Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (22 page)
Read Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Online
Authors: David Bellos
Having bowed my head in submission and rubbed my slavish brow in utter humility and complete abjection and supplication to the beneficent dust beneath the feet of my mighty, gracious, condescending, compassionate, merciful benefactor, my most generous and open-handed master, I pray that the peerless and almighty provider of remedies may bless your lofty person, the extremity of benefit, protect my benefactor from the vicissitudes and afflictions of time, prolong the days of his life, his might and his splendor …
Also, every scrap of information they gleaned from translating for a foreign embassy was put up for sale. As one English ambassador put it, since these dragomans “with large families live upon a small salary and are used to Oriental luxury, the temptation of money from others is with difficulty withstood by them.”
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It’s easy to see why such dragomans should adapt their work to their audience—they were Ottoman subjects and stood to lose far more from displeasing the authorities than from misrepresenting their foreign employers:
Fear tied their tongues: they would much rather risk their employer’s displeasure than the brutal fury of an angry pasha … At times, ingenious interpreters … were known to improvise imaginary dialogues—to substitute speeches of their own inspiration for those really made.
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They were suspect in any case for the mere fact of working for a foreign embassy. Why double the risk by failing to address local potentates with the florid servility to which they were accustomed? Adding a few paragraphs of eternal devotion wasn’t mistranslation. It was life insurance. “All things considered, the wonder is not so much that Dragomans fulfilled their perilous task inadequately, as that they dared undertake it at all.”
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Fidelity was obviously a major issue for Ottoman dragomans, but it didn’t mean what translation commentators in the West seem to mean by “fidelity to the source.” Dragomans needed to prove that they were faithful to the padishah or to the particular Ottoman grandee they were addressing.
It was the grandest of the Phanariot dragomans who paid the highest price for suspected disloyalty. In 1821, the Greek provinces of the Ottoman Empire rose up in revolt. Because they were Greeks as well as Catholics, Phanariot families in Istanbul came under immediate suspicion. Their leader, Grand Dragoman Stavraki Aristarchi, was hanged for treason. Why? Because, as had long been said in the Ottomans’ international language,
Traduttore/traditore!
Translators are traitors anyway!
Traduttore/traditore!
Translators are traitors anyway!
This exotic adage has percolated into all Western languages, in Italian and in translation, and has become one of the most commonly touted pieces of expertise about translation in circulation. But save in quite exceptional cases it is wrong, and always was. The translation practice of the dragomans was generally subservient to an outstanding degree—subservient to the purpose of the original, and subservient to the dragomans’ real masters. Treachery was what the masters feared, not what the translators performed. But even if Phanariots did on occasion make deals for themselves by misrepresenting their commissioners, the connection between “translating” and “treachery” is of no relevance to modern, thoroughly print-based societies. In a world where you can check the translation against the original, even when it has the form of speech (thanks to the sound-recording devices we have used for the past one hundred years), the principal grounds for the fear and mistrust of linguistic intermediaries that is endemic to oral societies no longer exist. Yet people go on saying
traduttore/traditore
, believing they have said something meaningful about translation. A thoughtful translator such as Douglas Hofstadter still feels he needs to counter it with a pun in the title of an essay, “Trader/Translator.”
15
We may now live in a sophisticated, wealthy, technologically advanced society—but when it comes to translation, some people seem to be stuck in the age of the clepsydra.
traduttore/traditore
, believing they have said something meaningful about translation. A thoughtful translator such as Douglas Hofstadter still feels he needs to counter it with a pun in the title of an essay, “Trader/Translator.”
15
We may now live in a sophisticated, wealthy, technologically advanced society—but when it comes to translation, some people seem to be stuck in the age of the clepsydra.
Traditional mistrust of oral interpreters in the Middle East affected Western tourists when visits to the region became practical and prestigious for individuals in the nineteenth century. Tourists had to rely on local intermediaries for contact with the authorities, and hereditary dragoman families turned themselves into guides, guesthouse brokers, and go-betweens for the purchase of antiquities and other delights. As they performed their tasks according to their own traditions of highly adaptive translation, they were despised and scorned. “Dragomania,” the fear and loathing of the intermediaries who ran rings around all but the most canny Western travelers, made a major contribution to the stereotype of the “wily Oriental gentleman” of colonial-era travelogues.
