Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

It is translation, more than speech itself, which provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought. We should do more of it.

in Israel it is said that God himself would not get promotion in any science department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Why not? Because he has only one publication—​and it was not written in English.

I express not the word for the word but the sense for the sense.

In English and many other languages the word for translation is a two-headed beast. A translation names a product - any work translated from some other language; whereas translation, without an article, names a process - the process by which “a translation” comes to exist.

Translation is the opposite of empire

A desire to believe (despite all evidence to the contrary) that words are at bottom the names of things is what makes the translator’s mission seem so impossible.

Would we have ever asked what it is that a translator ‘carries across’ the ‘language barrier’ if he or she were called a ‘turner’, ‘tongue-man’, or ‘exchanger’? Probably not.

In today’s world, translators into “small” languages also often see their task as defending or else improving their own tongues - or both at the same time.

Domesticating translation styles that eradicate the Frenchness of Gallic thugs have been attacked by some critics for committing “ethnocentric violence”.

Translation involves many things that do not fit common definitions.

On the other hand, linguistic borrowing between cultures in contact with one another is a fundamental fact of intercultural communication - and that is the very field of translation.

You can't talk about it easily if you don't have a word for it.

Language unification, if it ever comes, will probably not be achieved by Latin, Esperanto, Volapük, or some yet-to-be-invented “contact vehicle” but by one of the languages that possesses a big head start already. It will probably not be the language with the largest number of native speakers (currently, Mandarin Chinese) but the one with the largest number of nonnative users, which is English at the present time. This prospect terrifies and dismays many people, for a whole variety of reasons. But a world in which all intercultural communication was carried out in a single idiom would not diminish the variety of human tongues. It would just make native speakers of the international medium less sophisticated users of language than all others, since they alone would have only one language with which to think.

One big truth about translation that is often kept under wraps is that many societies did just fine by doing without.

Pero la historia de una palabra no dice mucho sobre su significado real. [...] Las etimologías oscurecen verdades esenciales sobre la forma en que utilizamos la lengua y, entre ellas, verdades sobre la traducción.

Translation is not just one thing; how best to do it depends on what you are doing it for.

Translation-​based language teaching is no longer in fashion, but its ghost still inhabits a number of misconceptions about what translation is or should be.

The expression “literal meaning,” taken literally, is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, and a nonsense.

This way of dealing with an untranslatable by not translating it while making it pronounceable (sound translation, homophonic translation: see here) could be considered the primary, original meaning of the term literal translation.

To try to capture “all the words of a language” is as futile as trying to capture all the drops of water in a flowing river.

The real story is the other way around. Without translators, Western dictionaries would not exist.

the semantics of words is an intellectual mess.

It can be done only by guessing what the context and genre of the utterance are.

Once again, the expression uttered (in speech or writing) is not the sole or even the primary object of translation when the force of an utterance is what matters, as it always does.

Most of the time, the symptomatic meaning of an utterance is just too obvious to be noticed.

In many circumstances, formal education replaces the infant language with one that goes on to be used in adult life as the operative means of communication.

The natural way to represent the foreignness of foreign utterances is to leave them in the original, in whole or in part.

The survivor language, English, is not necessarily the best suited to the job; it’s just that nothing has yet happened to knock it out.

Among them we cannot possibly include the unfortunate but widespread idea that English is simpler than other languages.