Above you see Roland Hampe’s 1979 translation of the Odyssey into German.
A very close translation would go something like this:
Tell me, Muse, about the man, the much-turned, who was repeatedly / cast away after he destroyed the holy stronghold of Troy / he saw settlements of many people and learned their nature / and suffered much pain in his mind on the sea / striving for his life and the homecoming of his companions / but even then he could not restrain them, however much he wished to / fools, who ate the cattle of Hyperion’s son, Helios; / but he took from them the day of their homecoming / of that, goddess, daughter of Zeus, give us an account now, too.
This has a lot in common with Wilson’s translation, in my opinion. It has a similar simplicity. Of course, one could always quibble about how I’ve translated Hampe’s translation…the quibbles never end. Feel free to leave them in the comments.
Every so often, people come after Emily Wilson with pitchforks on social media for her translations of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. The latest flare-up dominated my “X” feed until I felt like writing the lengthy response you see here.
Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Prominent X users have called her Odyssey “abominable, a crime against the classics,” and “a political manifesto advocating gynocracy” which “can in no serious way even properly be referred to as a translation.” The most concise offering was “wow this translation sucks.”
The translation does actually have a lot of fans. But why do some people hate it so much? In most cases, it’s a combination of the style (which as you can see in the image above is quite different from previous English versions) and her general perspective, which is typical of a current professor of literature at a prestigious university. “Making visible the cracks in the patriarchal fantasy” is one of her stated goals; her hobbies probably include problematizing things, like bodies and spaces, and sitting with them.
Had her interviews given off more of an “I just really love Homer” vibe, the pitchforks might be safely in storage. One also wonders how the world would have received this translation with a masculine nom de plume and no interviews. Alas, we can’t know. But according to one tweet, “our gripe with Wilson isn’t about the translation itself, it’s that she has so cynically capitalized on our current political/activist moment.”
When you put it that way it makes sense. However, many other commentators insist the translation itself is terrible, regardless of whether Wilson is cynically capitalizing on things. How can we judge this? Let’s consider some criteria.
1. Does it tell the same story as the original? That’s a pretty low bar, but long ago — in the Middle Ages, say — you could write a new version of a story in your language and slap on the same title it had in the source language, even if the poetry was all yours and you added new incidents and characters. Wilson clears this bar easily. One might argue that her translation subtly encourages readers to interpret the story a certain way, but it’s the same sequence of events with the same cast of characters. She didn’t rewrite it from a siren’s perspective or anything weird like that.
2. Is it well-written in English? Anyone can weigh in on this criterion. Unfortunately, those who do will never reach a consensus.
3. Does it give readers an accurate sense of the original? This is what matters most to modern scholarly types. The academic standard is that the translation should reflect all the linguistic and narrative elements of the original as closely as possible while still being decent English. A friend of mine once bombed a Classics essay on Euripedes’ Bacchae because all her quotes came from a very free adaptation by Wole Soyinka — so free as to be considered a new work inspired by Euripedes, rather than a translation of Euripedes.
Wilson’s translation would pass the test that my unfortunate friend’s source failed. She is certainly aiming at modern standards of accuracy, as you can see from her Substack, where she gives detailed accounts of how she made her choices and how they compare to other versions.
In order to weigh in on this question of accuracy, you do have to have substantial expertise in Homeric Greek. I don’t, so I won’t. But I can say that in her writing I recognize the thought process of a serious translator making the kinds of decisions all translators make. So that one guy on X was definitely wrong to say it “can in no serious way even properly be referred to as a translation.”
Here is a negative review of Wilson’s Iliad by someone with the necessary expertise and here is a mostly positive one of her Odyssey. Both are interesting and demonstrate the level of knowledge required to evaluate it as a translation.
Although…there is something to be said for judging a translation entirely by criterion 2. “This is bad English writing” is a fair critique. I would just advise critics to make that clear, since “this is a bad translation” usually implies inaccuracy, and most of us can’t judge that. Sometimes translations are hated because they are hard to read, and that seems legit, with the caveat that the translator may simply be giving you an accurate sense of how hard it is to read the original. (Cyril Edwards’ Parzival springs to mind.)
Accurate translators are also supposed to “bring over” style and register. This raises several difficulties. For example, ancient poems are archaic from our perspective, but once they were fresh. Whenever we translate something from long ago, we have to choose where in time to locate our language.
When I translated an adventure story about Germans seeking their fortune in Papua New Guinea circa 1910, I tried to make the characters sound a bit like Richard Hannay; i.e. I tried to locate the English in their time. That’s the relatively recent past, so it wasn’t that hard to do.
