February 24, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:And now for something completely different
Via the impeccably excellent About Last Night comes this interesting post on writing in a language other than your native tongue:
Bookslut links to an article about Panos Karnezis in which he talks about his choice to write in English.
Apart from the commercial advantages of being able to sell English-language fiction worldwide, there are technical reasons, too, for Karnezis' choice. "The Greek language is a bit like Spanish - more other, much more wordy. It's common to have very long sentences. As a language, Greek is more dramatic. I try to bring the Greek experience - the bathos, the pathos - into English."For my part, I wrote in Arabic and French when I was a kid but English superseded those languages by the time I started college. When I wrote in Arabic I found it hard to keep up with the rhythm. Pick up any novel in Arabic and you'll see that a sentence can run a page or two. I needed the finality of the period, perhaps because I had been already exposed to non-Arabic punctuation from a very early age. In French I wrote mostly poetry, long pieces that were meant to sound like Lamartine or Hugo and later like Baudelaire or Verlaine. I started learning English in high school and liked the mechanics of the language and soon I was reading almost everything I could get my hands on in English. Sometimes I even read French or Arab writers in translation. After a few years English became the language I think in. Sometimes when I talk to my mom my Arabic comes out garbled, like a translation of something I'm conceptualizing in English. (There's fodder for you Sapir-Whorf people.) Some of my favorite writers are non-native speakers: Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad and more recently Ha Jin and I end up re-reading them almost every year. Sometimes I wonder if language choice affects the kinds of stories I'm writing or thinking about writing. I suppose the only way to find out is to switch back and see. I certainly plan on trying that someday.
Is there a tension, then, between the language and what Karnezis is writing about? "Yes, yes. It's very interesting. You can explain a man's macho attitude with one word in Greek. You can be much more specific. Here, you have to do it in a few sentences, which I find a great challenge. It's like building a wall."
This particularly struck me for two reasons:
a) I'm a lousy writer in any language other than English (and many would argue, in English as well)
b) I've had several interesting discussions with Contributor A of Mistakes Were Made about the oft-heard statement that there are things one can only say in certain languages. Contributor A, who is among his many other talents an amateur linguist and an enormous fan of Steven Pinker's, argues that this is so much twaddle. I agree in the strong sense that there aren't words that are untranslateable--but I think it's true in the sense that it is often impossible to convey the flavour of a word, the subtle meanings and associations that a native speaker has with it, so that though you may be able to express any particular word's core meaning, the process of translation can nonetheless strip much of the meaning out of a document. Anyone who's been following Juan Cole's interesting pieces on the Zarqawi letter will see just how important this can be when you're trying to understand what the writer was saying to his audience--and what his audience heard.
Posted by Jane Galt at February 24, 2004 7:14 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksMay I be the first to say it.
You write very well in English.
Now your opinions....
:)
Jane - You spoke/wrote Arabic and French as a kid? Inquiring minds, not here from the beginning and too lazy to search through your voluminous archives, can't help wondering where you grew up. (Your short bio doesn't even hint at this fascinating background.)
Oh, no . . . that's from the post I linked. I spoke good old American English growing up, had some French from sixth grade on, and Spanish and a smattering of German and Hebrew in college (I remember nothing of the latter two now, sadly).
Thanks for clearing that up, Jane! Obviously, I need a refresher course in either speed-reading or recognizing extended quotes. ;-)
One of my best friends, who is Italian by birth, was an English major in college (in Milan), moved to New Zealand and became a linguistics major (now getting his Ph.D.) told me that English is a much easier language to express himself in because there are so many words. (by, that was a heck of a sentance!) He said Italian has about 100,000 - 150,000 words that are used and that this was the standard for most romance languages. English, he told me, has about half a million.
That's somewhere around three to five times more words. Giovanni (my friend) said it made it much more difficult to learn, but once you had it, much easier to convey ideas.
I always like to think of English as having hybrid vigor!
Kate-- that certainly makes the aesthetics of writing in different languages different. In English, a sign of better writing and style is the use of synonyms and avoiding repetition. This is hardly true in many other languages, such as Japanese.
It's a very odd thing to get used to, though, when learning a language.
But Kate, those extra words come at a cost:
There, their, they're
To, two, too
etc.
I suppose it is slightly OT but I recommend a wonderful book: "The Mother Tongue" by Bill Bryson.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0380715430/qid=1077647216/sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_2/102-2304243-4072136
"...the process of translation can nonetheless strip much of the meaning out of a document"
A translator not only strips the meaning out of the document, he or she places what you call the "core meaning" into the cultural context of the target language. That's what makes it meaningful as a translation. Otherwise, you get machine translation.
