When we are listening to the latest developments in Bosnia or reading about events in Chechnya we are the largely unwitting consumers of the end-product of an often complex concatenation of translation acts. It is this particular segment of this vast area that is my subject here, namely media coverage of events and media- staged events in which the reportage which reaches your TV screen or newspaper has passed through the medium of translation in some shape or form. However, because of limitations of space, I shall confine myself here to the print media and cut to the bone the number of illustrative examples.
It is hard to estimate the damage done to international “understanding” because of the cumulative subliminal effect on the psyche of the English speaking public of constant exposure to the portrayal of non-English speaking political figures and their words through this distorting prism. At best, the personality will be caricatured, at worst, especially if he represents an “unfriendly” power, he will be demonised. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that, properly rendered, foreign political leaders should sound at least as “normal” as their English speaking counterparts.
The product of translation and interpretation finds its way into the media in many ways, direct and indirect. At its most indirect, translation manifests itself in the print media in the form of reportage on foreign affairs or direct dispatches from foreign correspondents. At this level the material cannot be treated as actual translation, although at some stage in the journey much of it must have been derived from trans
lation and its accuracy at its final destination will depend to some extent on the quality of the translation act which took place at an earlier stage.
Another kind of reportage will consist of paraphrases of utterances and com
ments from non-English-speaking sources. This material will often take the form of indirect speech. For example: “Agovernmentspokesman said that the government was making every effort toinvestigate thecauses of the explosion”. In such cases, although the quality of translation somewhere along the line will have left its imprint on the final product, the act of translation itself is untraceable.
At the level of direct quotation of foreign-speaking sources we can finally address and treat the material as a passage of translation proper and not as a by-product or consequence of it. At this level it is still very often unclear what or who precisely is the source of the translation. At times we may be dealing with material which has not itself been directly translated from the source and may even have been “relayed”
through a third language.
There is a further complicating factor in attempting to track the material that winds up on your breakfast table past the point of the translation act to the original
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raw, unprocessed material itself. Quite often the English of the finished product has not actually been translated at all in the normal sense and is still in the original form in which it issued forth from the mouth of the source. This happens when the source is not a native English speaker, such as Yasser Arafat, Dr Karadjic and Andrei Kozyrev.
Print publications, even newspapers “of record", are constantly “quoting” non- English language sources and the utterances of non-English speaking political lead
ers and other public figures in exactly the same way that they quote English-speaking sources. In the latter case, reporters and correspondents, when they have not been actual eye- or ear-witnesses of the statements they are reporting, will usually signal the fact by saying: ... it isreported that ... or... so andso is reported as saying ...
They, their editors, and unfortunately, by extension, their readers, remain oblivious to the fact that even when correspondents are on the spot, what they hear through interpretation or read in translation is just as much “at one remove” or “second
hand” as if they had not been physically present.
There is also a twilight zone where the correspondent presents what is in fact his own translation of what was said or written in the original language. It is too bad that there is no law requiring these products to carry a Linguist General’s warning to unwary consumers against the dangers of incautious use.
The problem is that by the time these statements and “quotations” are served up to the reading public as the ipsissima verba of the speakers or sources concerned they are likely to have suffered several kinds and innumerable degrees of distortion.
Whether the apparent obliviousness of correspondents - and their editors - to this fact is real or feigned, they are failing in their duty to their readers and to the truth when they do not alert them to it.
Firstly, any translation, however good, accurate and idiomatically phrased, can
not, by definition, be the actual words of the original in the source’s own language.
Secondly, an accurate but poor translation into unidiomatic English can distort the original source to make it anything from downright incomprehensible to inco
herent or merely weird, exotic and strange or, in a word, foreign, with all the pejora
tive associations that cling to it.
Thirdly, there is the ever present danger of sheer mistranslation. Paradoxically enough, this danger is deadliest when the mistranslation is couched, in clear, com
prehensible and idiomatic English. If, for example, a newspaper’s Beijing correspon
dent reports: “Today the People’s Daily reported that Paraguayanforces have invaded Brazil", the reader is totally disarmed. He has no way of checking this version against the original Chinese and because the English used is unexceptionable, his suspicions are not even aroused.
