Is That a Fish in Your Ear - By Bellos, David Page 0,20

about them are not strictly comparable to the kind of translators’ campaigns in centuries past that made German more like English, French more like Italian, Syriac more like Greek, and so forth. The for-eignizers of today are not struggling to make English an international language, because English is the international language of the present. To some degree, they are seeking to enrich English with linguistic resources afforded by languages that are distant from it. “One subliminal idea I started out with as a translator was to help energize English itself,” Richard Pevear stated in an interview in The New Yorker.10 That creative, writerly project rests on a wish to share with readers some of the feelings that Pevear has when reading a Russian novel. He has also often said that he is not a fluent speaker of the language and relies on his partner to provide a basic crib that he then works into a literary version.11 Something similar may be true of other proponents of awkward and foreign-sounding translation styles. The project of writing translations that do the least “ethnocentric violence” to the original thus runs the risk of dissolving into something different—a representation of the funny ways foreigners speak.

The natural way to represent the foreignness of foreign utterances is to leave them in the original, in whole or in part. This resource is available in all languages and has always been used to some degree in every one of them.12

It is not easy to represent the foreignness of foreign languages in complete seriousness. It takes the wit of Chaplin or Celentano to do so for comic effect without causing offense.

What translation does in the first place is to represent the meaning of a foreign text. As we shall see, that’s quite hard enough.

SIX

Native Command: Is Your Language Really Yours?

Translators traditionally and now almost by iron rule translate from a foreign language into what is called their mother tongue. In translation-studies jargon this is called L1 translation, as opposed to L2 translation, which is translation out toward a learned or other tongue. But what exactly is a mother tongue?

We all start with a mother and it seems obvious that we first learn language in her arms. The language that your mother speaks to you is therefore what you are “born into,” which is all that can be meant when instead of “mother tongue” we call it a native language.

It is an axiom of language study that to be a native speaker is to have complete possession of a language; reciprocally, complete possession of a language is usually glossed as precisely that knowledge of a language that a native speaker has. In spite of the obvious fact that speakers of the same language use it in infinitely varied ways and often have quite different vocabularies and language habits at the levels of register, style, diction, and so forth, we proceed on the assumption that only native speakers of (let us say) English know English completely and that only native speakers of English are in a position to judge whether any other speaker is using the language “natively.”

We also know, from observation and self-observation, too, that native speakers make grammatical and lexical mistakes and find themselves lost for words from time to time. In what is now a conventional view of language use, the slips and stumbles in the speech of a native speaker are themselves part of what it means to possess the language natively. Teachers of foreign languages are expert in distinguishing between mistakes that language learners make and those that are characteristic of native speech; and for a native speaker of any language, there are some kinds of errors made by others that sound not just wrong but not native. But let us put these practical and effective uses of the distinction between “native” and “nonnative” aside. Other, much more difficult issues are involved in using terms such as mother and native to name the way we are more or less at home in the language we call our own.

We do not have to learn our mother tongue from a mother. It can be acquired just as effectively from siblings, from an au pair, or from the kids next door. What matters for normal human development is that there be a language available in our immediate environment in infancy, for no child invents a language by itself, without input from outside. We acquire our first language from whatever sources are available in our infant environment. Some children do