Shakespeare, William; King Lear; Macbeth
Shalamov, Varlam
Shannon, Claude
Shaw, G. B., Pygmalion
Shibata, Motoyuki
Shoah (film)
shunkouliu
sign, linguistic
signaling
signifier
simultaneous interpreting; EU; Nuremberg Trials; UN
Singin’ in the Rain (film)
Sinha, Amara
slaves; as translators
Slovak
Slovene
Smetona, Antanas
social class
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sonnenfeldt, Richard
Sophocles
sound translation
source-text language; hierarchical relationship between target language and; L1 translation
South Africa
South America
Spain; conquest of Americas
Spanglish
Spanglish (film)
Spanish; Bible; Castilian; as UN language
speech; differential function of; hand movement and; original common form of; thought transmission and; see also oral translation
Spitzer, Leo
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti
spoken speech language
Stalin, Joseph
statelessness
Steiner, George
Strachey, James
Strasbourg Oath
Strategy for American Innovation, A
Streep, Meryl
style; individual sense of; poetry; research; sheets; terminology; translation of
substitute; analogy-based; cultural; of translation for original text
subtitles
Sumatra
Sumerian; dictionaries
Surrealism
Swahili
Swedish
Switzerland
Symbolism
symptomatic meaning
syntax
Syria
Syriac
Szabó, István
Tagalog
Tamil
target language; hierarchical relationship between source language and; L2 translation; modification
targums
Tartu
Tati, Jacques
teaching languages; immersion; translation-based
technology; machine translation; simultaneous interpreting
teenagers, loss of language proficiency in
telementation
tercüman
thesauruses
third code
Thirlwell, Adam
thought transmission
Tieck, Ludwig
titles
Tok Pisin
Tolstoy, Leo; War and Peace
Torah
Torbert, Preston
tourism
Tranglish
transcoding
translation: Avatar as parable of; avoidability of; Bible; borderline between rewriting and; boundaries and; commentary; cultural domination and; definitions; as dialect; dictionaries and; disparagement of; diversity of language and; DOWN; effects on receiving cultures; equivalent effect; etymological roots of; EU language-parity rule and; foreign-soundingness of; global; Google; hierarchical relationship between source and target languages; humor; impacts; impossibility of; ineffability and; literal; literary; L3; machine; making forms fit; meaning and; native language and; news; nonfiction; oral; passed off as original work; pseudo-; relations; sameness, likeness, and match; simultaneous interpreting; sound; spread of international law and; of style; as substitute for original text; terminology; UP; variability of; word-for-word ; words and
transliteration
treachery
Treaty of Rome
Trique
trust; oral translation and
Tschinag, Galsan
Turkish
Twain, Mark, “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” 107–108
typo
typography
Ugaritic
Umbrian
UNESCO
unification, language
United Bible Societies
United Nations; Commission for Human Rights; General Assembly; simultaneous interpreting; translation; World Charter of Human Rights
United States
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
universities, languages taught in
unstable anchoring
Urdu
utterance; meaning and; oral translation
Uzbek
Vargas, Fred
vehicular languages
Venice
Venuti, Lawrence
“Verbatim,” 121–22
verbs; performative; prepositional
vernacular languages; African American; translating DOWN to
vocabulary
Volapük
Volodine, Antoine
Volokhonsky, Larissa
Voltaire
von Humboldt, Wilhelm
von Schlegel, August Wilhelm
vulgar language
Waard, Jan de
Waley, Arthur
Wall Street Journal
Walpole, Horace; The Castle of Otranto
Warner, Rex
Weaver, Warren
WELR
whale language
whisper translation
Whorf, Benjamin Lee
Williams. K.
Wodehouse, P. G.
Wolof
word-for-word translation
wording
Word Magic
words; dictionaries; diversity of; identification of; lack of matching; literal vs. figurative meanings; literal translation; meaning and; as names of things; terminology
Wordsworth, William
World Bank
World Trade Organization
World War I,
World War II
written language; difference between oral language and; origins of script
Wu Jing Project
Yade, Rama
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny
Yiddish
Yoruba
Young, Thomas
Yugoslavia
Zacuto, Abraham
Zamenhof, Lejzer
Zipf’s law
Zulu
Permissions
See Here “Ma mignonne”: English translation of Marot, reproduced with the kind permission of Professor Douglas Hofstadter.
See Here “Recent observations”: Scientific pastiche, from Cantatrix Sopranica et autres écrits scientifiques, 1991, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, © Georges Perec; published in the U.K. as Cantatrix Sopranica: Scientific Papers of Georges Perec (London: Atlas Press, 2008).
