We don’t need to talk about German all the time here. Let’s consider a tongue known for its siren-like hold over language nerds: Welsh.
I received Welcome to Welsh from a family friend who was majoring in linguistics when I was in 8th grade in 1990. He had it, and knew I would want it, because if you have the language-learning bug, the moment you see a sentence like “Oeddech chi wedi meddwl am fynd i Landudno yn yr haf?” you know you will never be at peace until you learn to talk like that.
I’m not sure how Welsh feels to young people nowadays, but back then it enjoyed a curious status in the quieter corners of American youth culture. Not only because it was the Holy Grail of language nerds, but because it conjured the Welsh imaginary which nourished and sustained the fantasy genre. For American children who read TheChronicles of Prydain or watched The Black Cauldron, names like Gwydion and Fflewddur Fflam sounded intrinsically magical; by the time those kids got to high school, bookstores were flooded with paperback knockoffs about guys named Rhys fighting dragons on misty green islands with magic swords so they could marry Princess Gwenhwyfar and go live in the land of Ionawr or whatever.
I swear I used to see perfectly normal people reading those books, not just boys who played D&D instead of sports. Most of them probably didn’t know they were inspired by Wales – in my experience, many Americans were unaware that Wales existed and many more didn’t realize it had its own astonishing language. But anyone who developed an obsession with foreign languages or fantasy – or, God forbid, both – was sure to be pulled into the Welsh orbit. Information was scarce in those days, however. The encyclopedia could show you a map and a picture of coal miners and provide you with a few non-magical facts. You might see A Child’s Christmas in Wales on PBS. And that was about it, unless you really made an effort or had a nice friend who could send you obscure language books in the mail.
The Wales I discovered in Welcome to Welsh was not the Wales of my imagination. Published in 1984, it featured picture stories about people who were either living in the seventies or continuing to rock seventies styles, and who enjoyed watching TV, drinking to excess, and having casual affairs with door-to-door salesmen. Their material circumstances seemed rather shabby compared to the American suburb I grew up in, yet they outclassed me by going on holidays in St. Tropez.
“Hell, boys, do you remember the party last night? I wasn’t drunk, but you, Dai, were on the floor – you were blind drunk. And hell, there was one pretty girl there – she was like that girl on the beach in St. Tropez.” (from a story about working on the local newspaper)
There was definitely no magic, unless wandering around the Societies Tent at the Eisteddfod counts as a magical experience. Coal (glo) is in the glossary so it’s probably mentioned somewhere, but overall there was a distinct lack of coal mining. That may be why one of the conversation openers is “Are you on the dole?” (Here the book actually taught me a new English word – I had to ask various adults before finding one who was able to inform me that it meant “Are you on welfare?”)
But the local Plaid Cymru candidate is on your side:
“What is Plaid Cymru’s policy for housewives?” – “We want to give money to housewives.”
Quirky picture stories aside, Welcome to Welsh did turn out to be a highly informative and well-organized course in the Welsh language. I loved the layout and always found the lessons easy to absorb. These sentence-building boxes on the first two pages instantly enriched my life:
I learned a lot from this book. Not just about the seamy side of small-town life in Wales, but about grammar and vocabulary. I didn’t put in enough effort to become fluent, but I did once give Bryn Terfel a shock when he was signing autographs at Ravinia, so all the time I spent reading this book instead of doing schoolwork was totally worth it.
Eventually I married a fellow nerd – an alliance that gained me a Welsh book.
His is more formal and probably has better morality, but Welcome to Welsh will always be my favorite.
Hey, entire world. I’m really sorry translations can’t be perfect.
And by that I don’t mean translators are bound to make a few mistakes, though of course that’s also true. I mean no translation will ever be exactly the same text or give you exactly the same experience as the original. Think you’ve read War and Peace? If it wasn’t in the original Russian, it wasn’t exactly the book Tolstoy wrote. Close enough to pass as the same book, of course, but not 100% the same. The best way to understand the soul of Natasha Rostova is to read it in Russian. The rest of us are settling for exported Natashas.
100% concordance between languages is not possible this side of the eschaton, but it seems some people just can’t bear reminders of that sad truth. Witness these complaints about the subtitles and dubbing for Squid Game on Netflix (although when an article says something has “sparked an online controversy” you never know how many people were actually involved…)
Movie subtitles and dubbing come with particular challenges for translators, who have to consider things like how quickly the audience can read (which means subtitles almost always say less than the dialogue) and how to avoid severe mismatches between spoken dialogue and actors’ mouths. If an American actor says “ham” it might get dubbed into German as “Salami” because fits the mouth shape better than “Schinken,” which is German for “ham.”
