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Funny and surprising on every page, Is That a Fish in Your Ear offers readers new insight into the mystery of how we come to know what someone else means whether we wish to understand Asteerix cartoons or a foreign head of state. Using translation as his lens, David Bellos shows how much we can learn about ourselves by exploring the ways we use translation, from the historical roots of written language to the stylistic choices of Ingmar Bergman, from the United Nations General Assembly to the significance of James Camerons Avatar. Is That a Fish in Your Ear ranges across human experience to describe why translation sits deep within us all, and why we need it in so many situations, from the spread of religion to our appreciation of literature; indeed, Bellos claims that all writers are by definition translators. Written with joie de vivre, reveling both in misunderstanding and communication, littered with wonderful asides, it promises any reader new eyes through which to understand the world. --amazon.com… (more)
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Bellos tells us that although there are perhaps as many as 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, most
Perhaps I have thus far given the impression that this book is just a compendium of fun language facts. It is, but that’s not the point of the book at all. Rather, the author sets out to define translation, and then determine what makes a good translation, and finally to consider why we need translation at all? Why don’t we all just learn to speak a common language?
In characterizing translation, Bellos explains that “meaning” is not the only component of an utterance; there is also tone of voice, context, layout, intention, culture, form (such as poem, play, legal document), the identities of the communicants together with the relationship between them, etc. In fact, as Bellos observes, what matters the most is not a word-to-word congruence. On the contrary, it is more important for the translator to preserve the force of the utterance in another language. Thus the translator must take into account such factors as levels of formality in conversation, as well as customs and rules about how men and women and people of different social classes may relate to each other. Importantly, he adds, “No sentence contains all the information you need to translate it.”
One of my favorite examples in the book is this anecdote:
"In many parts of Africa… casting branches in the path of a chief expresses contempt, whereas in the Gospels it is done to mark Jesus’s return to Jerusalem as a triumph… Revision of the Gospel’s account of Palm Sunday is both absolutely necessary to avoid giving the wrong message to African readers and at the same time impossible without profoundly altering the story being told.”
Another great example given by Bellows concerns a statement released by the office of Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, in 1870. The statement referred to a communication made to the French by “the adjutant of the day.” In German, this is a high-ranking courtier, but in French, this is a mere warrant officer. The French took the meaning of this word-for-word translation as a sign of grievous disrespect, and an international incident ensued, culminating in a declaration of war by the French six days later.
Translating humor is a particular challenge; meaning must almost always be changed to get the particular point across the original is trying to make.
Moreover, translators try to get across the style of an author or what makes him or her distinct:
"The question is: At what level is the Dickensianity of any text by Dickens located? In the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, the digressions, the anecdotes, the construction of character, or the plot?"
All of these considerations (and many more delineated by Bellos) mean that just knowing the words of another language is insufficient to be a good translator.
At the end of the book, Bellos asks if one day we might just be able to have the equivalent of a translation fish in our ears, as was the device used in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, and then we would all be able to understand one another totally. He suggests this is unlikely, since linguistic diversity serves other functions besides the conveyance of meaning in different formats: it also serves to establish lines of in-groups and out-groups, and helps form part of the identity of an individual as a member of a specific community. “Every language,” he notes, “tells your listener who you are, where you come from, where you belong.” It is not poetry that is lost in translation, he avers, it is community. But translation can accomplish almost everything else to enable human beings to communicate thought. He concludes “We should do more of it.”
Evaluation: This is a highly entertaining and thought-provoking treatise on what comprises communication and the surprisingly small but important role that language plays in the process. I loved this book.
Note: Bellos is the prize-winning translator of the works of Georges Perec and Ismail Kadare. He teaches French and Comparative literature at Princeton University
In this loosely-linked collection of essays on the history and practice of translation, Bellos sets out to demolish those philosophical windmills and show us that his craft is possible, useful and necessary. He does so wittily and engagingly, but doesn't always quite manage to quell our suspicion that they were only windmills in the first place. The core of his argument, really, is that translation isn't about transferring exact semantic content, but about creating likeness, transferring the functional effect of a text. The reader of a translated instruction manual must be able to perform the task being instructed; the reader of a treaty must know what's been agreed; the reader of a novel must be entertained, informed and moved in ways that are sufficiently like the ways the original operates.