But there was no English in Homer’s day, not even Old English, so English translations necessarily displace his work in time. What time do you pick, then? Should you give the language a Shakespearean feel? That would be consistent with how the poem seems to us and what kind of status it has in our canon. You could argue that even if Homer’s Greek has a rather stark and simple style (as Wilson claims it does), we should adorn it until it sounds like what we English speakers expect from great epic poetry. “Modern English is not a bardic language,” said one rando, voting to give it an archaic style. He has a point.
Someone on X compared Wilson’s work to the No Fear Shakespeare series. If you haven’t seen these, they are study aids that suck all the poetry out of Shakespeare’s plays until they lie, mere desiccated husks, on the floors of classrooms where students might as well be reading terms and conditions for downloading software. Quite a diss, in other words. This comparison presupposes that Wilson has “dumbed down” Homer but she claims precisely the opposite – that others have embellished Homer and hers is the more accurate version.
Wilson’s choice of iambic pentameter is reminiscent of Shakespeare, but her language itself sounds contemporary. I was amused to learn that Wilson’s Odysseus begins his slaughter of the suitors with “Playtime is over!” No good, said some commenters, it sounds like a Hollywood action movie. Well, said others, perhaps this was the equivalent in its day and this line hits you the same way the original line hit the Greeks. Then again, this review asserts that Homeric poetry had a distinctive poetic language that sounded at least vaguely archaic in its time, drawing from “vastly different centuries of Greek language and culture.” We might find an English equivalent of that in Howard Pyle.
At any rate, these are decisions that must be made and you can’t find a solution everyone will agree with. Religious people will never stop arguing over whether the Bible or the liturgy should be like bright, new copper or have the green patina of age, and we’ll never collectively decide whether Homer’s Odyssey should “sound ancient” when translated into a language that, again, did not exist when it was written.
If you’ve followed the colorful discourse about whether Wilson is murdering Homer and corrupting our youth, this is a good time to reflect on why there used to be so much anxiety about Bible translations. I’ve written something about that as well.
In conventional parlance, professional translations exist on a spectrum from “close” to “free.” A close translation reproduces the structure and diction of the original as accurately as possible in correct English. A free translation is one where the translator has taken more liberties.
What is the difference between “close” and “literal”? A “literal” translation has the same structure as the original text and direct equivalents for all the words, even to the point of nonsense: “I brush myself the teeth,” “He makes heat in Wisconsin today,” or “I make to myself cares around you,” for example. Pros don’t do literal translations unless they are working on a special task like explaining sentence structure to language learners.
Close translations are not nonsense, but sometimes they are too close.
I ran into a good example while researching the Quebec Winter Carnival. Its website has English and French versions of the same text. Here’s the French, which I would bet my life savings was written first:
Si vous ne connaissez pas encore le Carnaval, il est temps de remédier à la situation ! Le Carnaval est un festival extérieur qui célèbre l’hiver entre la fin janvier et la mi-février. Pour une période de 10 jours, la ville est transformée en fête des neiges avec ces nombreuses décorations, sculptures de glaces et lumières. Au rendez-vous : plusieurs sites d’activités pour les petits et grands, un défilé de chars allégoriques et des soirées musicales. C’est l’événement hivernal à ne pas manquer !
And here is the English:
If you don’t know the Carnival yet, it’s time to remedy the situation! Carnival is an outdoor festival that celebrates winter between late January and mid-February. For a period of 10 days, the city is transformed into a snow festival with many decorations, ice sculptures and lights. On the agenda: several activity sites for young and old, a parade of allegorical floats and musical evenings. This is the winter event not to be missed!
That’s a very close translation. It’s not nonsensically literal—if it were, it would have “several sites of activities for the smalls and the bigs,” and so on—but the English is as close to the French as you can get while still being normal English.
“Allegorical floats” is a noteworthy phrase. In fact, the French “chars allégoriques” simply means “floats.” “Chars” is a general enough word for vehicles (especially in Quebec) that it needs an adjective to specify the notion of vehicles decorated to represent something. Whereas if someone told me in English that I was going to watch allegorical floats go by, I’d wonder if there was an exam at the end.
For promotional materials, translators usually take a freer approach to match the style of advertisements in their language.
For example:
If you’ve never been to the Quebec Winter Carnival, it’s time to fix that! Carnival is an outdoor festival that turns our city into a celebration of winter from late January to mid-February. It’s ten days of fun in the snow among gorgeous decorations, enchanting ice sculptures and dazzling lights. There’s plenty to do for visitors of all ages! Highlights include the parade with elaborate floats and evenings of musical entertainment. Don’t miss this extraordinary winter event!
