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[Aug. 19th, 2010|02:34 pm]
Scott
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Last week, I read S.M. Stirling's In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, an alternate history novel about the discovery of life on Mars. It's worth reading if you're already a big Stirling fan; if not, his other books like Island on the Sea of Time and Dies the Fire are much better.
But I was struck by his comments on the Martian language. Not only do his Martians speak in strange, overly scientific language like "I request permission to engage in recreational copulation with you," but he makes a point of emphasizing that the language is so subtle and complex that it can express this sentiment using only two words. In another scene, a Martian gives his occupation as "Professional Practitioner of State-Sponsored Coercive Violence" - in Martian, a single syllable. How does one react to a language so alien that it can reduce such involved concepts to such a short code?
Easy. Fire your translator! English can also express "I request permission to engage in recreational copulation with you" in two words, like so: "Wanna screw?". "Professional Practitioner of State Sponsored Coercive Violence", one syllable, is "cop". When Stirling translates that two word Martian sentence as "I request permission to engage in recreational copulation with you," he's saying nothing whatsoever about Martian language and culture, but a heck of a lot about how Earthlings think of Martians, or about how he wants his readers to think of Martians. He's saying "Even though these Martians may be exactly like us, I want you to think of them as being overly formal, scientific, and most of all, alien."
S.M. Stirling's a smart guy. I'd give good odds he was doing this on purpose, probably as a running gag. Real world translators don't have that excuse.
One way real world translation makes this mistake is by translating short words in a foreign language into long words in English. Really old translations of Japanese always sounded like "Honorable Sato, please give the honorable money to unworthy me." This makes Japanese people sound both obsessed with honor, and horribly long-winded. This isn't totally unfair: honor does play an important role in Japanese life. But the difference between "money" and "honorable money" in Japanese is "kane" versus "okane". There's a big difference between the level of concern with honor it takes to say "honorable money" every time you want to talk about money, and the level of concern it takes to say "okane" instead of "kane". And in fact, "okane" is the natural construction you would use to talk about money in Japanese, and most people aren't even thinking about honor when they say it. A more natural translation would be translate "okane" as "money" and "kane" as "bucks" or some other slang term. In any case, translating it as "honorable money" is not unlike translating "cop" as "professional practitioner of state-sponsored coercive violence".
Also, all that Oriental talk about cherry blossoms all the time sounds a lot less artificial and silly when you realize it's just "hana" in Japanese and so takes no more effort to say than "roses" in English.
More topically, I have heard accusations, perhaps fair, that our use of the word "Allah" to refer to the Muslim God is another subtly flawed translation. "Allah" is basically Arabic for "God", so instead of saying "Muslims say Allah spoke to Mohammed at Mount Hira" why don't we translate every word in that sentence equally and say "Muslims say God spoke to Mohammed at Mount Hira"?
I notice that atheists refer to God as "Jehovah" much more often than Christians, even though it is a technically sort-of-correct name for the Christian God. This is a smart public relations move on the part of atheists. "God" calls to mind a sort of generic, god-of-the-philosophers type being. "Jehovah" sounds like some specific guy with a specific personality, properly categorized alongside Zeus and Thor and Vishnu and all those other named deities. By calling God by a name, atheists are trying to to lump Him into the category of specific gods who sound silly, anthropomorphic, and childish; by calling God "God", religious people are trying to distance Him from that category and say "Here's the real God, above all those specific gods you get in myths."
Keeping the Muslim word "Allah" untranslated transfers it from a designation, "God", to a name, "that god named Allah", and makes Islam seem subtly sillier. One could also argue it does double duty in drawing battle lines with Judaism and Christianity on one side and Islam on the other - after all, Jews and Christians both worship "God", but Muslims worship "Allah" - even though Jews and Muslims are probably more similar to each other than either are to Christians.
I recently read an article (which I have since lost the link to) which argues even further, saying that one reason Arabs tend to sound like religious fanatics whenever they talk is that we constantly undertranslate a bunch of religious expressions in Arabic. For example, if a Muslim cleric on TV was noted to always use "May Allah be with you" as a salutation every time he left somewhere, we would assume he was really religious. But our own culture does exactly the same thing - our standard salutation "good-bye" is a contraction of "god be with ye" (really!).
Likewise, most people say "Damn it" a lot more often than they mean "May Jesus condemn it to an eternity of suffering in Hell". An unsympathetic translator trying to render "Obama's damn health plan is ruining the country" into Japanese would have an option of painting all of us as crazy religious fanatics constantly arguing about whom Jesus should and shouldn't send to Hell.
The article wasn't saying that there aren't a bunch of Muslims who really are religious fanatics who think about Allah all the time when they say stuff, just that with a sufficiently slanted translator you can't prove that just from hearing them talk and apparently say religious things a lot.
On a related note, I also suspect it's easy to slant someone's perception by transliterating in a weird way. "Cnoc na hAoine" sounds like the sort of place inhabited by wise druids, but "Knocknaheeny" sounds like it was named by two-year-olds. They're both the same town outside Cork, but one is the original Gaelic-approved transliteration and the other is the way the Brits transliterated it into English. No wonder the British had a dim view of Irish civilization when they thought of them as living in places called "Knocknaheeny".
You want a transliteration scheme tailor-designed to look dumb to English speakers, look no further than Haitian Creole. The Haitian word for "education" is "edikasyon", the Haitian for "production" is "pwodiksyon". It's not the Haitians' fault that their language looks a lot like comically mispelled English, but I bet that's the first thing most foreigners (including me!) think when they see those kinds of words. |
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