Sometimes, if the writer is second-rate, the translator is better at creating a cultural context than the writer was, resulting in the translated work being more popular than the original. For example, Byron is more popular on the continent than in English.
So the core meaning can be translated, in a strict sense, but it's trivial in terms of creating meaningful translation.
Take it from someone who's spent years in Computational Linguistics: context is everything. While it's true (I believe, anyway) that there's no such thing as an "untranslatable word," it's equally true that contexts in interpretation differ. To give a very focused example, "Yiddish" is very close to consisting of 100% cognates with German, but a German saying "Mensch" and a Jewish person saying "Mensch" mean appreciably different things, and most people are aware of this whether they speak either language or not.
I also wonder whether the level of abstraction inherent in the writing affects the ease or difficulty of translation. For example, is William Weaver's job of translating Umberto Eco's Italian fiction into English easier or harder than that of translating other authors?
Finally, for an excellent book on the subject of translation in general and translating poetry in particular, let me strongly recommend Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, by Douglas Hofstadter.
Worth considering that part of contemporary English's stranglehold on word counts comes from a tendency to adapt non-English words as necessary. Try and think of many English words that capture the full meaning of rendezvous, for example -- they exist but it's hard to use them or the near synonyms without two or three other words to support and clarify the thought. ("Appointment" is perhaps nearly the same in most contexts.) But since the French word got appropriated into English and is now understood by any fluent English speaker...meanwhile reciprocity is not the case because the French language elites fear a "pollution" of the tongue, to the point that words they can't evict suddenly become deliberately Francophoned, witness the "cédérom."
And as with the CD-ROM, acronyms and abbreviations can become words, to the point that nobody knows their origin. How many people casually use "snafu" (and write it in lower case) without even knowing that the original form was a WWII acronym containing a word many of those same people would not employ in polite company?
And then nouns sometimes become verbs -- the act of implementing a noun gradually becomes a verb form over time merely by using the noun form or a near variant with verb intent.
And sometimes new words are invented, either out of the blue or by permutations of an existing word or words, and become so heavily used they integrate into the language.
Etc. (hehe)
english is the solution to not being able to express an idea from another language
if the idea's good enough, we'll just steal the bloody word
jodhpur, je ne sais quoi, rsvp, elan, bungalow, mesa, schadenfreude, gottdammerung, borscht, banzai, etc
in the case of greek and latin, we've incorporated major portions of both languages
we can therefore incorporate new ideas
unfortunately, it's just brutally hard to spell words in english except through memorization
our etymology is great, but where fish = ghoti you know spelling doesn't map to pronounciation
Anything you can say in one language you can say in another, but
1. What's easy and elegant in one language is often awkward in another.
2. It might take you significantly longer to say it in another language.
As for more words in English, if you look at a dictionary (and don't mind sounding pedantic) it's true, but as a translator (Polish to English) my most frequent problem is that there's no word in English (see 1. and 2. above).
Also Polish sentences tend toward long and very long, but very long sentences are much easier to read in Polish than English (subordinate clauses are a bitch in English but super easy in Polish).
I'll also mention that first and second language users often have different tastes "Always look on the bright side of life" is absolutely hilarious for Poles who know English well enough to understand it, while most native speakers I've known think it's mildly amusing but nothing special (and Poles IME don't get the lumberjack song no matter how good their English is). Similarly, I enjoy reading things in Polish (Police novels from the 70's and 80's especially) that make many people doubt my taste/sanity.
Any native German speakers out there?
My German is pretty good, but I have yet to successfully explain the difference between "arrogance" and "condescension" to a native German speaker in less than two or three paragraphs. And even then I'm not certain I was successful.
Another example (from German) that I like: In English, if I get to the bus stop after the appointed time, I'm "late but not too late." In German, arriving "late" (spät) means something along the lines of "without the expected/reasonable margin" (i.e. only 1 minute before the scheduled time rather than 5). "Too late" ("zu spät") means after the appointed time, regardless of what the bus does. I've never found a concise way to express "late but not too late" in German.
Cheers,
Erik
FYI: The Arabic/French speaker in the post is not the writer of the About Last Night blog, but Moorishgirl, whom About Last Night is quoting.
PS: It was linked properly. I'm just, you know, putting the name out there
I think Jane and I are coming together here - yes, there are things more easily said in one language than another, but the "Sapir-Whorf people" alluded to in the original post believe that language truly structures thought at a deep level. This leads to all kinds of myths, from "the Hopi have a fundamentally different concept of time becuase they use words that don't overlay exactly with English words" to "the Eskimos have forty words for snow and that makes them see it differently". Neither is true: there are a single-digit handful of Eskimo snow words, and the Hopi do indeed think of past, present, future, days, months seasons and years, and so on.