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The tropes of “fidelity” and “betrayal” in translation commentary do not come to us only from a vanished Ottoman past.
In seventeenth-century France
, several translators of the Greek and Latin classics thought it best to amend the originals to make them correspond more closely to the standards of politeness that ruled behavior and writing at the Court of Versailles. Swearwords and references to bodily functions were simply cut out, as were whole passages referring to drinking, homosexuality, or the sharing of partners. Confident in the absolute rightness of the courtly manners of France, these translators tried to produce translations that were fitter for their target audience, and also (in their view) better and more beautiful works. They were saving the Greeks from themselves by editing out all those primitive blemishes. Purposefully and intentionally adaptive, these many classical texts refashioned for courtiers (or for children) were dubbed
les belles infidèles
, literally, “beautiful unfaithful [ones] [feminine].”
In seventeenth-century France
, several translators of the Greek and Latin classics thought it best to amend the originals to make them correspond more closely to the standards of politeness that ruled behavior and writing at the Court of Versailles. Swearwords and references to bodily functions were simply cut out, as were whole passages referring to drinking, homosexuality, or the sharing of partners. Confident in the absolute rightness of the courtly manners of France, these translators tried to produce translations that were fitter for their target audience, and also (in their view) better and more beautiful works. They were saving the Greeks from themselves by editing out all those primitive blemishes. Purposefully and intentionally adaptive, these many classical texts refashioned for courtiers (or for children) were dubbed
les belles infidèles
, literally, “beautiful unfaithful [ones] [feminine].”
These two adjectives juxtaposed imply a missing noun between them, and the absent word is obviously
traductions
, “translations.” At bottom, the phrase
les belles infidèles
says only “beautiful free translations.” However, French adjectives preceded by an article (
a
,
the
) can also be taken as nouns, just like “the poor” or “the unwashed” in English. So because its form is feminine and plural,
les belles
can also mean “[the] beautiful women,” and the whole phrase,
les belles infidèles
, read that way around, may be taken to say “beautiful women who cheat.” This construction of the phrase allowed for the invention of another adage that has burdened translation commentary ever since. Translations, this saying goes, are like women.
Si elles sont belles, elles sont infidèles, mais si elles sont fidèles, elles ne sont pas belles—
“If they are good-looking, youcan’t trust them to be faithful, and if they stick by their mates, it’s because they’re old frumps.” That’s a fairly free translation by conventional standards, but it is exactly what the adage implies (while also being translatable in its other dimension as “Aesthetically pleasing ones are adaptive, and nonadaptive ones are just plain”). The shadow of such sexist nonsense falls even today upon a French publishing house with an otherwise admirable list of translated works—Les Belles Infidèles.
traductions
, “translations.” At bottom, the phrase
les belles infidèles
says only “beautiful free translations.” However, French adjectives preceded by an article (
a
,
the
) can also be taken as nouns, just like “the poor” or “the unwashed” in English. So because its form is feminine and plural,
les belles
can also mean “[the] beautiful women,” and the whole phrase,
les belles infidèles
, read that way around, may be taken to say “beautiful women who cheat.” This construction of the phrase allowed for the invention of another adage that has burdened translation commentary ever since. Translations, this saying goes, are like women.
Si elles sont belles, elles sont infidèles, mais si elles sont fidèles, elles ne sont pas belles—
“If they are good-looking, youcan’t trust them to be faithful, and if they stick by their mates, it’s because they’re old frumps.” That’s a fairly free translation by conventional standards, but it is exactly what the adage implies (while also being translatable in its other dimension as “Aesthetically pleasing ones are adaptive, and nonadaptive ones are just plain”). The shadow of such sexist nonsense falls even today upon a French publishing house with an otherwise admirable list of translated works—Les Belles Infidèles.
