It took a group of fifty scholars from twenty countries to produce the academic tome Translators Through History in 1995 (edited by Jean Delisle and Judith Woodsworth and co-published by John Benjamins and UNESCO. See this review by Alex Gross, with a list of eight other recommended works on translation history). That erudite and expensive collection of 345 pages now languishes on University library shelves, for the convenience of research use by a select minority of researchers.

Sixteen years later, an academic (Professor David Bellos) has distilled a distinguished career as university teacher, researcher and award-winning literary translator into 390 pages of multi-faceted views of “Translation” (and translators), whose title clearly indicates a desire to address a broad swathe of the educated public: Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything.
Within a few weeks of its publication on both sides of the Atlantic (Faber in USA and Penguin in UK), the general appeal of Bellos’s very original work has been convincingly demonstrated by a unanimously favourable number of independent reviewers (mostly from widely-circulated culturally prestigious newspapers). Here is the list of eleven reviews (plus a strategic intervention by David Bellos), in order of appearance, with some selected points of view which present flavours of the book:
8 September 2011: The Times Higher Educational Supplement. Matthew Reisz, ‘Derrida had a word for it.’
“At a graduate ceremony at Princeton University, where he is professor of French and Italian and comparative literature, David Bellos recalls “a rather plump, pink-faced parent who came up and started chatting. When I told him I was a translator, he said: ‘But a translation is never a substitute for the original, is it?’ Trotting out a piece of folk wisdom as if it were an important new truth! I was so annoyed that I went home and started writing a diatribe. That’s how the book started.”
[…]
“More generally, Bellos is keen to challenge academic as well as popular misconceptions about translation.”

10 September: The Economist. Loftily anonymous, as is their habit; also hurried, superficial and with errors but very favourable. A good review for the author and publisher to have in the bag.

13 September: The Independent. David Bellos, ‘How Google Translate Works’.
David Bellos posts a book extract about Machine Translation and high praise for Google Translate (with many critical and other comments from readers).

14 September, The Sunday Telegraph. Maureen Freely, ‘A Witty Look at the Dark Art of Translation’.
“Bellos seems to have no anger in him whatsoever. Even as he demolishes the myths of translation, he delights in its chequered past and its contemporary ubiquity.”

22 September: The Guardian. Michael Hofmann, ‘Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos – review. An inquiry into the finer points of translation’.
He implores a section of his readers: “anyone with no interest in translation, please read David Bellos’s brilliant book.”

23 September: The Independent. Shaun Whiteside, ‘No word for fig? Have a banana’.
He refers to Edith Grossman’s recent “stout defence of the translator’s art, Why Translation Matters, to richly deserved acclaim” and confesses to envy for Bellos’s ability to
“entertain while getting difficult linguistic ideas across to the general reader.”

The September issue of The Literary Review, pp. 46-47.
Frederick Raphael, ‘Speaking in Tongues’. A short piece by the eminent novelist and screenwriter’.

1 October: The Spectator. Robert Chandler, ‘Art of Translation’
Chandler makes this distinction:
“This book fulfils a real need; there is nothing quite like it. Why Translation Matters, by Edith Grossman, is equally well written, but it is limited to the field of literary translation. Steven Pinker’s books about language have been highly praised, but they leave me wondering how closely the author has ever wrestled with any language other than English. And ‘Translation Studies’ as taught in universities is a highly theoretical discipline that is beyond the understanding of most practising translators — let alone of the general public.”

8 October: The Irish Times, Theo Dorgan, ‘Mind Your Language’.
“Bellos is a witty and perceptive writer, a provocateur in the best sense of the word. He is particularly enlightening on the linguistic protocols of the European Union – I had not known of what he calls the Basic Rule, originally laid down as article 248 of the Treaty of Rome, which stipulates that the treaty (now encompassing 24 languages for 27 member states) is “a single original” in each of those 24 languages.”