So there’s a lot going on, OK? As it says in the Squid Game article:
Dr Cho said there was no such thing as a perfect translation, and differences in dialogue were unsurprising because many words, phrases or concepts were “untranslatable” from one language to another.
“It’s not limited to English and Korean, but between English and Japanese, or even between Korean and Chinese,” she said.
“There are always things that can’t be translated perfectly.”
The flooding in Germany this summer reminded me of this letter I translated a few years ago, and the client gave me permission to share it.
Spork is in Nordrhein-Westfalen, right by the border with the Netherlands. Josef was a family member who had left Spork to settle in Wisconsin.
The flood is described in paragraph 5. Apart from that, there’s news about the Franco-Prussian war, family news, and village gossip. I’ve done a little light editing.
Spork, January 11, 1871
Dear Josef,
First of all, we wish you a happy new year. May the good Lord lend you his aid so that everything goes well for you in the New World and is as you would wish. Your lovely letter arrived in good condition on December 15, 1870. We were all very happy to learn that you had made it through the dangerous voyage and arrived in America. Over here, people had been saying that the ship you were on had sunk. In the future, do write to us about how you and your friends are doing. We are having a very hard winter here, for three weeks in a row it’s been 10, 12, or even 15 degrees below zero every day. We just had a few days of thaw and now it’s freezing again.
Thank the Lord that you’re not here, for the war with France has taken on a character more serious than anyone expected. All men from 18 to 40 who are fit to bear arms are being drafted indiscriminately. Our troops are now at Paris. The strongest fortresses in France, including Metz and Strassbourg, were stormed by our soldiers and have surrendered. Now you can imagine what our boys have had to go through at Paris. The terrible cold and spending the day without shelter. You know all about that. For the bombardment of Paris, our troops have gathered around the city with a force of eight hundred fifty thousand men. The bombardment began on December 23rd, 1870. They are using over 600 of the heaviest cannons, including twelve Riesenmörfer where each shot weighs over two hundred pounds. Our soldiers have now taken all the fortresses around Paris; the city itself has been hit in several places by our grenades and caught fire and if it does not surrender it will probably end up a pile of ash. We can only look upon it all with regret, but the Prussians alone now have over sixty thousand casualties, not counting the sick and wounded, and the French many more. Prussia has four hundred thousand French prisoners of war. The war has simply become a never-ending slaughter. How long it will last cannot be predicted, but it is certain that many, many more victims will fall.
Now we would like to tell you about our household situation and how we are doing. We are, praise God, all in good health. Although our household entails much work and trouble, it consists primarily of our family – Father, who is still quite well, then Dora my wife, myself, my two children who are very healthy and Johann is with us. Sickly little Johann is gaining weight in defiance of all expectations and has already learned to walk. Other members of our household are Johanna, your Dora her sister, Johann Hermes from Süderwick. Stelke who makes wooden shoes is staying with us again and we are giving him plenty of help. Holzendorf has done so much to disadvantage Stelke that the latter did not receive his license. I even had to go to the Comptroller to help Stelke but it will probably be over with Holzendorf soon because all the bad things he has done are coming before the public prosecutor, including the fight at the riflery festival.
Now for the neighbors. Recently old Kniepert sprained his leg so badly while unloading coal that he was bed-ridden for a time. At the same time, at half past three in the morning in the Schopperts’ house, old Wilting was talking to his wife who was quite well. Immediately afterwards he tried to wake her up but could no longer do so, because she had suddenly gone to her eternal rest and was a corpse. You can imagine the grief and pain. The old man is in bed. But that family suffers from terrible misfortune. First his son drowned in the Rhine, now this. Johann Radstaak is home again but how? He’s using crutches. He was shot in the lower leg at the battle of Wörth. The bullet went through the thick flesh from behind and out through the shin bone at the front. It’s uncertain how many invalids will get pensions.
We also have to tell you that for three weeks it rained so much here that the oldest people could not remember the water ever being so high. Near Bocholt at the Holy Image, the water overflowed onto the street and poured into the factory, causing about three thousand Thaler worth of damage. Where we are, almost everything practically turned into a lake. It was hard even to make it to a neighbor’s house. The cellars were all full of water and the big frost happened right afterwards.