Sexist language has been the object of long and mostly successful campaigns in France as in the English-speaking world, but only rarely has it been observed that outside the context of politeness as it was understood in the French seventeenth century,
les belles infidèles
, whether used as a three-word catchphrase or in the longer adage that was built from it, is an insult to women. Most people let it pass because they think it is a statement about translation. It is not. It’s about male anxiety—to the point of misogyny. It applies to translation, I suspect, only because, like other versions of the betrayal motif, it says just how frightening translation can seem.
les belles infidèles
, whether used as a three-word catchphrase or in the longer adage that was built from it, is an insult to women. Most people let it pass because they think it is a statement about translation. It is not. It’s about male anxiety—to the point of misogyny. It applies to translation, I suspect, only because, like other versions of the betrayal motif, it says just how frightening translation can seem.
Some critics have argued that a good translation is one that is faithful to its source. The corollary would be that a bad one counts as some kind of a betrayal and therefore justifies to some degree the worn-out and disreputable clichés we’ve tried to demolish. The corollary would be plausible if we knew what we meant in saying that a faithful translation is a good one. Why indeed is the term
faithful
applied to translation at all? True, a good spouse is a loyal one, and a decent spy is not a traitor. We also used to ask of servants and family retainers that they be faithful to their masters. But translators aren’t married to their originals, nor do they work for the CIA. The repeated insistence on “fidelity” as a criterion of quality in translation has certainly led many to describe themselves as servants of their originals. In so doing, they reenact the historical and prehistoric origins of their profession—the exercise of skills possessed by slaves.
faithful
applied to translation at all? True, a good spouse is a loyal one, and a decent spy is not a traitor. We also used to ask of servants and family retainers that they be faithful to their masters. But translators aren’t married to their originals, nor do they work for the CIA. The repeated insistence on “fidelity” as a criterion of quality in translation has certainly led many to describe themselves as servants of their originals. In so doing, they reenact the historical and prehistoric origins of their profession—the exercise of skills possessed by slaves.
Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1880. Time to move on.
Custom Cuts: Making Forms Fit
Chinese people love to pass around
shunkouliu
on oral grapevines. These are satiric rhythmical sayings, often consisting of quatrains with seven-syllable lines. The regularity of the form is audible and also visible in writing, because each Chinese character corresponds to one syllable. Here’s a jingle of that kind:
shunkouliu
on oral grapevines. These are satiric rhythmical sayings, often consisting of quatrains with seven-syllable lines. The regularity of the form is audible and also visible in writing, because each Chinese character corresponds to one syllable. Here’s a jingle of that kind:
Compact, patterned, dense, allusive, bitter, and humorous … translating a
shunkouliu
is a tall order. So why bother to try? Yet despite the odds, this barbed rhyme about New China’s old guard can be tailored into a pleasing and meaningful shape in a language completely unrelated to its original tongue. Here’s how it can be done, step by step.
shunkouliu
is a tall order. So why bother to try? Yet despite the odds, this barbed rhyme about New China’s old guard can be tailored into a pleasing and meaningful shape in a language completely unrelated to its original tongue. Here’s how it can be done, step by step.