24 October: From the blt [Bible, Literature, Translation] group blog: JD Gayle,‘A Book Review: Is That A Fish In Your Ear?.
An interesting and very favourable review by a an academic and translator. Gayle adds a lengthy lobbying comment on Bellos’s “short shrift” for women, perhaps in deference to the recommendation of the adage “A review, to be worthwhile, must add something.” Gayle also gives us the information (from Bellos) that the paperback is due next year and will include corrections and amendments and that a French translation is in preparation.

28 October: The New York Times. Adam Thirlwell, ‘The Joyful Side of translation’.

5 November: The Australian. Weekend Review. Miriam Cosaic, ‘It’s not all Greek to the Translators’.

Note:
I also learned of the following three reviews through the excellent Omnivore (Criticism Digested) books and reviews website but unfortunately the links are broken by News Limited’s paywall in two cases and for unknown reasons for The Scotsman reference, so I cannot report on them.
10 September: The Times. Michael Binyon.
18 September: The Sunday Times. Robert Rowland Smith.

11 September: Jennie Erdal, The Scotsman on Sunday. Not only a broken link but this review was not even accessible through a direct search on The Scotsman website.

There is a common thread of strong approval running through this rich batch of early reviews: the very broad range of the coverage (variegated facets of Translation, many illuminated for the first time), the author’s engaging style and sense of humour, and his original and sometimes challenging views and questions about what Translation is. (Longer more specialised reviews will, as is customary, take more time to appear but they will undoubtedly provide further food for thought and discussion for translators and others with a close interest in Bellos’s stimulating research and conclusions on the nature and varieties of Translation activities.)

So Is That a Fish in Your Ear? is already well on the way to bestseller status (including Kindle and other e-book versions). Dr Bellos is to be warmly congratulated for significantly raising public awareness of this vital but often misunderstood activity, or group of activities (including Interpreting) and of its hierarchy of practitioners, from the foot soldiers and pedagogues to the élites engaged in international geopolitics and literary translation.

STOP PRESS: Bellos’s success with younger readers is now guaranteed: He has sensibly joined Twitter as D.Bellos@Cinoc123.

In conclusion I add my own very enthusiastic endorsement and gratitude for Davis Bellos’s excellent work and append a few personal comments from a translator’s point of view.

Highlights:

Bellos’s views on translation (the whole book).
His highlighting of Translators as a motley group and his attention to many of their roles.
The author’s agreeably light touch and humour, passim. He even plays with the Font styles of Chapter headings as well as the title of the book.
His emphasis on both practical and theoretical questions.
The welcome absence of detailed discussion of eminent academic theoretical linguists of the distant or very distant past such as de Saussure (p. 326), Whorf (remember the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?), Bloomfield, Chomsky and George Steiner. Although perhaps provocative, it is also deliberate, as Bellos himself makes clear at the end of the book:

“Readers familiar with translation studies may notice other omissions. Some of them are intentional. George Steiner’s After Babel is still in print, and my reasons for not commenting on Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’, can be found in Cambridge Literary review 3 (June 2010), pp. 194-206.” (I was unable to locate this.)
Elsewhere (page reference missing) Roman Jakobson is equally quickly passed over.

My favourite chapters:
Chapter 10. ‘ Global flows. Centre and Periphery in the Translation of Books’ (pp. 208-223)
Do not be put off by the title! The chapter deals in fascinating depth with the world translation publishing industry. You may be surprised at the revelations.
Chapter 21. ‘Ceci n’est pas une traduction: Language Parity in the European Union’ (pp. 237-249)
An inside view of one of the European Union’s key institutions. (Especially topical in the context of the current EU financial crisis.)

Perhaps Bellos’s conclusion to the chapter has a wider significance too in relation to the historic European Union venture: “The laudable aim of treating all languages of Europe as equal produces the unwanted but perhaps inevitable result that ECJ [the European Court of Justice] rulings are sometimes so pithy as to defy comprehension in any of them” (p. 249)

Chapter 23. ‘ The Adventures of Automated Language Translation Machines’ (pp. 256-267)
Bellos accords very high praise to the “ Google Translate” venture and makes a confidently optimistic forecast of its future trajectory.
(Still to be taken into account: Google’s undoubted high performance with some highly trafficked languages with huge corpora of data should be contrasted with its inevitably much less satisfactory results so far with less trafficked – but very important – languages like Chinese, Hindi and Arabic.)