Dear Josef, now we would like to ask you to tell us more details about your journey, especially the sea voyage, because we are very curious about that. We think that of all the mortal dangers you have been through, that must be the biggest and will have made both of you unwilling to undertake such a journey again. However, if possible, we would be happy to see you two again sometime. Johanna wants to tell you something else, dear Josef. I will put down her own words here: I thank you very much for the friendly greeting you sent to me in your fine letter. Please send me such greetings again. Stelke wishes you lots of luck and prosperity and notes that not a hair falls from our heads unless God wills it so. In his infinite wisdom, he arranged your journey over the ocean so that you did not travel on the ship that sank, and in his opinion that is a sign that things will go well for you both.
In conclusion, dear Josef, we send you a thousand greetings over the sea and express our most heartfelt wishes for your prosperity. Greetings especially from Stelke, Hermes, and Hermann Hüning who is also here and is an avid hunter. All of us also send greetings to your friends and ours and ask them to write to us sometime as well.
Respectful greetings from your Father in particular, and your brothers and all your relatives and neighbors.
Having a busy summer, as always, but here’s a brief note: typos are a problem for machine translators. The best ones (like DeepL) have some ability to recognize typos and correct for them. But they usually can’t do that when the typo is a correctly spelled word (just not the one you intended to type).
Case in point: DeepL rendered a German sentence into English as “The magazine is available oh offline.” When I checked the source text, it turned out the author had mistyped “auch” (also) as “ach” (oh). The magazine was, in fact, “also available offline.”
I find these things rather delightful, especially because they score a point for Team Human…for now.
In this post, I discussed whether to decline German adjectives when you use them in an English sentence. I don’t, but here’s somebody doing it on the Wikipedia page for Leo von König:
He was not well thought of by Adolf Hitler, however, and his works were removed from the “Großen Deutschen Kunstausstellung” at the Haus der Kunst in 1937.
Had I written that sentence, it would say: …his works were removed from the “Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung” at the Haus der Kunst in 1937.
In Brideshead Revisited, Cordelia Flyte returns from her long sojourn in war-torn Spain and the narrator tells us:
“She looked more than her twenty-six years; hard living had roughened her; constant intercourse in a foreign tongue had worn away the nuances of speech; she straddled a little as she sat by the fire, and when she said ‘It’s wonderful to be home,’ it sounded to my ears like the grunt of an animal returning to its basket.”
“Constant intercourse in a foreign tongue had worn away the nuances of speech.” I was struck by that observation when I first read the book because it described a genuine phenomenon – one that had happened to me. Partly because time spent honing your skills in a foreign language is time not spent refining your use of your native language, but also because aspects of the other language seep into your intercourse in your own tongue, so to speak.
It happens in both speech and writing. If you talk to me in person, you might be surprised by how often I wave my hand in the direction of a thing and say, “the, um, you know, thing,” or use slightly odd phrases like “Don’t put yourself in a drawer” rather than “Don’t box yourself in.” During a game of D&D last weekend, I was roundly mocked for saying “I want him to go over there and molest our characters.” I meant “bother,” and you can blame Spanish for that one.
Because you have more time to think when writing, the effects there are subtler, e.g. lackluster word choice and dull or awkward phrasing.
Working as a translator or interpreter makes the problem more acute because you are constantly under the influence of the specific words and phrases you’re reading and hearing in the other language. And if you’re not careful, the more translation work you do, the worse your product might get over time.
When I started out in this business I was a voracious reader of high-quality English books. So my sense of what constituted good English prose was well developed and I used it to good effect when translating from German.
But the more I worked, the more German I read, and before long, sentences like “St. Florian was not only for a period of ten years the identity-establishing and beloved working place of the composer, but is also well known as his final resting place” started to look OK to me.
So how does one push back against the deterioration of target-language skills?
Read a lot. And I mean good writing – books that have stood the test of time, and new books that have gone through a rigorous process of copyediting and proofreading. Cardinal Newman used to read Mansfield Park every year to keep his prose style on the level. Identify authors and publications that match the style you’re aiming for. Much of what I translate from German has to do with current art exhibits, so I read art reviews in The New Yorker. I have marketing clients so I pay attention to ads and pore over catalogues.
Get a copyeditor who doesn’t know your source language. Feedback from someone who is firmly ensconced in your target language is invaluable. Such a person will instantly recognize awkward phrasing that’s crept in from your source language and will know how to fix it. Teaming up with a good copyeditor ensures your translations will be excellent texts in their own right, which is what most of your clients want.
While doing research for a project, I came across this 1997 review of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s novel Petrolio . It was amusing, and since I’m from the future, I can answer this question:
Is there any chance that, with the alleged collapse of Communism in the Western world, no one will ever again dismiss his or her adversary as being “bourgeois”?
And the answer is no, reviewer, there was and is no chance of that happening.