See Here “One consequence of this”: Anadalam 1, from La Vie mode d’emploi (ed. Magné), 1978, Hachette-Littératures, p. 141, © Georges Perec; published in the U.K. as Life A User’s Manual, 2008, Vintage, p. 110, © David Bellos, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group, Ltd.; and in the United States as Life A User’s Manual, new edn., 2009, David R. Godine, p. 125, © David Bellos.
See Here “Of all the characteristics”: Anadalam 2, from La Vie mode d’emploi (ed. Magné), 1978, Hachette-Littératures, p. 142, © Georges Perec; published in the U.K. as Life A User’s Manual, 2008, Vintage, p. 110, © David Bellos, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group, Ltd.; and in the United States as Life A User’s Manual, new ed., 2009, David R. Godine, p. 125, © David Bellos.
See Here “If the translation”: Japanese translation terms, from Michael Emmerich, “Beyond Between: Translation, Ghosts, Metaphors,” posted online at wordswithoutborders.org, April 2009, reproduced with the kind permission of Professor Michael Emmerich.
See Here “Fisches Nachtgesang”: Finnish translation of the sight-poem courtesy of the translator Reijo Ollinen, originally quoted in Andrew Chesterman, Memes of Tr
anslation, John Benjamins, 1997, p. 61.
See Here “Un petit d’un petit”: French version of Humpty Dumpty, from Luis d’Antin van Rooten, Mots d’Heures, Gousses, Rames, Grossman, 1967.
See Here “Sa bella giu satore”: Gibberish song from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, 1936, courtesy of the Chaplin estate, copyright © Roy Export S.A.S. All rights reserved.
See Here “The positive and the classical”: From De La Grammatologie, Jacques Derrida, © Éditions de Minuit; published in English as Of Grammatology , Jacques Derrida. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. © 1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.
See Here “My mother language”: Letter from Estonian translator, reproduced with the kind permission of Anti Saar.
See Here “In order to give”: Leonard Bloomfield, from Leonard Bloomfield, Language, Henry Holt & Co., 1933, p. 140.
See Here “Cinoc …”: Perec’s word-killer, from La Vie mode d’emploi (ed. Magné), 1978, Hachette-Littératures, p. 341, © Georges Perec; published in the U.K. as Life A User’s Manual, 2008, Vintage, pp. 287–88, © David Bellos, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group, Ltd.; and in the United States as Life A User’s Manual, new ed., 2009, David R. Godine, p. 327, © David Bellos.
See Here “Platon could never recall”: From War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Rosemary Edmonds, © Penguin Classics.
See Here “”: Shunkouliu, reproduced with the kind permission of Professor Perry Link, University of California at Riverside.
See Here “I’m Asterix!”: Astérix 1, © 2011 Les éditions Albert René/Goscinny-Uderzo.
See Here “Je suis Astérix!”: Astértix 2, © 2011 Les éditions Albert René/Goscinny-Uderzo.
See Here “Attempts to render a poem”: Nabokov on translation, from Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin, translated and with a commentary by Vladimir Nabokov, Routledge, 1964, Vol. 1, pp. vii–ix, © Princeton University Press.
See Here “Faster! Faster!”: Israeli “Onegin stanza,” from Another Place, a Foreign City, by Maya Arad, copyright © by Xargol Books Ltd., Tel-Aviv, 2003; translated into English by Adriana Jacobs and reproduced with her kind permission.
See Here “‘Sybil,’ said I”: Sybil, from La Disparition, Georges Perec, 1969, Éditions Denoël, in the translation, A Void, by Georges Perec, translated by Gilbert Adair, published by Harvill Press, pp. 107–108. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group, Ltd.
See Here “We would stare”: Pete the Strangler, from White Dog, Romain Gary, 1970. Reprinted courtesy of the author’s estate and The University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 51.
See Here “The perfect language”: From From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, Oxford University Press, 2004, © of and reprinted with permission from The British Academy.
See Here “However great”: Japanese newspaper editorial, translation reproduced with the kind permission of Professor Michael Emmerich.
See Here “Think of individuals”: Warren Weaver, from Warren Weaver, “Translation,” in Machine Translation of Languages, by William N. Locke and A. D. Booth (eds.), published by The MIT Press. 2
See Here “I have repeatedly tried”: FAHQT, from “A Demonstration of the Nonfeasibility of Fully Automatic High Quality Translation,” Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, 1960, in Language and Information—Selected Essays on their Theory and Application, Addison-Wesley Publ./Jerusalem Academic, 1964, p. 174.
See Here “Adolf Hitler”: Joke visiting card 1, from La Vie mode d’emploi (ed. Magné), 1978, Hachette-Littératures, p. 341, © Georges Perec; published in the U.K. as Life A User’s Manual, 2008, Vintage, pp. 287–88, © David Bellos, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group, Ltd.; and in the United States as Life A User’s Manual, new ed., 2009, David R. Godine, p. 327, © David Bellos.