1. Translated character for character
Hard hard bitter bitter four ten years
One morning return to untie release before
Already thus return to untie release before
Just-at year change fate in-fact for whom?2. Translated group for group
Strenuous, strenuous forty years
One morning return to before Liberation
Given that return to before Liberation
In those days revolution in fact for whom?3. Explanation, sense for sense
An extremely strenuous forty years
And one morning we [find ourselves having] returned
to before Liberation
And given that we’ve returned to before
Liberation
[We might ask] who, in fact, the revolution back in
those days was for.4. Plain translation
An extremely strenuous forty years
And suddenly we’re back to before Liberation
And given our return to before Liberation
Who, in fact, was the revolution for?5. Adding some rhythm
An extremely strenuous forty years
And suddenly we’re back to ’forty-nine,
And since we’ve gone back to ’forty-nine
Who, in fact, was it all for?6. Matching words to Chinese syllables
For forty long years ever more perspiration
And we just circle back to before Liberation
And speaking again of that big revolution
Who, after all, was it for?7. Adding rhyme
Forty long years crack our spine
Back we go to ’forty-nine
Since we go to ’forty-nine
Back then who was it all for?8. First polish
Forty years we bend our spine
And just go back to ’forty-nine
And having gone to ’forty-nine
Whom back then was this for?9. Adaptation, with double rhyme
Blood sweat and tears
For forty long years
Now we’re back to before
Who the hell was it for?10. As a word rectangle (6 × 4)
We had sweat, toil, and tears
For more than forty bloody years
Now we’re back to square one
For whom was it all done?11. Isogrammatical lines (21 × 4)
Blood sweat and tears
Over forty long years
Now it’s utterly over
Who stole the clover?12. Sounded out in Chinese
Xin xin ku ku si shi nian
yi zhao hui dao jie fang qian
ji ran hui dao jie fang qian
dang nian ge ming you wei shui
What’s been done in the later versions of this translation is to exploit the flexibility of English to simulate artificially the patterned visual effect of a script whose appearance naturally represents patterned sound. Counting characters and spaces along the line isn’t usually considered a translator’s task, but it’s really just one variant of the need in a whole variety of fields to make words fit shapes.
Strip cartoons are not redrawn when they are translated, and of the four-color plates used, only the black-and-white one with the lettering is remade for international sales. The cartoon translator has to make his version fit physically into the bubble spaces left blank by the three other plates. A very small amount of flexibility is provided by being able to alter the size of hand-drawn lettering—but limits are set by the requirement of legibility. The cartoon translator also has very little freedom to move meanings around between frames, since the captions must fit the picture, right down to the details of what the depicted characters are doing with their arms and hands. If you thought translating Proust might be difficult, just try
Astérix
:
Astérix
:
The “Breton” cousin of the Gaulish heroes speaks a parody of schoolbook English in French, with word-for-word renderings of “I say,” “a bit of luck,” and “shake hands.” Moreover, his name, Jolitorax, is a pun on “fair chest,” “pretty thorax,” which is not remotely funny in English. The translator Anthea Bell deftly reinstates the caricatural nature of the representation of English in French by inserting “Oh” and “old boy,” and she substitutes a rather better pun of her own for the name. Doing all that within the confines of a physical space that can take only so many letters makes this translation an exploit, a victory over language itself. But only slightly lesser feats are performed every day by professionals and amateurs the world over who translate Japanese manga into English or Belgian graphic novels into Portuguese, and so on. Graphic translation is much bigger business than literary fiction and probably rivals the translation of cookbooks in volume and turnover. Studying translated captions of works of this kind is an education in the flexibility of human languages and human minds. Nothing ever fits easily, but in the end a really surprising amount of form and content can be made to fit external constraints of nonlinguistic (bubble size) and paralinguistic (gestural) kinds.
Subtitling is a smaller business, but the skills it engages are of the same kind. It has become conventional to regard average moviegoers as capable of reading only about fifteen characters per second; and in order to be legible on a screen as small as a television set, no more than thirty-two alphabetic characters can be displayed in a line. In addition, no more than two lines can be displayed at a time without obscuring significant parts of the image, so the subtitler has around sixty-four characters, including spaces, that can be displayed for a few seconds at most to express the key meanings of a shot or sequence in which characters may speak many more words than that. The limits are set by human physiology, average reading speeds, and the physical shape of the movie screen. It’s really amazing that it can be done at all.
A further constraint on subtitling is the convention that a subtitle may not bleed across a cut: if you have someone chatting to his neighbor on an airplane seat and then a cut to a shot of the plane landing, for example, the subtitle must disappear at or just before the cut, and the following caption may not appear before the next audio sequence begins. Consequently, a film has to be decomposed into the “spots” in which subtitling may occur. The delicate job of “spotting” (made a lot easier if the film distributor can provide a transcript of the voice track) may or may not be done by the translator hired to write the captions. Usually, at least two people are involved. It follows almost automatically from this that subtitles do not offer a translation of all the words spoken, and in particularly fast-talking films they can offer only a compression or a résumé.