But my reason for sharing this particular review is its terse commentary on the Italian-to-English translation:
Translator Ann Goldstein was heroic in her herculean undertaking. But twice she has a character smelling the scent of “lime” trees. As once the owner of Italy’s only lime tree, (imported from Los Angeles) I think she meant “linden” (Tilia europea).
That’s all he says about the translation — basically, “She did a pretty good job, but I spotted an error!” Bear in mind, reader, that this book is 470 pages long and everyone makes mistakes. Also, many dictionaries offer “lime” as a translation for that tree. Here’s a German-English example:
And hey, the same thing happens in Italian-English dictionaries:
And to further complicate matters, Wikipedia says: “Note that the tree species known in Britain as lime trees (Tilia sp.), called linden in other dialects of English, are broadleaf temperate plants unrelated to the citrus fruits.” Seems like Ann Goldstein could make a solid argument in defense of “lime.”
The problem with reviewing translations is that nitpicking errors is easy. And it makes us feel smart. So we (myself included) tend to do a lot of it. (And sometimes they aren’t even errors!) It’s harder to articulate what, precisely, is good about a given translation. With that in mind, Katy Derbyshire, a well-known literary translator from German into English, solicited thoughts from colleagues around the world on what makes a translation great. Check out the resulting article here.
“Darmok,” episode 102 of Star Trek: The Next Generation
This episode has always been popular – it’s inspired fan merch and was discussed at length in The Atlantic in 2014 – but it’s getting more attention lately as the social media hive mind wrestles with certain issues.
The episode begins with the Enterprise receiving an invitation to establish relations with an alien race, the Children of Tama, aka Tamarians. However, attempts to communicate with the Tamarians have failed on seven previous occasions. Star Fleet deems them incomprehensible. The “universal translator” device helps little because so much of their speech consists of proper names: “Rai and Jiri at Lungha,” says their captain, Dathon, upon meeting the Enterprise crew. “Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Umbaya. Umbaya of crossed roads. At Lungha. Lungha, her sky gray.” The crew are perplexed.
Having failed to communicate their Plan A for establishing relations with The Federation, the Tamarians switch to Plan B, which they call “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” They beam Dathon and Picard down to the nearest planet, where the two captains end up fighting a monster with daggers. Meanwhile, Data and Deanna Troi google some proper names mentioned by the Tamarians and realize they are references to mytho-historical people and places. It turns out the Children of Tama communicate entirely through “narrative imagery,” so you have to learn their stories in order to talk to them.
Picard realizes the same thing while fighting alongside Dathon: the heroes Darmok and Jalad learned to understand each other by facing a common enemy at Tanagra, and that is what they are supposed to do now. Dathon is mortally wounded by the monster but spends some quality time by a campfire listening to Picard tell the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, before dying secure in the knowledge that he has made a communicative breakthrough. By the time Picard is beamed back up to the Enterprise, he’s learned enough narrative reference points to tell the Tamarian crew what happened down on the planet. Although saddened by the loss of their captain, the Tamarians are overjoyed that someone finally understands them. The episode ends with Picard reading Homer and reflecting that “More familiarity with our own mythology might help us relate to theirs.”
If you watch the episode more than once, you can come up with rough translations for the Tamarian dialogue. For example, after the humans fail to understand “Rai and Jiri at Lungha” (which was presumably a suggestion for a more conventional diplomatic meeting), the Tamarians argue amongst themselves: DATHON: Darmok. (“We’ll have to fight a monster together.”) FIRST OFFICER: Darmok? Rai and Jiri at Lungha. (“Fight a monster? No, do what Rai and Jiri did at Lungha.”) DATHON: Shaka. When the walls fell… (“That’s not working…”) FIRST OFFICER: Zima at Anzo. Zima and Bakor. (Alternate suggestions based on other stories.) DATHON: Darmok at Tanagra. FIRST OFFICER: Shaka! (“It won’t work!”) Mirab, his sails unfurled. (“Let’s go.”) DATHON: Darmok.
Although I’m old enough to remember the Saturday Night Live skit where William Shatner yells at Trekkies to get a life, I’m still going to ask some serious questions about this language:
Is the language made up of separate words? What we hear is filtered through Star Trek’s “universal translator,” a convenient piece of de facto magic that suffers from none of the characteristic weaknesses of machine translation. (Contrast this with Eifelheim, where the machine translator is conspicuous and quirky.) So we can’t be sure about the structure of the language, but the characters do seem to be saying a series of words. And in addition to proper names, they have many other words in various parts of speech. This should allow them to mix the words up to form new sentences. But instead they’re stuck repeating set phrases. I don’t think there could be a language like this in real life. A culture that values myth, yes, but something this rigid, no.