See Here “Adolf Hitler”: Joke visiting card 2, from La Vie mode d’emploi (ed. Magné), 1978, Hachette-Littératures, p. 341, © Georges Perec; published in Permissions and Acknowledgements in the U.K. as Life A User’s Manual, 2008, Vintage, pp. 287–88, © David Bellos, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group, Ltd.; and in the United States as Life A User’s Manual, new ed., 2009, David R. Godine, p. 327, © David Bellos.
See Here “The old pond”: Haikus, from One Hundred Frogs: From Matsuo Bash to Allen Ginsberg, by Hiroaki Sato, 1995, Weatherhill, Shamb-hala Publications Inc., Boston, MA, © Allen Ginsburg, © James Kirkup, and © Curtis Hidden Page.
See Here “There is a river”: Wordsworth pastiche, by Catherine M. Fanshawe, extracted from The Faber Book of Parodies, Simon Brett (ed.), 1984, Faber & Faber.
See Here “Sunday is the dullest day”: T. S. Eliot pastiche, from The Sweeniad, by Myra Buttle (aka Victor Purcell), Secker & Warburg, 1958. Extracted from The Faber Book of Parodies, Simon Brett (ed.), 1984, Faber & Faber.
See Here “Boy, when I saw old Eve”: J. D. Salinger pastiche, from Adam & Eve & Stuff Like That, by Ed Berman. Extracted from The Faber Book of Parodies, Simon Brett (ed.), 1984, Faber & Faber.
See Here “LAMENTATIONS”: 53 Days, from 53 Jours, Hachette-Littératures, 1989, © Georges Perec; published in the U.K. as 53 Days, by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, published by Harvill Press, 1994, p. 61, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group, Ltd.; and in the United States as 53 Days, David R. Godine, p. 61, © David Bellos.
A Note About the Author
David Bellos is the director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University, where he is also a professor of French and comparative literature. He has won many awards for his translations, including the Man Booker International translator’s award. He received the Prix Goncourt for his biography of Georges Perec and has also written biographies of Jacques Tati and Romain Gary.
Copyright © 2011 by David Bellos
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2011 by Particular Books, an imprint of
Penguin Books, Great Britain
Published in the United States by Faber and Faber, Inc.
Faber and Faber, Inc.
An affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott
eISBN 9780865478725
First eBook Edition : September 2011
First American edition, 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bellos, David.
Is that a fish in your ear? : translation and the meaning of everything / David Bellos.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-86547-857-2 (alk. paper)
I. Title.
P306.B394 2011
418’.02—dc23
2011022237
Table of Contents
Title Page
Prologue
ONE - What Is a Translation?
TWO - Is Translation Avoidable?
THREE - Why Do We Call It “Translation”?
FOUR - Things People Say About Translation
FIVE - Fictions of the Foreign: The Paradox of “Foreign-Soundingness”
SIX - Native Command: Is Your Language Really Yours?
SEVEN - Meaning Is No Simple Thing
EIGHT - Words Are Even Worse
NINE - Understanding Dictionaries
TEN - The Myth of Literal Translation
ELEVEN - The Issue of Trust: The Long Shadow of Oral Translation
TWELVE - Custom Cuts: Making Forms Fit
THIRTEEN - What Can’t Be Said Can’t Be Translated: The Axiom of Effability
FOURTEEN - How Many Words Do We Have for Coffee?
FIFTEEN - Bibles and Bananas: The Vertical Axis of Translation Relations
SIXTEEN - Translation Impacts
SEVENTEEN - The Third Code: Translation as a Dialect
&nbs
p; EIGHTEEN - No Language Is an Island: The Awkward Issue of L3
NINETEEN - Global Flows: Center and Periphery in the Translation of Books
TWENTY - A Question of Human Rights: Translation and the Spread of International Law
TWENTY-ONE - Ceci n’est pas une traduction : Language Parity in the European Union
TWENTY-TWO - Translating News
TWENTY-THREE - The Adventure of Automated Language-Translation Machines
TWENTY-FOUR - A Fish in Your Ear: The Short History of Simultaneous Interpreting
TWENTY-FIVE - Match Me If You Can: Translating Humor
TWENTY-SIX - Style and Translation
TWENTY-SEVEN - Translating Literary Texts
TWENTY-EIGHT - What Translators Do
TWENTY-NINE - Beating the Bounds: What Translation Is Not
THIRTY - Under Fire: Sniping at Translation
THIRTY-ONE - Sameness, Likeness, and Match: Truths About Translation
THIRTY-TWO - Avatar : A Parable of Translation
Afterbabble: In Lieu of an Epilogue
ALSO BY DAVID BELLOS
Notes
Caveats and Thanks
Index
Permissions
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page