What is translation: Part I — natural languages
I read an article by Aritra which got me thinking, what is translation — really?
In simplest terms, translation is conversion from one language to the other, while preserving the ‘meaning’ (we’ll come to that). Let’s examine these tenets in different scenarios. Of course, there are good and bad translations; but every now and often, you find really unjust translations from people you would least expect. Nabanita Debsen, in her essay Probasi Janmantar (‘প্রবাসী জন্মান্তর' )¹ cites a few examples of Rabindranath Thakur translating his own works for the European audience. What was originally in Bangla
স্বপন দিয়ে গোপনে ধীরে ধীরে, যেমন করে ঢেকেছে ধরণীরে
(Geetanjali, No 24)
… has become,
Even as thou wrapt the earth with the coverlet of sleep
For those who speak Bangla, the tragedy is obvious. For non-Bangla audience, the translation preserves almost nothing of the original lyric, but only manages to find a word-to-word correspondence — that too in a most awkward manner (‘coverlet’?). Again, what was
পাথেয় যার ফুরায়ে আসে পথের মাঝখানে
ক্ষতির রেখা উঠেছে যার ফুটে
বসন যার মলিন হল ধূলায় অপমানে
is now,
From the traveller whose sack of provisions is empty before the voyage is ended
Whose garment is torn and dust laden
This is just plain sad. The tranlation is apoetic, and would even fail to qualify as acceptable english usage. Now, these are really gross, poking-at-your-eyes kind of example, but there are subtler translation fails. For example, this poem by Heinrich Heine describes the yearning of a snow laden pine tree, for a sunburnt oriental palm:
Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Im Norden auf kahler Höh’;
Ihn schläfert; mit weißer Decke
Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee.Er träumt von einer Palme,
Die, fern im Morgenland,
Einsam und schweigend trauert
Auf brennender Felsenwand.
This was translated by James Thomson, as
A pine-tree standeth lonely
In the North on an upland bare;
It standeth whitely shrouded
With snow, and sleepeth there.It dreameth of a Palm Tree
Which far in the East alone,
In mournful silence standeth
On its ridge of burning stone.
Now, as Guy Deutscher points out in his book Through the language glass,² this tranlation preserves most of the orignal, even the rhythm and meter, it fails to convey a most critical aspect of the poem. Consider the translation of the same by Emma Lazarus
There stands a lonely pine-tree
In the north, on a barren height;
He sleeps while the ice and snow flakes
Swathe him in folds of white.,He dreameth of a palm-tree
Far in the sunrise-land,
Lonely and silent longing
On her burning bank of sand.
What’s really happened here is that pine in german is male (der Fichtenbaum), and palm is female (die Palme), a distinction which was missing in Thomson’s translation (this a a typical bug-masquerading-as-a-feature example). While translating, if one ignores the gender (as Thomson did), the entire gender dynamics between the two trees is missed.
Higher level differences
The ‘bug’ in this case, is that everything has a gender in german, but a great majority of things are ‘neuter’ in English. Natural languages differ in many such ways
- micro — syntax, grammar, singular-plurals, gender, case, mood etc. Sanskrit has a singular, dual and plural number; the dual number (i.e. नरौ, ‘two people’) has no equivalent in English
- macro — the culture of the people who speak the language, their nationality, geography, food, weather, socio-economy — i.e. everything which goes on to shape the language; ‘oxygen’ can not be translated into Bangla or Hindi, simply because oxygen was discovered in Europe, and the scientific baggage behind the word is too heavy for any other language to bear
With these stark differences, it’s no short of a wonder that translation is possible at all. Douglas Hofstadter encounters difficulties met by three different translators while working on Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, and comes up with a really radical solution:
The first sentence employs the street name “S. Pereulok” (as transliterated). What is the meaning of this? … the street must be “Stoliarny Pereulok”. Dostoevsky probably wished to tell his story in a realistic way, yet not so realistically that people would take literally the addresses at which crimes and other events were supposed to have occurred. In any case … we have several translation problems, on several different levels.
First of all, should we keep the initial so as to reproduce the aura of semi-mystery which appears already in this first sentence of the book? We would get “S. Lane” (“lane” being the standard translation of “pereulok”). None of the three translators took this tack. However, one chose to write “S. Place”. Now we could be frank with the reader (who, it may be assumed, probably won’t have the slightest idea whether the street is real or fictitious anyway!) and give him the advantage of our modern scholarship, writing "Stoliarny Lane” (or “Place”). This was the choice of translator number 2, who gave the translation as “Stoliarny Place”.