How do they say anything specific? This seems to be the most common objection — how did these people build a spaceship if they can’t give instructions like “The confinement resolution should be .527” or “Press that button if there’s a power surge in the plasma reactor”? The best answer is probably Ian Bogost’s assertion in his Atlantic article that each mythological reference communicates “a strategy” or “a logic,” which is carried out with no need for “explicit, low-level discourse.” Given how much ants and bees accomplish without explicit, low-level discourse, I’m prepared to believe there could be an alien species operating along similar lines. In fact, The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion notes that this episode was originally conceived as “a complex and confusing ‘ant farm’ visit,” so insect societies may indeed have served as a model for the Tamarians.
How do they learn their own stories? If they can’t mix and match words to form new sentences, how does anyone tell a story to a child who’s never heard it before? Maybe they attend mystery plays where the stories are acted out with minimal speaking.
When Dathon asks Picard to tell him a story by the campfire, why does Picard say, “But you wouldn’t understand?” They have the translator. It’s a story, and the Tamarians are all about stories. This seems connected to my points 1 and 3 – can they not understand novel combinations of words? Do they not learn their own stories by hearing them told, as we do? We don’t know. Anyway, Dathon does appreciate the tale of Gilgamesh, although it’s not clear what his comprehension level is.
The best answer to these questions is probably “shut up,” because the episode has a value that transcends quibbles.
To understand its recent resurgence, let’s consider how discourse has changed over the past decade. Some of the people who used to produce meticulous, link-filled arguments in response to other people who were Wrong on the Internet have moved on to quietism. Others have adopted a posture of being “so tired of having to explain these things.” The most savvy have gone Tamarian and committed to meme culture. Our awareness of the role memes now play in our communication called forth the image of Dathon describing well-known memes in his characteristic style:
I particularly like the last one because it refers to a real-world event that achieved mytho-historic status almost instantly.
And it’s not just Internet memes per se that summoned Dathon to Twitter and Tumblr in 2020. It’s also a sense that as our fractured media environment renders reasoned argument ineffectual, at least between different memetic tribes, archetypal stories begin to shine more brightly.
Americans can’t currently agree on any of what constitutes “the news.” But we can agree that you shouldn’t fly too close to the sun. We can agree that certain things will turn you to stone if you look straight at them. And that sometimes there’s a thing you need to leave behind, and you mustn’t look back at that thing, not even once. Closer to home, perhaps we can agree it’s right to walk six miles to return three cents to a customer you overcharged, or fess up to chopping down your Dad’s cherry tree.
The Tamarians communicate through “narrative imagery,” and so do we all, now. The distracted boyfriend meme isn’t a myth per se, but it’s a kind of microstory that everyone understands. Like the Children of Tama, we know how to express our thoughts according to its logic. And as they circulate, memes acquire layers and shades of meaning that add to their communicative power. Unfortunately, they also have the power to spread propaganda and stoke groupthink and enmity. Use them wisely.
Yesterday, November 11, 2020, was the twentieth anniversary of the Kaprun disaster, where 155 people died in a train fire in a mountain tunnel. Journalists Hannes Uhl and Hubertus Godeysen investigated the accident and its aftermath and wrote a book – 155: Kriminalfall Kaprun – in 2014. They asked me to translate it into English and that translation is now available as an e-book. It came out a few days ago, just in time for the anniversary. I hope it will be of some benefit to people who lost relatives in the accident.
Not many people in the English-speaking world have heard of the Kaprun disaster but there were British and American tourists among the casualties. An entire American family was wiped out. There is a National Geographic documentary about it, although please note that it contains some inaccuracies about the cause of the fire that are corrected by the book.
Notes on the translation:
The original book is written in the historic present, which is much more common in German than in English. Usually, I change it to the past tense for English translations, but in this case the present seemed appropriate for the style and subject matter.
I translated it into British English the first time around and was then asked to Americanize it, so if you come across any stray British terms, that’s why.
I am aware of one error: in chapter 37, I translated the German word Feder as “spring,” when it should have been “tongue.” I realized my mistake after translating the book’s website, but by then it was too late. I am sorry! It’s only one word out of 51,724, but unfortunately it was a rather important one.
If you are an expert on funicular railways or the Austrian legal system and you find other important errors, please write to me through my contact form on this website and let me know so it can be corrected in a future edition.
I hope people find the book readable and informative. It certainly was a privilege for me to work on it.