My edition of the OT was kindly purchased for me by my traumatized reader (see intro post) from a used book shop in Tennessee. It had previously been given as a Christmas gift to one Alma Kathryn in 1942, the year the Disney movie came out. Although recent articles have emphasized the extent to which the film eclipsed the book, it seems at least some people were inspired to buy the book after seeing the film.
According to the New Yorker article, it has been claimed that the OT “mistranslated Salten, flattening both the political and the metaphysical dimensions of the work.” However, the author of that article goes on to say, “that claim is borne out neither by examples in the introduction [to the NT] nor by a comparison of the two English versions, which differ mainly on aesthetic grounds.”
One sentence might suffice to give you a sense of their aesthetic differences (part of a description of Bambi as a disoriented newborn):
German original: Es nahm auch noch keinen einzigen von all den Gerüchen wahr, die der Wald atmete.
OT: Nor did he heed any of the odors which blew through the woods.
NT: Nor did he perceive a single one of the smells that the forest exuded.
Moving on, is there any evidence that the OT contains significant errors, and do they “flatten the political and metaphysical dimensions of the work”?
The OT is often accused of sloppy taxonomy, e.g. “Eisvogel” (“kingfisher”) is translated as “hummingbird.” Was that an error or just an adaptation for American readers who wouldn’t be familiar with kingfishers? To add to the confusion, the NT translates “Eisvogel” as “warbler.” Why? It’s not an option in any of my reference books, so it seems like another error or adaptation. This is a recurring problem—titmouse or chickadee? Ferret or polecat?—but frankly not very interesting to most readers.
The error that most jumped out at me from the OT was as follows: the kingfisher from the paragraph above is quite anti-social. Another bird (sedge-hen or coot?) tells Bambi that the kingfisher has never said a word to anyone. Bambi replies, “Poor thing…” with the ellipsis indicating a pensive, sorrowful tone (rather than an incomplete sentence). (In German: “Der Arme…” with “Arme” capitalized because it is an adjectival noun.) Presumably thrown off his game by the ellipsis and a failure to notice the capital A, Chambers (author of the OT), has:
“The poor…” said Bambi.
Then I checked the NT and was surprised to see the exact same error, only ramped up:
“The poor…” Bambi began to say.
(The new translator has added the idea that he “began” to say it.)
Seeing this in both books made me doubt my judgement so I consulted two native speakers with excellent writing skills and they both confirmed it could only be “poor thing” and the ellipsis was there to signal his tone.
So, as we can see, both books contain errors (as do most long translations, including mine). But do the errors in the OT really give readers a highly distorted experience of Bambi, as some have claimed?
Some examples to back up that claim can be found in an article by Sabine Strümper-Krobb in the journal Austrian Studies. Strümper-Krobb closely compared the German original to Chambers’ translation and found that Chambers often translated anthropomorphic language into language that is more conventionally about animals. See this table for examples:
Salten
Chambers
Should be
Das waren die Tage, in denen Bambi seine erste Kindheit verlebte.
These were the earliest days of Bambi’s life.
childhood
Überall gab es solche Straßen, sie liefen kreuz und quer durch den ganzen Wald.
There were tracks like this everywhere, running criss-cross through the whole woods.
streets (referring to deer trails)
Er kam mitten im Dickicht zur Welt, in einer jener kleinen, verborgenen Stuben des Waldes…
He came into the world in the middle of the thicket, in one of those little, hidden forest glades…
rooms
Hier in dieser Kammer war Bambi zur Welt gekommen.
Bambi had come into the world in this glade.
chamber
Dann küsste sie wieder ihr Kind….
Then she kissed her fawn again…
child
“Das sind die Kleinen.”
“Those are ants.”
the little ones
“Weil wir niemanden töten.”
“Because we never kill anything.”
anyone/anybody (this is Bambi’s mother saying deer don’t kill other animals)
Ganz langsam schritten sie durch einen Saal himmelhoher Buchen.
They walked very slowly through a grove of lofty beeches.
hall
der Alte, der alte Fürst
the old stag
The old one, the old prince
Liebeszeit der Könige
mating season
the kings’ time of love
Krone
antlers
crown
die anderen gekrönten
the other bucks
the other crowned ones
In other words, unconventional words and phrases that make the animal world seem more human are translated as conventional terms relating to animals and the forest.
