Thank you so much to everyone who has been supporting this Substack. I thought it was time for a change of pace. For the next few months, we will be looking at some common translation and interpreting myths. Each month, the free post will discuss the myth, while the paid posts will apply them to interpreting and multilingual church. Let’s start with the biggest of all.
Translation is impossible.
Otherwise known as:
· Something always gets lost in translation.
· The original is better.
· You have to learn the original language to get it.
· Layers of meaning are missing.
· Mumbling about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
· Every translation is biased.
· And, on the most fun days, something about how languages present different views of the world and so they are not interchangeable.
With the possible exception of the last claim, all of these sentences come from the same root. They assume that there is something that makes the process of taking something from one language to another flawed and problematic. There are some very technical arguments for and against each claim. However, it makes a lot more sense to go after the root first and then see how that helps us with each of the individual claims.
So what is the simplest way of dealing with the myth that translation is impossible.
The Problem with Translation Being Impossible
The biggest problem with the claim that translation is impossible is.
Wait for it.
Hold on just a bit longer.
Are you ready?
The biggest problem with the claim that translation is impossible is:
Translation happens all the time. And it seems to work too.
Any argument, no matter how philosophical, that contradicts reality is suspect. So we should be immediately skeptical of any argument that translation is impossible, since translation obviously happens all the time.
The Philosophical Comeback
Ah, but of course, few people talk about translation being impossible without knowing that something called “translation” happens all the time. The obvious counter argument is that we call “translation” isn’t real translation. Real translation, apparently, would involve all the shades of meaning from the source text being brought over into the target text and that, we are told, is impossible. Therefore, translation, real translation, is impossible.
Wait a minute.
There are several problems with that objection. Let’s start with the simplest.
Who gets to define “translation”? If someone buys the thing they call a “translation” and that thing does what they expect a translation to do, who gets to tell them that they didn’t actually buy a “translation”?
More to the point, why should anyone care of what we call “translation” isn’t really “translation” if it works?
The second issue is the whole “every shade of meaning” thing. Who decides on all the shades of meaning that exist in a piece of writing? A Shakespeare expert will “see” more shades of meaning in a single line of The Merchant of Venice than a child will see. The phrase “I’m home” means something different when said by someone who has been in exile for a year than it does when someone says it in response to a text from their parent.
The “shades of meaning” we see depend on who we are, where we are, and what we have experienced, even more than they depend on the words on the page. I will never forget one of my English literature lecturers asking a visiting poet about their allusion to some obscure ancient Greek play, when the poet had no idea that the play existed!
We can’t base any definition of translation on “shades of meaning” since “shades of meaning” are, at best, a really fuzzy concept. How can translation even deal with “shades of meaning” when people will always disagree as to which meanings are there?
What is translation, anyway?
We can therefore safely put away any philosophical meanderings when it comes to talking about translation. They are unlikely to lead anywhere useful and, honestly, most of the philosophical arguments against translation being possible require us to either ignore the real world or to talk about translation in terms that end up making communication in a single language impossible, never mind in more than one language.
We need a simple, realistic definition of translation. We can actually have two.
The most basic definition, which comes to us from Gideon Toury, is simply that a translation is whatever the people in the receiving culture call a translation. This is simple. Perhaps too simple. Let’s go with something a little more precise
A translation is a text that seeks to represent a source text in a new language. It must have a defined audience and purpose.
We can unpack that fully another time but, for now, I want to concentrate on two things: representing a source text and having a defined audience and purpose.
What this means is that a translation is clearly linked to some kind of previous text and wants people to understand that text in some way. Exactly how it does that is not defined by the text it represents, but by its audience and purpose. A translation of the manual of a game aimed at new gamers will be different than if the audience is esports experts. A translation of Shakespeare that will be performed will be different to one that is for private study.
Purpose and audience determine how a translation works. Purpose and audience also determine the meanings that are relevant and how these meanings will be communicated.
A Simple Example
Take this door sign.
(Image: Mike Mozart, flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/)
If we need a translation of it, the audience would be the people in this building and the purpose would be to ensure that people could get out of building in a fire. We therefore don’t need every possible meaning of fire: “to sack, shoot from a gun, cook until black, heat up ceramic in a kiln” and every possible allusion to doors throughout English literature.
We need a translation that will do the job and get over the meanings that are relevant here. That’s it. That’s why translation is possible and that’s why the philosophical arguments about loss and Sapir-Whorf, layers of meaning, and needing to read the original all miss the point.
Translation exists to get stuff done and the right translation is the one that gets the right stuff done.