Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

There is of course a real connection between these two divergent associations of word. Both of them name the smallest handy unit of speech. It’s just that since the invention of alphabetic script we’ve grown completely accustomed to thinking that the true form of what we say is the way it looks when written down. “Scriptism,” as Roy Harris called the illusion that a language consists of things called words, has served us well for a few thousand years, but it has a downside as well. It makes it harder to understand what translation does.

The uses in many Western languages of words meaning “word” to refer to acts of speech are perseverating traces of primary orality. The status of any utterance in a mental world without script derives mainly from the identity of the speaker, much less from the “meanings” of the “words” that are spoken. The concepts in scare quotes are probably not even thinkable without writing. The indeterminacy of the flow of speech and the dependence of meaning on the human context in an oral culture are pinpointed with affection and insight by Tolstoy in his portrait of the illiterate peasant-philosopher Platon Karatayev, in War and Peace:

Platon could never recall what he had said a moment before, just as he could never tell Pierre [Bezukhov] the words of his favourite song … He did not understand and could not grasp the meaning of words apart from their context … His words and actions flowed from him as smoothly, as inevitably and as spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value or significance of any word or deed taken separately.[65]

“Translating” in this kind of cultural circumstance calls for a special kind of trust. If the force of an utterance is intimately linked to the identity of the speaker, then it can’t be conveyed by any other speaker. That fundamental rule has to be suspended for oral translation to come into existence, since it requires the listener to take the words of the translator as if they had been uttered by the speaker of a foreign tongue. Oral translation in a world without writing creates and relies on a fiction—perhaps the earliest fictional invention of all. The first great leap forward in the history of translation must have been when some two communities found a way of agreeing that the speech of the translator was to be taken as having the same force as the immediately prior speech of the principal.

It’s not hard to account for the existence of bilinguals in early human societies: taking brides from different communities and taking slaves from vanquished enemies are ancient practices, and both of them can easily result in people who understand two different languages. But there’s a great difference between bilingualism and translation. For the latter to exist, huge intellectual and emotional obstacles to taking the word of another for the word of the source have to be overcome. They can be overcome only by a shared willingness to enter a realm in which meaning cannot be completely guaranteed. That kind of trust is perhaps the foundation of all culture.

But that trust is never granted without reservation. To conduct negotiation or trade between two communities speaking mutually incomprehensible tongues, the principal relies on the translator and is in his power, just as the translator serves one master only and is entirely in his power. The situation is guaranteed to create anxiety, suspicion, and mistrust.

The fear of imperfect or deceptive performance by an oral translator affects the translation protocols for private meetings between world leaders today. Each side brings along his or her own oral translator. When the British prime minister talks to the French president in confidential, face-to-face encounters, the person employed by Her Majesty’s Government speaks in French on behalf of the prime minister, and the French translator similarly speaks back the French president’s words in English. Such two-handed, one-way speech translation, out of the mother tongue and into the foreign, is never seen in public.[66] These arrangements hark back directly to the issue of trust in oral translation. Translators are no longer slaves, but states still have greater recourse against employees who have signed confidentiality agreements than against a translator hired by the other side.