I think (though it’s pure speculation) that the reason for this is as follows: One thing translators do all the time is adjust phrases to make them sound more “normal” in the target language. You read the source text and understand it but you also think, “That’s not how we say that,” and you adjust it to bring it into line with customary English usage. So, for example, you have a German phrase that translates to “Issuing threats against the world community” and you change it to something like “Threatening the global community.” I suspect Chambers was going through this book thinking “we don’t call antlers ‘crowns’ in English” and “no one would call a forest glade a ‘room’” and just making it all sound more normal. What he didn’t realize was that Salten’s word choices weren’t normal in German either and of course, unusual diction in the source should be translated as something equally unusual in the target. Chambers had learned German fairly recently and therefore hadn’t read widely enough to make judgements about which word choices are unusual in that language. That’s what I suppose, anyway.
How much did Chambers’ less-anthropomorphic diction affect English readers’ experience of the story? I’d say a little bit but not that much. When we read of Bambi and his mother walking on “streets” in the forest, we’re likely to picture streets in a town and consider that deer feel the same way about their trails as we feel about our streets. Chambers’ “tracks” and “trails” don’t call forth the same thoughts. However, the book as translated by Chambers is still deeply anthropomorphic. It couldn’t be otherwise, with passages like this, where Bambi considers striking up a conversation with the intimidating old stag:
Bambi did not know what to do. He had come with the firm intention of speaking to the stag. He wanted to say, “Good day, I am Bambi. May I ask to know your honorable name also?”
Yes, it had all seemed very easy, but now it appeared that the affair was not so simple. What good were the best of intentions now? Bambi did not want to seem ill-bred as he would be if he went off without saying a word. But he did not want to seem forward either, and he would be if he began the conversation.
The stag was wonderfully majestic. It delighted Bambi and made him feel humble. He tried in vain to arouse his courage and kept asking himself, “Why do I let him frighten me? Am I not just as good as he is?” But it was no use. Bambi continued to be frightened and felt in his heart of hearts that he really was not as good as the old stag. Far from it. He felt wretched and had to use all his strength to keep himself steady.
The old stag looked at him and thought, “He’s handsome, he’s really charming, so delicate, so poised, so elegant in his whole bearing. I must not stare at him, though. It really isn’t the thing to do. Besides, it might embarrass him.” So he stared over Bambi’s head into the empty air again.
“What a haughty look,” thought Bambi. “It’s unbearable, the opinion such people have of themselves.”
Did you read that and think, “I don’t get these deer, they don’t seem very human to me”? They might as well be eyeing each other up during intermission at the Vienna Court Opera.
Interestingly, Chambers uses “people” in that last line, whereas the German says “Es ist unerträglich, was so einer sich einbildet” – “so einer” meaning “such a one.” So in this case Chambers has added an explicitly human word where there wasn’t one in the German original! Which makes me fairly certain he didn’t have a policy of de-anthropomorphizing Salten’s forest dwellers and his word choices in the table above are just examples of overly cautious handling of unusual phrases.
In summary, there’s room for improvement in the OT but on the whole, it’s well-written, true to the spirit of the book, and accurate enough that little Alma Kathryn didn’t have a radically different reading experience from her counterparts in the German-speaking world.
As for the NT, it corrects some but not all of the discrepancies noted in the table above. Where Salten has “Straße” for a deer trail, this version has “path,” which is unsatisfactory in the same way as the old translation. But it does correctly say “We never kill anybody” (instead of “anything”) and “chamber” for “Kammer.” The writing style is quite different from the OT and readers can decide for themselves which one they prefer. The OT has the advantage of having been written in the same decade as Salten’s book, so its style has a natural compatibility with the original that is hard to achieve almost 100 years later. I would recommend the OT to most readers based on the quality of its prose.
I could go on and on about little details in these books, but I suspect most of my readers will be satisfied with the few examples cited so far. Don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you would like to know more.
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.”
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.
This morning someone on my local NPR station said that
English is a very implicit language, while American Sign Language is a very
explicit language.
What the heck does that mean?
The speaker, who interprets into ASL at stage productions, cited the example of translating the phrase “a cosmopolitan city”: “Well, you can finger-spell ‘cosmopolitan,’ but what does that actually mean? It’s a diverse city that has money and culture. So you have to expand on that, you don’t just finger-spell ‘cosmopolitan.’ “
That’s a good example of strategy for interpreting and translation, and an interesting insight about ASL. But does it show that ASL is “more explicit” than English?
What this example seems to indicate is that ASL has a
smaller vocabulary than English. This occurred to me because I have a small
French vocabulary and it causes me to have conversations like this:
Me: Hello, I would like to pay to have a car for one day.
French person: Ah, you would like to rent a car,
Madame.