Chapter 24. ‘A Fish in Your Ear? The Short History of Simultaneous Interpreting’ (pp. 268-282)
A fascinating in-depth portrait of this very specialised élite (crème de la crème) of the translating profession, for whose almost superhuman members Bellos has nothing but praise. More alarmingly, he also foreshadows a possible shortage of such specially equipped persons in the future, as you will find out if you buy the book.

On page 354, David Bellos admits to the following conscious omissions:
“the uses and pitfalls of translations in the military, in war zones and in hospitals. I plead ignorance. There is surely a lot to be learned from the courageous language mediators who work in those fields.”
I am sure that for future editions he will find collaborators to contribute material on these important themes, especially from the health and forensic fields. In Canada, Australia and USA, a significant body of expertise has been developed over recent decades.

I hope I have added something.

Postscript: For a note on Edith Grossman, see here.

The conduct of the seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – and their close (“in our face”) reporting by the international media – would have been impossible without the contingents of intrepid cameramen and local interpreters, translators and ‘fixers’ who have helped the American and allied forces and the battalions of foreign correspondents. A small proportion of these civilian interpreters (etc.) have paid the ultimate price for their work: death. (Others, as in other foreign wars, may well pay a similar price, when the coalition forces finally depart.)

On assignment in North Iraq in March 2003, Eric Campbell, a correspondent for Australian ABC TV was injured and his cameraman was killed in a terrorist attack (virtually on camera). When New York Times correspondent Stephen Farrell was taken hostage recently in Kunduz province, Afghanistan, he was freed in a subsequent commando raid but his “translator”, Sultan Munadi, was killed.

In an account of his own experiences in South Lebanon, another war correspondent, Sam Kiley, narrates the death of Abed Takoush, the fixer for the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen. Kiley also provides this background information on the unique job description of a fixer and an insight into the close bond between foreign correspondents (or the military) and their invaluable local assistants, referring also to the case of Sultan Manadi. (See The Spectator, 16 September 2009)

“Abed was a “fixer”, like Sultan Manadi, who was killed last week during a NATO operation to free the British journalist Stephen Farrell from Afghan kidnappers. ‘Fixer’ is an ignoble title. The word is sleazy and demeaning: it implies the local people hired by the foreign media are mere higglers. The reality is that without a worldwide network of local freelance drivers, translators, and general all-round fixers, there would be a lot of dead journalists, and pretty soon no foreign news at all.

Any nitwit, and I am living proof, can be a ‘war correspondent’ if they are lucky enough to come across a great fixer. These men and women usually earn no more than $100 a day. For that they provide introductions to gangsters, war lords, terrorists, politicians – as well as navigate, drive and give instant tutorials on Albanian politics, Somali clan rivalries and Balkan history. More important, they keep us alive. Behind our backs they apologise for our cultural insensitivity, anticipate our needs before we know that we’ve got them, and from time to time literally lead us through minefields.”
(The Spectator, 16 September 2009)

A happier ending: 30-year-old Australian SAS Trooper Mark Donaldson was recently awarded the Victoria Cross (Australia’s first for 30 years) for rescuing an Afghan interpreter under heavy fire in 2008. He was subsequently received by Queen Elizabeth II in Buckingham Palace.

Note: Sam Kiley is the author of Desperate Glory: At War in Helmand with Britain’s 16th Air Assault Brigade (London, Bloomsbury).

“Muammar Gaddafi’s personal translator broke down towards the end of the Libyan leader’s meandering 94-minute UN speech and had to be rescued by a U.N. Arabic speaker.

