Is That a Fish in Your Ear - By Bellos, David Page 0,19
of making French more like Italian has continued down to the present day. The caban (pea jacket) and the caleçon (underpants) in your closet and, if you’re lucky, the cantaloup and the caviar in your refrigerator, like a huge number of other ordinary, scholarly, refined, and delicious things, are all named in French by words taken from Italian, and for the majority of them the taking was first done by translators.8
A similar kind of lexical enrichment took place in the nineteenth century when German-speaking peoples sought to constitute themselves as a distinct and increasingly unified nation. German translators consciously imported a quantity of words from Greek, French, and English not only to make European classics accessible to speakers of German but also to improve the German language by extending its range of vocabulary. The issue as they saw it was this: French and English were international languages already, propped up by powerful states. That was why nonnative speakers learned French (and, to a lesser extent, English). How could German ever be the vehicle of a powerful state unless nonnatives learned to read it? And why should they learn to read it unless it could easily convey the meanings that arise in the transnational cultures held to represent the riches of European civilization?
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. Here’s a letter I received just the other day from a translator in Tartu:
My mother language, Estonian, is spoken by about a million people. Nevertheless I am convinced that Life A User’s Manual and my language mutually deserve each other. Translating Perec I want to prove that Estonian is rich and flexible enough to face the complications that a work of this kind brings along.
Translation can clearly serve national purposes—but also their opposite, the cause of internationalism itself. A contemporary writer of French who uses the pen name Antoine Volodine has formulated in striking terms why he wishes to use his native language as if it were a foreign tongue. For Volodine, French is not just the language of Racine and Voltaire. Because translation into French has been practiced for a very long time, French is also the language of Pushkin, Shalamov, Li Bai, and García Márquez. Far from being the privileged vector of national identity, history, and culture, “French is a language that transmits cultures, philosophies and concerns that have nothing to do with the habits of French society or the francophone world.”9 It is not that French is by its nature or destiny an international language: on the contrary, only the practice of translation into French makes the language a tool of internationalism in the modern world. Thanks to its long history of translation from foreign languages, French is now a possible vehicle for an imaginary, infinitely haunting literature that Volodine would like to consider absolutely foreign to it.
It would therefore be quite wrong to see the progressive interpenetration of English, French, German, and Italian together with terms and phrases from the ancient source tongues, Latin and Greek, and (in the writings of Volodine) Russian and Chinese, too, as the sole product of what is now called globalization. In any case, globalization does not spread only English into other languages and cultures: it could just as well be exemplified by the spread of pizza language and the vocabulary of pasta into corner stores and fast-food joints the world over. It is also the result of long efforts by translators to raise their national languages to international status. They did not necessarily seek to make their translations sound authentically foreign. Indeed, if that is what they were really trying to do, their success has made mincemeat of the ambition, because the words they imported or mimicked have now become part of the receiving language to such an extent that they are no longer foreign at all.
No less than 40 percent of all the headwords in any large English dictionary are imports from other languages. A foreignism—be it a word, a turn of phrase, or a grammatical structure that is brought into our marvelously and infuriatingly malleable tongue by a translator seeking to retain the authentic sound of the original—has its path already mapped out. Either it will be disregarded as a clumsy, awkward, or incomplete act of translation, or it will be absorbed, reused, integrated, and become not foreign at all.
However, contemporary efforts to produce translations into English that keep something authentically foreign