Now, most people would say, “That lady doesn’t know a lot of French.” Et oui, c’est vrai. But you could also say something like, “That lady’s French idiolect is more explicit than standard French. She mentioned payment and a limited time period, both of which are merely implied by the word ‘rent’.”
Somewhat analogously, ASL has a smaller word bank than the major spoken languages. Apparently this fact often leads to underestimation of its value and is therefore a sore point – see for example this post on Quora or Wikipedia’s assertion that “ASL users face stigma due to beliefs in the superiority of oral language to sign language.” Honestly, this is news to me, because I’ve never seen ASL portrayed as anything but super cool, but any linguist who’s made small talk has encountered the idea that the language with the most words is The World’s Best Language, so I get that an apparent paucity of vocab in ASL could be seen as a marker of inferiority.
OK. So ASL doesn’t have one word that is the precise equivalent of “cosmopolitan.” It probably doesn’t have the words “antediluvian” or “postlapsarian” either. But guess what? All those “words” are compounds made up of smaller words. A cosmopolitan place is a “world city” (Greek cosmos + polis), while antediluvian things happened “before [the] flood” (Latin ante + diluvium) and postlapsarian things happened “after [the] fall” (Latin post + lapsus). In other words, if ASL has words for “world,” “city,” “before,” “flood,” “after,” and “fall,” it can recreate all those compound words – and because they’re not cloaked (as they are in English) in the sounds of other languages, their meaning will be plainer.
A language is a tool, and if you can use it to express what
you want to express, it’s a good tool. You don’t need to worry about how many
words you have. I get along just fine in France with my circumlocutions.
And no language has achieved perfect specificity anyway. What are glasses, for example? Do you drink out of them or wear them over your eyes? Once a news team at the mall asked my friend what she was buying her mom for Christmas, and she said, “Glasses…um, drinking glasses” and made a drinking motion as if she needed a kind of sign language to come to her rescue where English had failed. In German, there’s no confusion: a “Brille” is a pair of eyeglasses and “Gläser” are what you drink from. But then German has the same word for “lentils” and “lenses.” You just have to deduce from context that your friend isn’t getting a prescription for contact lentils, or inviting you over for a steaming bowl of lens soup. We all seem to be communicating pretty well despite these deficiencies in vocab, though.
Back to the person I heard on the radio: at first I thought this was one of the dumb generalizations people are always making about language, like “English is very precise” (people who say this kind of stuff generally only speak English). But now I think that person was getting a point across in a rather brilliant way. Being a specialist in ASL and therefore sensitive to concerns about how it is perceived, they didn’t want to frame this interpreting problem as “ASL doesn’t have as many words as English.” Instead they thought it through in a different way: one English word, like “cosmopolitan,” implies a whole set of characteristics, whereas in ASL you would specify each characteristic, so…”English is a very implicit language, while American Sign Language is a very explicit language.” Got it.
Some people seem to think (see this post) that a really great machine-translation program would be able to “handle complicated multilingual puns with ease.” But what is a “multilingual pun” anyway?
The prefix “multi” implies more than two, and honestly, off the top of my head I can’t think of any puns involving more than two languages. If you have one, please send it in!
But I know of some puns between two languages – I think these are properly called “interlingual puns.”
For example, here’s an old joke my Dad used to enjoy telling: “What did the alien say in the music store?” – “Take me to your Lieder.”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ….sigh.
Consider whether an AI machine translator could handle this pun with ease – by “handle” I assume the author meant “translate.” Could the best ever future MT translate this joke into Japanese, or Thai, or French, or Navajo, or Spanish? Um, no? Neither could a human translator. It’s just not possible. If it appeared in a story you were translating, you’d insert a similar joke, but you couldn’t reproduce this exact joke. Some things really are not translatable.
The joke works by combining English and German, so could you translate it into German? Again, no. It wouldn’t work in reverse, so to speak. German speakers with good English and a good knowledge of 20th century pop culture would be able to get it, though.
OK, let’s try another one. I saw this pun being assembled in real time on social media. A friend of mine who was getting a PhD in Arab Studies posted:
ABD
which his academic pals recognized as the acronym for “all but dissertation,” i.e. he had reached an important phase in his course of study. Congratulations were offered in the comments section, but someone also left this comment:
abd al-dissertation
which is a pretty funny pun because it sounds like an Arabic name meaning “servant of the dissertation,” and that of course is what he was going to be for the next year or so. (For more context on the Arabic name in question, go here.)
Is this translatable into any other language? Nope. And there’s nothing humans or MT can do about it. Part of the romance of translation is the bittersweet knowledge that some things just can’t be carried over into another language, like rare flowers that won’t grow outside their native land.
