What is Translation? Sanaz was standing next to me once again and I couldn’t have been happier. Sanaz was the German girl I had fallen in love with while I was on Erasmus in Ireland. A few days after we had come back home, she had decided to make me a surprise and book a flight to Catania. In that moment we were waiting in front of the cathedral for an open bus which would take us around the city. ɑll of a sudden an elderly lady started shouting out of anger in pure Sicilian dialect, ‘Ju, pi trasiri nta cresia, ma cummigghiari tutta para comu na maomettana e stu pugnu di Giufà ficiru trasiri du masculu all’anagrafe menzu a nuda (Io, per entrare in chiesa, devo coprirmi completamente come una maomettana e questo pugno di Giufà ha fatto entrare quel tizio seminudo che possono considerare uomo solo all’anagrafe)‘. What had happened? Despite of the fact that a sign out of the church clearly read ‘This is a place of worship. We beg you to show respect: no shorts, no miniskirts, no sleeveless dresses or t-shirts’, a long-haired bare-chested boy had been let in. Impressed and amused by the woman’s colourful style and the concise and strikingly original insult she had created on the spot (du masculu all’anagrafe), I couldn’t help hooting with laughter. 1 It goes without saying that Sanaz immediately asked me, ‘What’s funny? What did that woman say?’ That wasn’t the first time I had translated something. ɒut that time I realised that the difficulty of the translation was considerably greater. How to render all those elements that had made me burst into laughter? How to express the coarse ignorance, the verbal abuse and the bitter irony of the lady in another language? How to convey the system of values hidden behind those words? How to recreate that low register in English? How to do justice to some cultural and folkloric references and the double meanings contained in some terms? How to translate that string of words? … ɑnd, above all, what was translation? In everyday life everyone makes, at least, two of the three different types of translation distinguished by Roman Jakobson: transposition (translation between media), intralingual translation (translation between different states of the same language) and ‘translation proper’ (translation between languages)1. Almost every day we negotiate meanings within our language (intralingual translation). Our thought and language do not vary from country to country only, but also from generation to 1 Bellos, David, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London: Penguin Books, 2011) p. 323. 2 generation. New generations inherit the major part of thought and language from ancestors and slightly change them over time2. This is the reason why the works of Dante, Boccaccio or Petrarca are not readily comprehensible to today’s readers. The other kind of translation that we make almost mechanically day by day is translation between different languages (‘translation proper’). Nowadays we live in a huge global community and, consequently, translation is practically unavoidable. This ‘jungle of languages and translations’ is even more tangled in countries where there are also minor languages (like in Italy, Spain, ɒelgium, Ireland, etc…) We face and decipher foreign terms every day3 (sometimes we even use them when they are not needed at all, especially as a way to pretend to be fluent in another language or to create Nobel-prize worthy gibberish). 2 Leigh, R., Gregor, Translation (The School Review, Vol. 12, No. 6 (Jun., 1904), pp. 482-490, The University of Chicago Press) p.482. 3 “What translation does in the first place is to represent the meaning of a foreign text” Bellos, David, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London: Penguin Books, 2011) p. 56. 3 When in the news Enrico Letta was referred to as ‘il premier italiano’, I immediately understood that they were talking about the ‘presidente del consiglio dei ministri’; if I speak too fast and someone asks me, ‘mi puoi fare lo spelling? (can you please spell it?)’, I know exactly that I have to ‘computare’; when a friend of mine orders a glass of whisky, I know that a glass of a spirituous liquor distilled from malted barley will be served. Obviously ‘different languages have words for mostly similar kinds of things, because we are all human’4. But when a certain language is in fashion or lexicalises specific concepts that miss in another language, speakers of the latter often borrow foreign words, in the form of loanwords or loanshifts. Even if we live immersed in translation and society cannot do without it, translation seems to be invisible. And so are translators.Generally, they are condemned to a sad invisibility. For example, Italian translators do not enjoy a high status and are not given any symbolic or material reward (Italian literary translators see their names on the dust-jacket printed in tiny fonts). They are not as well-paid as their French colleagues and do not receive any royalties on the books they translate like their German counterparts5 - 6. 4 Animation – Is That A Fish In Your Ear? – David Bellos (www.vimeo.com) http://vimeo.com/27969381. min. 00:10 - 00:20. 