Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (31 page)
Read Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Online
Authors: David Bellos
The position of English as source and target for the vast bulk of translation done in the world to date is brought out by ranking the most popular source languages for translations into any selection of languages you care to choose. This table shows the main source languages for translations of books into thirteen widely spoken languages since UNESCO first started keeping records:
Top four source languages
What’s clear is that English, French, and German dominate translation worldwide. Russian has a perhaps surprising role in fourth place, but the eight others that appear on this ranking—Spanish and Italian three times each; Sanskrit twice; Japanese, Finnish, Bengali, Arabic, and Malayalam only once each; and Chinese not at all—are peripheral to the global business of translating books.
The raw numbers of translated books on which this ranking is based produces an even more startling picture of the pyramidal structure of global translation today. Of the nearly 1 million translations used to compile the ranking, more than 650,000 are translations from English, and a further 10 percent of the total number consists of translations into English. English is the medium as source or target of 75.12 percent of all translation acts.
What these figures also show is that around 42 percent of all the translations recorded in the UNESCO database between the thirteen languages listed above have taken place in closed circuit between just three of them—English, French, and German. This is not an ineluctable consequence of the fact that of the million books we are dealing with, more than 47 percent were published in one of those three languages, too. Culture is not the prerogative of any part or place in the world, but book culture—and, within it, the culture of translation—is heavily concentrated in Britain, the United States, France, and Germany.
As a result, at any truly representative gathering of translators from across the globe, between 70 and 90 percent of delegates must be L1 speakers of a language other than English. To put it another way: if you would really like your children to earn their living as translators, you’ll give them a much better chance if you don’t raise them in Britain or America. This also explains why translation is much less easy to see and understand when you are based in the English-speaking world. You don’t meet many translators in the normal course of life in London, Sydney, or Cork—but they’re all over the place in Geneva and Berlin.
The flow of translations has always had a hierarchical structure: the present situation reproduces a pattern that can be observed many times in the historical past. Translation typically
takes place not between languages felt by their speakers to be on an equal footing but between those that in some respect have a vertical relationship between them. Laws, commands, instructions, and treaties are translated DOWN—from Sumerian, Greek, and Latin in ancient times; from German in the Hapsburg Empire; from Ottoman Turkish in the long period of Ottoman sway in the Mediterranean basin—into vernaculars spoken by people who need to grasp what the rules and agreements that affect them are. Novels, plays, philosophical and mathematical treatises, and religious texts may accompany them, but not always. Out of these kinds of situations the world over have grown ideas among the speakers of culturally dominant tongues that their language is inherently superior and the only true vehicle of thought. In the Muslim world, for example, there was little doubt in past centuries about which language was top:
takes place not between languages felt by their speakers to be on an equal footing but between those that in some respect have a vertical relationship between them. Laws, commands, instructions, and treaties are translated DOWN—from Sumerian, Greek, and Latin in ancient times; from German in the Hapsburg Empire; from Ottoman Turkish in the long period of Ottoman sway in the Mediterranean basin—into vernaculars spoken by people who need to grasp what the rules and agreements that affect them are. Novels, plays, philosophical and mathematical treatises, and religious texts may accompany them, but not always. Out of these kinds of situations the world over have grown ideas among the speakers of culturally dominant tongues that their language is inherently superior and the only true vehicle of thought. In the Muslim world, for example, there was little doubt in past centuries about which language was top:
The perfect language is the language of the Arabs and the perfection of eloquence is the speech of the Arabs, all others being deficient. The Arabic language among languages is like the human form among beasts. Just as humanity emerged as the final form among animals, so is the Arabic language the final perfection of human language and of the art of writing, after which there is no more.
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Seventeenth-century French grammarians made much the same assertion about French, and similar expressions of confidence in the superiority of Greek, Persian, Latin, Chinese, and who knows how many others among the world’s temporarily dominant tongues could easily be lined up.
Obviously, there are no rational grounds for such kinds of linguistic preference: all languages can be made to serve whatever ends their speakers wish to achieve. But the feeling that a difficult foreign text makes real and proper sense only when it’s been put into the language we prefer to use for thinking hard thoughts can easily ambush an otherwise sensible mind. Years ago I sat in a library in Konstanz trying to make sense of Hegel by reading him very slowly in German, with a pencil in my hand. It was hard going, and I never really got the hang of it. I sneaked a look at what the German student in the next carrel was reading. It was Hegel, too—but in English translation! Well, I thought to myself with relief, if even native speakers use the English translation as a guide to Hegel’s thought … Such experiences can easily lead you into a barely conscious, self-comforting persuasion that your language alone is the one in which real meaning is to be found. But however great the service that a clarifying, explanatory translation of a foreign text may provide, we should always resist the false conclusion that the target language—whatever language it is—is “better” at expressing this or that kind of thought.
Despite their numerical insignificance, translators into English play an important role in the international trade in books. Because it is the most translated language in the world, it is far easier to get a book into any other language if it exists in English already—whatever language its original language was. But English is by no means the only “pivot tongue” in the world.