What about number 3? This is the most interesting of all. This translation says
“Carpenter’s Lane”. And why not, indeed? After all, “stoliar” means carpenter” and “ny” is an adjectival ending. So now we might imagine ourselves in London, not Petrograd, and in the midst of a situation invented by Dickens, not Dostoevsky. Is that what we want, perhaps we should just read a novel by Dickens instead, with the justification that it is “the corresponding work in English”. When viewed on a sufficiently high level, it is a “translation” of the Dostoevsky novel-in fact, the best possible one! Who needs Dostoevsky?
As hilarious as this sounds, ‘too much translation’, like ‘too little translation’, can end up just as awkward and fragile. In fact, all translators must tread the thin line between the two. A literal translation of a spanish novel set in Peru novel to Hindi would sound decidedly unreal, unless the characters are Indianised and the story smoothened at the edges to fit the Indian context. Yet, the tranlator must be careful, as not to slice off that peruvian ‘essence’ (this is completely subjective) off the novel.
The mental process of translation
Bhartrihari, an Indian grammarian from 5th century AD, argues in his seminal text Vākyapadīya (‘Of words and sentences’) that there is no micro structure to a language at all, only macro (‘holistic’). Now does this sound odd to you? Don’t we bend the micro-rules of grammar everyday? When we say ‘what’s up?’ do we denote a sense of direction? We use fragments like ‘whats up’ and ‘how you doing’ simply because they are in common use by a large number of English speaking people, i.e. integrated into the ‘macro’ structure of the language. Bhartrihari thus argues that translation is impossible. Bimal Krishna Matilal, in his commentary on Bhartrihari, elucidates this point⁴
… there cannot be any absolute transposition of virgin thoughts or virgin meanings from one language to another. Each meaning is already part and parcel of its so-called ‘verbal’ cloak. They are inseparable. To unclothe meaning is to destroy it.
In fact, Matilal argues that whenever one hears or reads something even in his/her own language, (s)he is actively translating the text into his/her own mental language (called ‘mentalese’ nowadays), and the same text will have different meanings to each individual.
To put it blandly, ‘translation’ in a non-trivial sense is involved even when a philosopher tries, with whatever motivation, to read the writings of another philosopher, ancient or modern. The same material can have different readings, and thereby inevitably different meanings, different interpretations.
Consider the celebrated poem by Lewis Carroll, Jabberwacky
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!
Now, this has been the graveyard of translators. The rhythm, the style, the plethora of new words — it elicits a completely novel feeling, which is notoriously difficult to capture in a translation. One attempt had been made by Satyajit Ray⁵
বিল্লিগি আর শিঁথলে যত টোবে
গালুমগিরি করছে ভেঊ-এর ধারে
আর যত সব মিমসে বোরোগোবে
মোমতারাদের গেবগেবিয়ে মারে।‘যাস্নি বাছা জবরখাকির কাছে
রামখিঁচুনি রাবন-কামড় তার,
যাসনি যেথা জুবুজু ব’সে গাছে
বাঁদরছ্যাঁচা মুখটি ক’রে ভার।
In spite of the marvelous translation, it doesn’t produce a sense of awe & horror as the original, partly because of some cultural shortcuts — like the use of ‘Ravan’ to denote the Jabberwocky’s monstrousity. Now, Ravan is the quintessental Indian villain of the Ramayana, but over millennia of overuse, he has mostly been subdued to the role of a comic villain (especially in Bangla literature). The very mention of Ravan brings back memories of so many comedy-dramas (i.e. those by Sukumar Ray, the father of the translator), that the comic connection is hard to miss. The use of a loaded word (‘Ravan’ in this case) hinders true translation (at least in my view), which goes on to bolster Bhartrihari’s doctrine.
Almost similar principles apply to programming languages, which I’ll talk about in the next part.
…
- Nabanita Debsen. Naba nita. Seventh reprint. Mitra o ghosh (Kolkata): 255
- Guy Deutscher. Through the language glass. New york; Metropolitan books (2010):194
- D R Hofstadter. Godel Escher Bach. New york; Basic Books (1999): 379
- B K Matial. Mind language and world. Delhi; Oxford (2002): 335
- http://www.milansagar.com/kobi/kobi-satyajitray_kobita.html#6