There's also a lot of very interesting information here about the things we translate and don't translate, the use of widely-understood "vehicle" languages like English and French, the difference between translations into languages with large numbers of powerful speakers and into those spoken by small groups of relatively powerless people, the (dying?) black art of simultaneous interpretation in conferences, the mysterious appearance of a pisang tree in a Bible translation, the curiously low status literary translation has in the English-speaking world, and lots of other fascinating topics.
Judging by the other reviews of this book, this is an area where linguists have deeply entrenched positions, and Bellos hasn't convinced many of them, but for non-combatants it's an entertaining and informative look into a world we normally only see through the material it produces.
(I also loved the way Bellos doesn't bother to explain the Douglas Adams allusion in his title until nearly 300 pages into the book: anyone who hasn't grown up knowing about such things clearly has no business reading a book like this!)
I do so agree with the blurb from Michael Hofmann of the UK Guardian who simply says ”Please do read David Bellos’s brilliant book.”
Prepare your favorite drink, find a silent place, and get ready for an intelligent conversation that always keeps a sense of humor on how we're surrounded by the activity we call translation. As the author tackles famous myths about translation, you'll get to admire this human faculty, and learn more about the obscure corners of this intricate world, a world where silent victories of human intellect are celebrated by thankless readers.
The book will take you from building a perspective on the excruciating debate of poetry translation to how translators deal with the maddening constraints of comic books. But it will not stop there, and take you on a journey of international publishing and how politics and dominant forces shape the book market as we know it. As if that's not enough, you'll learn about unique linguistic state of European Union, and how it affects laws and funny things about legislation. You will smile and scratch your head in confusion. Sometimes at the some time.
In the end, will this book succeed in translating the beauty of such a uniquely human activity into a neural encoding for you indirectly? Well, it did, for me, to an extent. And I tried to translate some of my experience into signs on a computer screen. Consider this a brief "thank you" note.
The cover and subtitle evoke Douglas Adams's Babel Fish and 'the meaning of life, the universe and everything'. Describing the book
If you're interested in this topic, I suggest you watch Stephen Fry's excellent BBC series Fry's Planet Word where he deals with the complex idea of language and translation in a fascinating, yet light-hearted way - does anyone know if he's written a book on the subject?
(This review was originally written for Amazon's Vine programme.)
Indeed, I have never thought much about translation. Even while reading all these translated works this past month, I’ve never thought about the actual act of translating, and how incredibly difficult it must be.
And Bellos’ book makes me respect this job, this science, this art of translation.
And David Bellos knows what he is talking about. For he is a professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton University, and also the director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. In this book, he sets out to investigate:
“What is it that translators really do? How many different kinds of translating are there? What do the uses of this mysterious ability tell us about human societies, past and present? How do the facts of translation relate to language use in general – and to what we think a language is?”
One of the biggest eye openers was the seemingly simple Asterix comics. In the book, Bellos reproduces a single cell from the strip, where Asterix meets ‘Anticlimax’, who is in the original French called ‘Jolitorax’, a pun on “fair chest”, “pretty thorax” which doesn’t mean anything to English-speakers, but would to someone who speaks French. Translator Anthea Bell substitutes ‘Anticlimax’ for ‘Jolithorax’, and Bellos quips: “If you thought translating Proust might be difficult, just try Asterix”. For cartoon translators have to make it fit the picture, and the speech bubble, among other issues.
Of course translation of graphic novels is just a teeny weeny part of this book. Bellos discusses all aspects of translation, from dictionaries to oral translation to translating humour.
Quite a lot of this is out of my league, way over my head, or just too much information. And it all got too much towards the end of the book – I skipped the chapter on Language Parity in the European Union (seems to belong more in a textbook), and skimmed most of some other chapters like the one on automated language-translation machines.