French continues to play a significant role as a conduit for global translation from less widely spoken languages. France’s proud tradition of openness to other cultures is one of the reasons why this is so. In the twentieth century, many of its leading writers—Romain Gary, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Andreï Makine, and Jorge Semprún, for example—were immigrants who had chosen to write in French. However, a more important reason for the continuing role of French in the circulation of cultural goods is not one that the defenders of French culture really like very much. French has long been the most widely taught foreign language in the English-speaking world, which makes it the main interlanguage for English and American publishers and literary scouts.
German also remains a crossroads for literature from little-studied languages. Jaan Kross, the Estonian author of
The Czar’s Madman
,
Professor Marten’s Departure
, and many other wonderful novels, was first translated into German, and that was what brought him to the attention of international literary scouts. The role of German as medium for exophonic writers has actually been growing strongly in recent years. Alongside several Japanese, Bulgarian, and Turkish novelists who have chosen to write in German, a Mongolian shaman called Galsan Tschinag is translated from his German translations into many other European tongues.
5
The Czar’s Madman
,
Professor Marten’s Departure
, and many other wonderful novels, was first translated into German, and that was what brought him to the attention of international literary scouts. The role of German as medium for exophonic writers has actually been growing strongly in recent years. Alongside several Japanese, Bulgarian, and Turkish novelists who have chosen to write in German, a Mongolian shaman called Galsan Tschinag is translated from his German translations into many other European tongues.
5
In the Middle Ages, Arabic was the pivot language that allowed Greek philosophy to be translated into European tongues—in some cases, written in Hebrew script. In the period from 1880 to 1930, Japanese was the relay language for translations of Russian literature into Chinese.
6
Even in the last fifty years, a handful of international literary careers have emerged from translation into languages outside the top three. They include the works of Bernardo Atxaga, first written in Basque, which reached a wider readership initially through their translation into Spanish, and from Spanish into French; and the Chuvash poetry of Gennady Aigui, translated independently into English and French from its Russian translation. But the use of pivot languages can be a risky affair. The Belarusan novelist Vasil Byka
, for example, was translated into Russian, which provided first entry to the world concert of books. However, Soviet translators did not dare reproduce his meaning too closely. In
Alpijskaja Balada
(
Alpine Ballad
; 1963), the hero tries to explain to a naïve foreigner about his country, saying, “It will get better someday. Things cannot go on being lousy forever.” In
Russian translation, the sentence reads: “The collective farm is good.” After such distortions, Byka
started to translate his own works into Russian soon after they had been published and also Russianized his name to Vasil Bykov. This allowed the Soviet authorities to present him as a Russian novelist, concealing the fact that his works were originally written in another (related) tongue. In Bykov’s case, translation UP simply absorbed a writer in a “minor” language into the regionally dominant one.
7
6
Even in the last fifty years, a handful of international literary careers have emerged from translation into languages outside the top three. They include the works of Bernardo Atxaga, first written in Basque, which reached a wider readership initially through their translation into Spanish, and from Spanish into French; and the Chuvash poetry of Gennady Aigui, translated independently into English and French from its Russian translation. But the use of pivot languages can be a risky affair. The Belarusan novelist Vasil Byka
, for example, was translated into Russian, which provided first entry to the world concert of books. However, Soviet translators did not dare reproduce his meaning too closely. InAlpijskaja Balada
(
Alpine Ballad
; 1963), the hero tries to explain to a naïve foreigner about his country, saying, “It will get better someday. Things cannot go on being lousy forever.” In
Russian translation, the sentence reads: “The collective farm is good.” After such distortions, Byka
started to translate his own works into Russian soon after they had been published and also Russianized his name to Vasil Bykov. This allowed the Soviet authorities to present him as a Russian novelist, concealing the fact that his works were originally written in another (related) tongue. In Bykov’s case, translation UP simply absorbed a writer in a “minor” language into the regionally dominant one.7
However, even in places not afflicted by political appropriation of that kind, the drift away from small languages toward a dominant tongue has been felt again and again. In the late nineteenth century, an editorialist for the Japanese daily newspaper
Yomiuri Shimbun
opined that his country had much to give to the world beyond Mount Fuji and Lake Biwa—it had magnificent literary works such as
Genji Monogatari
or Bakin’s
Nans
Satomi Hakkenden
. But the distance between Japanese and the European languages was too great to make translation feasible, in his view:
Yomiuri Shimbun
opined that his country had much to give to the world beyond Mount Fuji and Lake Biwa—it had magnificent literary works such as
Genji Monogatari
or Bakin’s
Nans
Satomi Hakkenden. But the distance between Japanese and the European languages was too great to make translation feasible, in his view:
However great our future writers may be, their fame will never succeed in crossing beyond our borders … And so I would like to suggest to the public spirited men of the world that they engage themselves in the writing of English … In this day and age, it is self-evident that a man with great ambitions should study English writing. Study it, and strive, by using the language, to make his glory shine abroad. There is nothing great about a fame solely garnered in the context of this pathetic string of islands.
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