5 Andrea Bocconi, Lavoro intellettuale in Italia: la sfortuna di nascere traduttore (ilfattoquotidiano.it) http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2013/06/22/lavoro-intellettuale-in-italia-la-sfortuna-di-nasceretraduttore/634017/ 4 To make things even worse, the only time when translators become visible, they are expected to account for their work, explain and justify7. The first thing I did, to let Sanaz understand, was explain the context. As both David Bellos8 and Paolo Emilio Balboni9 argue, the linguistic meaning of the words uttered represents just a fragment of all that happens while something is being said. Any piece of language behaviour acquires a certain meaning in a certain context. If I was not wrong, a similar and complementary concept had been developed also by Amparo Hurtado ɑlbir in her “Traducción y Traductología: Introducción a la traductología”. 6 Bellos, David, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London: Penguin Books, 2011) p. 302 - 303. 7 Halliday, Iain, Huck Finn in Italian, Pinocchio in English (Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009) p.17. 8 Bellos, David, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London: Penguin Books, 2011) p. 71 - 72. 9 "10 Minuti con..." Ca' Foscari: Video lezione di Didattica Lingue Moderne - BALBONI (www.youtube.com) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP1hDnco-Qw. min. 8:09 - 9:26. 5 “[...], no basta con los conocimientos lingüísticos; el traductor ha de poseer también conocimientos extralingüísticos”.10 (linguistic knowledge is not enough; the translator must have also extra-linguistic knowledge). 10 Hurtado, Amparo Albir, Traducción y Traductología: Introducción a la traductología (Madrid: Cátedra, 2001) p. 29 -30. 6 ‘Well… You know that churches are absolutely sacred places to the Catholics, don’t you?’, I started explaining in a hesitant way, ‘The lady gave vent to all her bitterness against the man who walked into the cathedral half-naked and the security officers who let him in. She compared the latter with a character of Sicilian folklore that represents the symbol of the goodfor-nothing idiot and whose name is Giufà11. As to the former, the woman insulted him heavily and publicly by raising doubts about his maturity, for the way he behaved, and his virility, because of his hairstyle. She spoke in an aggressive way, used a very informal register and showed off a considerable amount of illiteracy, coarse ignorance and stereotypes. Firstly, she didn’t use Italian, but Sicilian dialect. Which means that probably she is illiterate; secondly, she insinuated that all long-haired men are gay and all Muslim women wear burqa; thirdly, she thinks that Muslims believe in Mahomet, not in Allah. The woman said ‘Mohammedan’ not ‘Muslim’.’ Once the context had been made clear, I could focus on the linguistic level only. ɒecause of my ‘Sicilian’ laziness, the first temptation I was about to give in to was to reach out for the smart phone in my pocket, launch the app Google Translate, type in the text in Italian and After read all, what out was the wrong with translation. that approach? Unlike the previous computer-based language translation programs, Google Translate considers linguistic expressions not as something to be decoded, but as something that has 11 Giufà (en.wikipedia.org) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuf%C3%A0 7 already been said. It uses vast computing power to scour the Internet looking for the expression in some text that exists alongside its paired translation. This technique, together with human translators’ contributions, reinforces the probability that the original Google Translate translation is acceptable12. Then an imperious voice in the back of my mind screamed ‘What the hell are you doing?! Do you realise that, if you do so, your translation will be - let’s use a euphemism incomprehensible to anyone and lose all the features that made you fall about laughing? First of all, you yourself know very well that Google Translate does not have a Sicilian corpus; secondly, in Italian the words of the old woman wouldn’t sound the same; finally - what’s more - even if you turned the message into Italian, Google Translate would never find a match in English for such an original and unique utterance. Probably that translation device will produce a nonsense. Let’s be honest: Google Translate is NOT a suitable tool for the kind of translation you want to do’. They were all wise remarks. Maybe the automatically translated text would have read something like: “I, for entering the church, I have to cover myself completely as a Mohammedan and this handful of Giufà did get that guy half-naked man can be considered only anagrafe” I had to adopt another strategy. In my second attempt to translate the woman’s utterance, I resorted to the same technique 12 Bellos, David, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London: Penguin Books, 2011) p. 262 - 265. 8 that I used to apply when, as a high school student, I translated from Latin into Italian: transverbalization13. Practically, I would translate word for word. The result of this literal translation was: “I, to enter a church, have to cover myself like a Mohammedan woman and that handful of Giufàs let that half-naked only-for-the-civil-register-male (only the documents of the registry office certify his virility and adulthood) person enter.” If on the one hand, this procedure showed the source language as it was and gave an exact rendering of the Sicilian order of words and constructions; on the other hand, this literal translation did not have a minimum of English coloring and did not convey the same emotional charge as the original. ɒesides, I couldn’t ignore all those authoritative voices in the history of translation studies that had criticised literal translation and were starting to crowd in my mind: Cicero, who had written in his Libello de optimo genere oratorum that translation verbum pro verbo was to be avoided; Horace, who had expressed the same concept in his Ars poetica14; Saint Jerome, who had noticed, ‘if I render word for word, the result will sound uncouth’ 15; and Octavio Paz, who had 13 Shedd, E. Cuttler, The Translation of Latin (The Classical Weekly, Vol. 1, No. 12 (Jan. 11, 1908), pp. 90-91, Classical Association of the Atlantic States p. 90. 