There is also a fourth possibility which arises in cases where a statement or “quo
tation” originating in a foreign language comes across in English as incoherent, gar
bled, muddled or incomprehensible. What if it started out that way? An attempt by the translator to make sense of nonsense and to render the obscure in clear, idiomatic English would not only be in its own way a travesty of the original and a disservice to the truth but could actually lead to much graver international misunderstanding than providing the reader with a faithfully muddled and incoherent English version of the original. Imagine for a moment that you are the hapless correspondent of Le Monde or Izvestia faced with the task of reporting to your readers in French or Russian President Reagan’s reply to the following question: “Do you think there could
Stephen Pearl
be a battlefield ‘nuclear’ exchange without escalation into full-scale nuclear war“? The answer was verbatim: “Well, I would - ifthey realized that we- ifwe went back to that stalemate only because our retaliatory power, our seconds or our strike at them after their first strike wouldbe so destructive that they couldn’t affordit, thatwouldhold them off”.
Here are just a handful of the translation travesties which are allowed to pass daily in the press unremarked and unchallenged as “quotations” from non-English speaking figures in the news.
On 17 December 1992, an article headed Brasilia Journal in the New York Times contained the following passage: .. few peoplehere seem to believe that the Senate will acquit him (President Collor) ofthe constitutionalcrime oflack of decorum ”. At this point the reader could well be excused for assuming that the President of Brazil had committed some sartorial gaffe like wearing hunting pink while the court was in mourning or a lapse of protocol by seating the Archbishop of Canterbury below the Ambassador of Guatemala at a State Dinner.
On learning that the crime Collor was actually being charged with was that of ”...
accepting $6,5 million from an influencetrafficking ring” some readers would no doubt feel quietly amused that Brazilians could be so quaint as to describe corruption of this order as “lack ofdecorum”. Others might go away with the rather more serious misimpression that Brazilian society must be pretty thoroughly depraved to rate such a high crime and misdemeanour as the mildest of peccadillos. In any case, President Collor’s conscience was perfectly clear, after all, as he was quoted as saying: “Iam absolutely free of what has been created.“
On 29 March 1992 The NewYork Times reported Spanish Prime Minister Gonzales as saying : ”... this mafia (the Basqueseparatists) thinks itcan blackmail us because of the special dates cue will be living. “
In its edition of 14-17 January 1993, The European reported LeFigaro as writing :
”.. . the veto episode opposed by the President (Mitterand) (correct version: Presi
dent Mitterand’s veto) on January 14 is still fresh I everyone’s mind ... “
The NewYorkTimes of 11 March 1993 “quoted” Gorbachev as saying “Gorbachev was greeted very warmly ... by students, scientists (probable correct version: professors/ academics), people in the streets ... Reportersthoughtthat people would throw sauer
kraut, when they didn’t they all left. “
The NewYork Times of 12 June 1992, report on the Congress of People’s Deputies:
“It would have been better ifhe had notspoken,” said Amangeldy Tuleyev, “in this case he (Yeltsin) acted not as a psychologist, but he has blockheads on his team. “
TheNewYork Times, report on a protest demonstration by Spanish students: ”...
Ramon Iglesias ... marchedthrough Madrid’s Cibeles Plaza holdingone end of a banner proclaiming : “Formation and Equality” Formation? How can you blame them? No doubt citizens would take to the streets in protest in any country where they were denied formation?
The Times of London of 3 September 1996 reported : ’’...the Kremlin described them (the US air strikes against Iraq) a inadequate and inadmissible”. On the same page it “quoted” Saddam Hussein as saying: “the aggressorshave come again ... to reg
ister for themselves the third cursed comeback along with what they deserve for the debase ment of theiraggressiveweapons”.
Each of these examples illustrate different, sometimes overlapping, aspects of the problem. At times, the reader is left totally bemused by the sheer incomprehensibility
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of the utterance. At other times, the meaning can be glimpsed through the linguisti
cally bizarre wrapping. At yet other times - and these can be the most dangerous for understanding - the meaning is clear and couched in acceptable and idiomatic English, but is a sheer mistranslation of the original. In such cases the reader is totally disarmed; he has no way of checking it against the original and, because the lan
guage is unexceptionable, his suspicions are not even arouse.
These examples are just a few of the many picked up casually and sporadically by a single individual from a tiny sample of the world’s English language media alone.
Given the world-wide predominance of the language, there is likely to be vastly more translation of utterances originating in English in the world’s non-English language press. Consequently, the whole iceberg, of which this is the merest tip, must be enor
mous, as must be the sum total of its subliminal impact on international understand
ing.
Perhaps one should not be too distressed at this situation, because, if I may essay one of the fashionable locutions of the day, the whole thing is a zero sum game and the loss to international understanding is offset by the equal and opposite potential gain in international amusement, if not bemusement. To wit, President Reagan’s joc
ular remark to Nancy as he was being wheeled into the operation room after the assassination attempt: “Honey, 1 forgot to duck\“, was reported in the French press as : “Chérie,j’ai oublié le canard!” - unless, of course, this whole story is itself nothing but a canard!