers to particular tribes, whereas Polish uses the cover term yet both refer to the same thing.

Interestingly, Polish culture has had an important influence on the hairstyle and the Polish Mohawk/Polish Mohican is a type of inverted Mohawk (made famous by Keith Flint of The Prodigy).

A simple haircut…

Translating Culture

OK, how do you go about translating something that cannot be translated? The best examples that come to my mind are literature of the magical realism variety where absurd plots unravel and bizarre happenings take place so outlandish that often the native mind has problems grappling the meaning of the words and the intention of the author. We have to remember that before any translation takes place, an interpretation of sorts has to take place. Translation is - in effect and in a very real practical sense - an interpretation of an interpretation (ad infinitum). The writer interprets ideas and transforms them into words on a page; we then interpret his/her message (which may or may not be in tune with the author’s original intent) and then go about transforming the words again into another lanaguage and culture. The reader then makes yet another interpretation on reading our work. OK, let’s look at an interesting little example. How would you translate the meaning and true essence (not just the words) of the following short extract from Freedom and Death by Nikos Kazantzakis. Explain to yourself what it really means and think about how to translate it into another language, what characteristics Cretans possess that make them different from other Greeks, what significance eggs have in this culture. There are a whole host of questions we can ask…

“The eggs had already been eaten, shells and all. Now Captain Michales with a blow from his fist, smashed the pottery eggcups and distributed them to his guests to eat. Bertodulos, terrified, took his piece and clung breathless to a cask. With goggling eyes he watched the Cretans at his feet bite their bits of clay and chew them until they became sand and grit, which they swalled with a snigger.
There are three sorts of men, Bertodulos slowly explained to himself: those who eat eggs without the shells, those who eat eggs with shells and those who gobble them up with the shells and the eggcups as well. The third kind are called Cretans.”