14 Halliday, Iain, Huck Finn in Italian, Pinocchio in English (Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009). p. 23 -24. 15 Halliday, Iain, Huck Finn in Italian, Pinocchio in English (Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009). p. 33. 9 stated, ’No digo que la traducción literal sea imposible, sino que no es una traducción (I’m not saying a literal translation is impossible, only that it’s not a translation)16. That text wasn’t satisfactory, but I didn’t throw the baby out with the water. It was a good starting point. I had to improve it and, as Saint Jerome wrote, translate sense for sense, instead of word for word17. From the lexical point of view, I opted for common informal words. So I changed ‘enter’ with ‘get into’, ‘have to’ with ‘gotta’18, ‘cover myself’ with ‘wrap up’, ‘let… enter’ with ‘let in’, ‘person’ with ‘guy’ . I was unsure about keeping ‘Giufàs’; at the end, I didn’t substitute it with ‘good-fornothings’, because I had explained the meaning before. I substituted ‘Mohammedan’ with ‘Mahometan’ because the latter was old-fashioned19 and, consequently, more suitable in the 16 Bellos, David, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London: Penguin Books, 2011). p. 104. 17 Bellos, David, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London: Penguin Books, 2011). p. 106. 18 gotta, v. Pronunciation:/ˈɡ tə/ a representation of the colloq. or vulgar pronunciation of (have) got a or (have) got to (see get v. 24a) (http://www.oed.com/) http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/80241?redirectedFrom=gotta#eid 19 Mahometan, n. and adj. Pronunciation: Brit./məˈh mᵻt(ə)n/ ,U.S. /məˈh mədən/ Now arch. and rare. 10 mouth of an old woman. I couldn’t help changing my personal neologism: only-for-the-civilregister-male. I tried to recreate the bitter doubts of the old woman about the man’s sexuality and maturity by adding a relative clause and putting the adjective ‘real’ before ‘man’. Finally, I decided to substitute ‘civil register’ with ‘I.D.’ because I wanted my translation to sound smooth and because I thought that the ear of an English speaker was much more familiar with this legal document. On the contrary, on the syntactic level, I reproposed the same constructions as the original with the only exception of the new relative clause. My aim was to give a flavour of Sicilian dialect. This was the result of my meditation: “To get into a church, I gotta wrap up like a Mahometan woman and that handful of Giufàs let in that half-naked guy who is a real man only on his I.D.!” I wondered immediately, ‘Did I do a good job? Was I able to express the same concepts as the source text? Did I find the right matches? Did this translation sound natural? Did I succeed in rendering the style of the woman? Did I sacrifice any elements of the original text?’ etc... Fortunately, before my insecurities could eat me alive, an illuminating and reassuring passage from ‘Is That a Fish in Your Hear?’ dawned on me : = Mahommeddan (http://www.oed.com/) http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/112411?redirectedFrom=Mahometan#eid 11 “What translators do is find matches, not equivalences, for the units of which a work is made, in the hope and expectation that their sum will produce a new work that can serve as a substitute for the source. [...] What counts as a satisfactory match is a judgement call, and is never fixed. The only certainty is that a match cannot be the same as the thing that it matches. If you want the same thing, that’s quite right. You can read the original.” 20 Just when I was about to open mouth, another thorny dilemma flashed through my mind. Did I have the right to break one of the “golden rules of translation”? In other words, was my attempt of translating from my native language to my second language theoretically grounded? If, on the one hand, translations from L1 to L2 are considered unethical and inaccurate because they are contrary to a professional norm and tend to strengthen L1 interference 21, on the other hand, it is impossible to deny that the essential skill of a translator is the complete comprehension of the original22. A native speaker of the source language generally has a greater understanding of the text and 20 Bellos, David, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London: Penguin Books, 2011) p. 320 21 Malmkjær, Kristen, Translation in Undergraduate Degree Programmes (Benjamins Translation Library, 2004). p. 132. 22 Bellos, David, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London: Penguin Books, 2011) p. 65. 