So my argument is only with this strong version, that language actually determines thought, and if you lack a word you can't think the thought. It's just not true that if your language lacks that "mot juste", (a totally needless borrowing that means "right word", nothing more), you can't think something. Are Greeks more macho becuase they have lots of words for it? Of course not. They have words for it becuase they're macho.
And yes, I'm a big Pinker fan, and I'd like to recommend that everyone go right out and read "The Language Instinct" straight away, especially before you go to Bryson's "Mother Tongue" (sorry, Steve). I love Bryson when he's being funny and observant, but I'll never take him extremely seriously after finding about half a dozen errors in the first chapter of "Mother Tongue", including the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, which was thoroughly debunked in an essay of that name by Geoffrey Pullum. You'll get a lot of fun and a lot of mythology but fairly little serious linguistics from Bryson.
Just to throw in my $0.02:
I grew up speaking both Chinese and English (I am of the 2nd generation in the US.) I find that there are phrases in Chinese that express ideas that are difficult to sum up in English. For the briefest example, the Chinese phrase ("wo hu cang long") that is translated as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" a means of describing someone who has a great deal of skill or strength but keeps it hidden.
While I'm on the subject, I had the most difficult time explaining to my now-deceased grandmother (God rest her soul) who was learning English that 'astronaut' was 3 syllables, not four. (She insisted that there were four syllables, divided 'a-ss-tro-naut'. Go figure.)
Japanese has borrowed a lot of those four-character expressions, Klug. I find it generally helps to think of them as proverbs in shorthand: shin-shou-bou-dai = make a mountain out of a molehill-ish. Sometimes the tone is a bit too folksy, but something has to give.
On a related note, what John Thacker said (about not having to avoid repetition) is something non-native speakers/writers of Japanese rely on all the time. In English you often sound insincere or inappropriately stiff if you use conventional phrasing; in Japanese, no one cares about your sincerity as long as you preserve the forms, so you can frequently write documents that are little more than strings of memorized set phrases and have something perfectly acceptable.
It's not just a matter of the words, it's the way we sound them out in our heads when we read. I worked for a while translating plays from German into English, and I found that with an "untranslateable" sentence you have two options:
1. Render it in an English that leaves not doubt as to the author's semantic intent, but gets bogged down in the explanation.
2. Leave a footnote for the actor explaining in detail what the line really means and where it comes from and let the actor work the definition into the way he reads the line.
When you read a sentence, a rhythm develops naturally in your head that, from experience in your native language, chooses to stress or not stress different words and phrases. These, in turn, help determine meaning.
Which leads me to agree with Michael Farris. You can, indeed, say anything in any language, but in the wrong language it might not be worth it anymore by the time you get there. Language isn't just semantic meaning; it's the weight that comes from rhythm, too.
Also, translations tend to only be good for a generation or so, while the original work tends to endure without translation. We have not lost the meaning of Shakespeare in English, for example, but he goes through about three "definitive" translations a century in German. Perhaps Shakespeare is a special case, because he helped create English, but take a modern author, like Brecht: four or five translations of his major plays in the eighty years since they've been written.
I'm bringing up this second point because I've been thinking about it since I started translating seven years ago and I don't really know why it's true.
And then, of course, you have the problem of dialects, and even idiolects (how the hell do you translate Finnegans Wake, or even Harry Potter, for that matter?)
There are cultural limitations. A friend of mine had his Japanese boss visit him at his home. He has asthma and the boss (you guessed it) smoked. We asked why he didn't just ask his boss not to smoke. He said there was no way in Japanese to do so.
Every possible translation of "I'm terribly sorry, but do you mind not smoking?" came out as the Japanese equivalent of "Stop smoking, you jerk!". There just wasn't a polite way of asking a superior to stop doing something he was already doing.
My $ 0.01 worth :
The idea that you can always find a way to express an idea in any langiage, even if inelgantly. Well, yes. I've been asking for the past three years what the word for " cod " is in Portuguese and there doesn't seem to be one. There's bacalau ( probaby the wrong spelling but hey ) which means salt cod, and it's the national dish. But there appears to be no way to refer to " fresh cod " in the language. The concept just isn't there. The best anyone has been able to come up with is " bacalau fresca " or "fresh salt cod"
If anyone knows different please do let me know.
It's my impression that Spanish uses fewer words than English because the unspoken/unwritten subject pronouns are implied by the conjugation of the verbs. "Quiero un taco" - three words - is "I want a taco" in English. It only seems like more words because Spanish uses more syllables - 6 (5 for English). I think that example is fairly typical.
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