Stringent formal constraints in film translation are believed to have had important retroactive effects on original work. Filmmakers dependent on foreign-language markets are well aware of how little spoken language can actually be represented in on-screen writing. Sometimes they choose to limit the volubility of their characters to make it easier for foreign-language versions to fit all the dialogue on the screen. Ingmar Bergman made two quite different kinds of films—jolly comedies with lots of words for Swedish consumption, and tight-lipped, moody dramas for the rest of the world. Our standard vision of Swedes as verbally challenged depressives is in some degree a by-product of Bergman’s success in building subtitling constraints into the composition of his more ambitious international films. It’s called the “Bergman effect,” and it can be observed in the early films of István Szabó and Roman Polanski, too.
The supposed Bergman effect in film may actually be only a “keyhole” example of a much wider modern trend. Steven Owen has argued that some contemporary poets from China, for example, write in a way that presupposes the translation of their work into English—and that all writing in foreign languages that now aspires to belong to “world literature” is built on writers’ effective internalization of translation constraints.
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1
Subtitling into English is a very small part of the translation world because so few foreign films are screened in the United States. At present there are only two American companies that provide subtitling services (and neither of them do only that), and they rely on a loose network of translators whose main jobs are elsewhere. Paid derisory sums at piece rates, the tiny band of English-language subtitlers are among the least-loved and least-understood language athletes of the modern media world.
In many countries, dubbing is preferred. It is rarely done into English nowadays, because American audiences insist on complete lip-synching, so that no trace remains of the foreignness of foreign-language films. To make a translation of speech such that when pronounced it matches the lip movements of the original speaker—measured in fractions of a second—is no trivial task. But it’s not only the microseconds that count. The translated dialogue is also constrained by facial gestures and movements of the body, even when those are not the customary accompaniment of the words spoken in the target language. The writers of dubbing scripts are not just athletes; they are world-class gymnasts of words—but almost never credited with their achievements in the English-speaking world.
The popularity of English-language films worldwide means that most American and British films are dubbed in multiple versions for sale abroad. Dubbing skills are much more widely used and appreciated in German, Italian, Spanish, and many other languages. One result of this asymmetry that is quite perceptible on-screen is that perfect lip synchronization is not always felt to be necessary by non -English-language audiences. American and Brazilian soap operas broadcast on Russian television channels frequently have voice tracks that bleed (when dialogue continues beyond the point at which the characters’ lips stop moving)—but the voices of familiar actors are characteristically those of well-known “dub stars” in the target tongue. Everyone in Germany knows the voice of “Robert De Niro,” for example, and knows also whose actual voice it is—that of Christian Brückner, a prizewinning star among audiobook readers, too, nicknamed “The Voice” in the German-language media press. Meryl Streep’s German voice is that of Dagmar Dempe, for
all
her films; Gabriel Byrne has been voiced by Klaus-Dieter Klebsch throughout his career since 1981. German moviegoers would be discombobulated if Russell Crowe, in his next blockbuster appearance, didn’t have the voice that really is his—that of Thomas Fritsch.
2
The French voices of Homer and Marge Simpson, Philippe Peythieux and Véronique Augereau, have their pictures in newspapers.
3
In this respect as in others, English speakers find in the language culture of almost any other country a truly foreign land.
all
her films; Gabriel Byrne has been voiced by Klaus-Dieter Klebsch throughout his career since 1981. German moviegoers would be discombobulated if Russell Crowe, in his next blockbuster appearance, didn’t have the voice that really is his—that of Thomas Fritsch.
2
The French voices of Homer and Marge Simpson, Philippe Peythieux and Véronique Augereau, have their pictures in newspapers.
3
In this respect as in others, English speakers find in the language culture of almost any other country a truly foreign land.
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