But Bellos did make me think more about translation, translators, and their effect on language and the world.
An interesting example is that of a junior trader in the Dutch East India Company who translated the Gospel of Matthew from Dutch into Malay, using words from Arabic, Portuguese and Sanskrit when he knew no corresponding term. However, when the Dutch version talks of a fig tree, the translator used the Malay word ‘pisang’ or banana tree, which he justified by the fact that there are no fig trees on Sumatra. So it makes one wonder about the translations that we read, how much of it is interpreted in a different way for us, for those who may not understand that culture, that society, that style of humour, for instance. It goes to show much translators put of themselves into what they translate. As with the first quote right at the start of this post, no two translations will be identical. It is quite fascinating!
I could continue with many more examples from the book. I found myself sticking post-its all over this library book (of course I’ll remove them before I return it).
“English, for instance, doesn’t possess a designated term for the half-eaten pita bread placed in perilous balance on the top of a garden fence by an overfed squirrel that I can see right now out of my study window, but this deficiency in my vocabulary doesn’t prevent me from observing, describing, or referring to it.”
Is that a Fish in Your Ear? is incredibly informative, and far more humorous than I expected it to be, and the parts that I didn’t skip over were great reads, peppered with great examples. But while this book started out so strong and made me so interested in the act of translation, it’s a bit disappointing how it ended – a little too tedious for the everyday reader. However, as David Bellos says at the end of the book about translation, “We should do more of it.”
And as readers, we should read more of it.
One of the first things that struck me about the work as a whole was that Bellos was taking the opportunity to defend his profession, or at least his approach to the business of translation. Chapters often deal with a particular assault on translation or translators, mainly in the form of an every day platitude, which is then investigated, tested and (for the most part) satisfactorily overturned. I found myself disagreeing with his opinions on occasions, but the evidence is presented well enough that the reader can draw his own conclusions most of the time. Neverthelees, there appear to be some contradictions in the book, and some of his arguments felt at times overdrawn. For instance, he criticises a statement made by Nabokov regarding Pushkin's poetry that 'to reproduce the rhymes and yet translate the entire poem literally is mathematically impossible'. He then goes on to illustrate how the form of said poetry lent itself well to translation, and that the root of Nabokov's statement lay in his reluctance to attempt it. Whilst this isn't necessarily untrue, it doesn't detract from Nabokov's original statement about the impossibility of translating both form and content, nor does the statement that other gifted translators give a 'good approximation of Pushkin's verse'. Bellos' own chapter on poetry, as another reviewer well pointed out, if anything confirms Nabokov in his statement.
In his defence of translation, Bellos covers a wide range of fields and periods, from Sumeria through the Bible to the EU, with humour, legalese and interpreting all playing a part. He depaints the difficulties the translator faces, having restrictions of space (e.g. comics), time (e.g. film subtitles/dubbing), dealing with grammatical features that are missing in target or source language, or simply requiring clarification of meaning where there is none to be had. The chapters covering the workings of the EU and the UN are particularly interesting, as is the thread running through the work about the dominant role of English and its potential effects on other languages through the work of translators. Another strong point is Bellos' inclusion of plenty of examples and anecdotes that help to elucidate his points, both in terms of the difficulties and the successes.
Whilst there were a few statements in the book which I would consider 'mistakes', these were always peripheral to the main argument, and the work is otherwise extremely well-researched and detailed. Bellos writes with authority, and despite his strong points of view never comes across as condescending - in fact, a real sense of modesty peers through his writing, especially when dealing with areas of translation that are not his particular field.
Ultimately, this is a book that will definitely appeal to the right reader. Despite my finding some of his arguments to be not particularly convincing, Bellos presents enough information and evidence to allow his readers to make their own minds up. As an overall introduction and summary to the world of translations, this book is a thorough success, most suited to students of language, those considering becoming translators, and perhaps people interested in finding out more about the translations they themselves consume. Yet as others have pointed out, it isn't as straightforward a read as the title or dust jacket make out, so a brief flick through before picking it up would probably save a few rumpled foreheads.