Is That a Fish in Your Ear - By Bellos, David Page 0,8

along with rose, hydrangea, camellia, and so on, the hyponyms of the term flower. Hypernym and hyponym refer to relationships between words in a language, not to (botanical or other) relations between the things they refer to. So we could say that Japanese lacks a hypernym for all its various translation terms, whereas English has the hypernym but no readily available set of hyponyms. But the very structure of such an argument takes us into dangerous territory. It sets up English as the “Standard” or the “Thinking Language” because it alone has the general term, and could easily accommodate new coinages to give the meanings of the Japanese terms—uptranslate, downtranslate, newtranslate, retranslate, cotranslate, and so on. But it is not so obvious how we could translate the general or abstract notion of translation into Japanese, and so we would be predisposed to thinking of that language as deficient in precisely the respect in which it is richer than English.

In practice, Japanese speakers do have a way of translating the English term translation into Japanese. The word hon’yaku is used for that purpose in Japanese translations of English-language works about comparative literature and translation theory, and also in the world of publishing and the international book trade. But its range of uses makes it an imperfect match for the word translation. Hon’yaku covers translation from foreign (non-Japanese) languages into Japanese (or vice versa), sometimes more specifically translations from Europe or the United States, but not most other meanings of translation. According to Michael Emmerich, “Those like myself who attempt to translate ‘translation’ with the word hon’yaku are … subtly carrying out the type of translation known in Japanese as goyaku, or ‘mistranslation.’”2Hon’yaku is more like a term of art, whereas we think that the English term translation names something general of self-evident reality.

The Word Magic effect of a category term is that it leads unwary users to believe that the category thus named really exists. One way of looking at this is to say that the category or class—any category or class—really does exist as a mental reality if a name for that category exists in the language. But that is not at all the same thing as saying that the category thus created is a reliable, useful, appropriate, or truly meaningful way of talking about the world. The absence of a category term clearly makes it harder (but not necessarily impossible) to think about what a set of entities distinguished by different words have in common. In the case that concerns us, we do have a single, very general word for translation, whereas Japanese has many. That does not mean to say that in Japanese you cannot think about translation in general. But it does mean that European questions about the “true nature of translation” when translated into Japanese tend to ask a question about an aspect of European culture (called “translation,” or hon’yaku), not about what we think the question really is—the nature of “translation itself.”

You can’t talk about it easily if you don’t have a word for it, and that is why any intellectual inquiry invents a terminology for the things that exist, or need to be held to exist, within that particular field of specialization. But translation is not an invented, technical, or borrowed term like hydrogen, megabyte, or chiaroscuro. It’s a common noun and an ordinary, unmarked term available for general use. What exactly does it name?

The conventional way of tackling this question is to have recourse to etymology, the history of the word itself. Translate comes from two Latin words, trans, meaning “across,” and the past form latum of the verb ferre, “to bear.” The result of the word history is to give translate the meaning of “bear across” or “bring over.” Several European languages have similar words from similar roots, such as the German übersetzen (“to put across”) or the Russian (“to lead across”). From the etymologies of these words come formula-like proclamations in textbooks on translation, encyclopedias, and so forth of the following familiar kind: “Translation is the transfer of meaning from one language to another.”

That seems so obvious as to be not worth commenting upon. But the history of a word does not tell you much about its actual meaning. Knowing, for example, that divorce comes from Latin divortium, “watershed” or “fork in the road,” does not tell you what the word means now. Etymologies obscure essential truths about the way we use language and, among them, truths about translation. So let’s