12 it is no mystery that professional translators consult native speakers on occasions in the course of a translation23. In addition, (paraphrasing another concept expressed by David Bellos) since very few native speakers of major languages are fluent in minor languages24, the only way to describe small limited realities and get an international hearing is to resort to the most widespread language: English. Even if we don’t realise it, we are living in era of rapidly progressive linguistic unification. One of the main reasons for this phenomenon is the undisputed supremacy of the United States over the world. With the ending of the Cold War and the collapse of communism in the east, the United States extended its influence even further throughout the world. As a consequence, English became the dominant language and main means of communication 25. If Renzo Tramaglino, the fictional character from the Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, were alive, he would not hesitate to say, ‘English? You mean the new Latinorum, right?’. One last argument in favour of L2 translations crossed my mind as soon as I remembered a remark made by David ɒellos in the sixth chapter of ‘Is That a Fish in Your Ear?’: 23 Halliday, Iain, Huck Finn in Italian, Pinocchio in English (Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009). p. 94. 24 Bellos, David, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London: Penguin Books, 2011) p. 65. 25 Blake, Norman, Francis, A History of the English Language (New York University Press, 1998) p. 303- 304. 13 “[...] ɒritish and ɑmerican universities, [...] when seeking to appoint someone as a professor of languages, conventionally state that ‘native or quasi-native competence’ is required in the language to be taught. What can ‘quasi-native’ possibly mean? In practical terms it means ‘very, very good’. Implicitly, it means that you can be very good at French or Russian or ɑrabic even if it is not your birthright.” 26 I didn’t consider myself as ‘very, very good’, but I was convinced that it was worth giving it a try. ɑfter all, as the Italian saying goes ‘You learn by your mistakes’. I broke my silence: ‘In English what the woman said would sound more or less like this: “To get into a church, I gotta wrap up like a Mahometan woman and that handful of Giufàs let in that half-naked guy who is a real man only on his I.D.!”’ While repeating, I couldn’t help putting on the typical Sicilian drawling accent to give one more touch of ‘Sicilianity’. On the grounds of what I remembered of Lawrence Venuti’s theories about the invisibility of the translator, I thought that he would have appreciated this attempt 27. 26 Bellos, David, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London: Penguin Books, 2011) p. 62. 27 “Venuti rejects the ideal of the "fluent" translation, as being in itself a falsification, and ultimately calls for ‘abusive’ translations that proclaim the presence of the translator. The virtue of such an approach, for Venuti, is that the characteristic marks, the native flavor of the original are not smoothed out in the name of fluency.” 14 To my great delight (and pride) also Sanaz started laughing. In that moment I realised that translation means not only to find the best match possible in the target language, but also to strive to communicate all the meanings and all the features contained in a text (be it oral or written) to someone who does not master the language of the source text. Jackson, Thomas T. Theorizing Translation (SubStance, Vol. 20, No. 1, Issue 64 (1991), pp. 80-90, University of Wisconsin Press) p. 82. 15 Bibliography 1) Bellos, David, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London: Penguin Books, 2011). 2) Blake, Norman, Francis, A History of the English Language (New York University Press, 1998). 3) Leigh, R., Gregor, Translation (The School Review, Vol. 12, No. 6 (Jun., 1904), pp. 482490, The University of Chicago Press). 4) Halliday, Iain, Huck Finn in Italian, Pinocchio in English (Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009). 5) Hurtado, Amparo Albir, Traducción y Traductología: Introducción a la traductología (Madrid: Cátedra, 2001). 6) Malmkjær, Kristen, Translation in Undergraduate Degree Programmes (Benjamins Translation Library, 2004). 7) Jackson, Thomas T. Theorizing Translation (SubStance, Vol. 20, No. 1, Issue 64 (1991), pp. 80-90, University of Wisconsin Press). 8) Shedd, E. Cuttler, The Translation of Latin (The Classical Weekly, Vol. 1, No. 12 (Jan. 11, 1908), pp. 90-91, Classical Association of the Atlantic States. 16 Webliography 1) en.wikipedia.org Giufà http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuf%C3%A0 2) www.oed.com gotta: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/80241?redirectedFrom=gotta#eid Mahometan: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/112411?redirectedFrom=Mahometan#eid 3) www.ilfattoquotidiano.it Andrea Bocconi, Lavoro intellettuale in Italia: la sfortuna di nascere traduttore. http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2013/06/22/lavoro-intellettuale-in-italia-la-sfortuna-di-nasceretraduttore/634017/ 4) www.vimeo.com Animation – Is That A Fish In Your Ear? – David Bellos http://vimeo.com/27969381 5) www.ymerleksi.wikispaces.com PDF - Malmkjær, Kristen, Translation in Undergraduate Degree Programmes http://ymerleksi.wikispaces.com/file/view/Translation+in+Undergraduate+Degree+Program 17 mes+%28John+Benjamins%29.pdf 6) www.youtube.com "10 Minuti con..." Ca' Foscari: Video lezione di Didattica Lingue Moderne - BALBONI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP1hDnco-Qw 18