The Libyan translator matched the “Brother Leader of the Revolution” word-for-word for 90 minutes before collapsing from exhaustion, just after Mr Gaddafi denounced the popular Ottawa Treaty outlawing landmines. […] The translator broke down as the man once denounced by Ronald Reagan as the “mad man” of the desert embarked on a tirade about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and an explanation of his call for a single-state solution called “Isratine”.

According to the New York Post, the Libyan translator shouted: “I just can’t take it any more.”

Rules specify that UN translators provide live interpretation only for 40 minutes at a time, and they are accustomed to seamless handovers. But Libya insisted on using its own translators for both English and French rather than one of the 25 world-class Arabic translators at the UN.

Libyan diplomats said that Mr Gaddafi would be speaking a dialect only his own staff could understand. In the event, he spoke standard Arabic.

Mr Gaddafi spoke six times longer than the 15-minute limit set by the UN General Assembly. But he did not come close to Fidel Castro’s record of four-and-a-half hours, set in 1960.”

The dramatic dénouement is a credit to the high level of professionalism of U.N. interpreters:

“The Libyan translator was bailed out by the UN’s Arabic section chief, Rasha Ajalyqeen, who stepped in without missing a beat. Ms Ajalyqeen provided English translation for the remainder of the speech, but sometimes appeared to be chuckling to herself at Mr Gaddafi’s extravagant and rambling language.”

(See the full Report here)

The following apology does not exactly exemplify Mistranslation, but it does contain an excellent example of the sort of ‘spin’ frequently deployed by officialdom and individuals in damage control mode over egregious language-based errors.
*

“Dear Colleagues,
The cover of the most recent German-language edition of MaxPlanckForschung (3/2008) depicts a Chinese text which had been chosen by our editorial office in order to symbolically illustrate the magazine’s focus on “China”. Unfortunately, it has now transpired that this text contains inappropriate content of a suggestive nature.
Prior to publication, the editorial office had consulted a German sinologist for a translation of the relevant text. The sinologist concluded that the text in question depicted classical Chinese characters in a non-controversial context. To our sincere regret, however, it has now emerged that the text contains deeper levels of meaning, which are not immediately accessible to a non-native speaker.
By publishing this text we did in no way intend to cause any offence or embarrassment to our Chinese readers. The editors of MaxPlanckResearch sincerely regret this unfortunate error and would like to offer an unreserved apology to all of their Chinese readers for any upset or distress they may have caused.
The cover title has already been substituted in the online edition, and the English version of MaxPlanckForschung (MaxPlanckResearch, 4/2008) will be published with a different title.”

This and the whole embarrassing translation mishap is brilliantly reported by Victor Mair at:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=881

Thanks, Victor!
(And with acknowledgements to Ronnie R. for the timely tip.)
*

FYI, here is how the formidable Language log collective presents its top quality blog:
“Language Log was started in the summer of 2003 by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum. For nearly five years, it ran on the same elderly linux box, with the same 2003-era blogging software, sitting in a dusty corner of a group office at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Other more or less regular contributors include Arnold Zwicky, Benjamin Zimmer, Bill Poser, Heidi Harley, Roger Shuy, Geoff Nunberg, Eric Bakovic, Sally Thomason, Barbara Partee, and John McWhorter. And an additional cast of dozens have blogged here from time to time.
On April 5, 2008, the original server suffered a terminal illness, and was replaced by a new machine in an actual server room with professional support, thanks to Chris Cieri, Chad Jackson and others at the Linguistic Data Consortium. The blog posts between 7/28/2003 and 4/6/2008, in the ugly but beloved old format, can be found here.”

My earlier blog on mistranslations and misinterpretations introduced the topic of the political misunderstandings and damage which may be caused by mistranslations, or alleged mistranslations, and media involvement. More evidence will be presented on these important issues in later articles. Other serious consequences may result from mistranslations in fields like commerce and advertising, law, medicine, science and technology. In these cases, the damage caused by the errors may at times lead to litigation.

Commerce and Advertising

A commonly told but false mistranslation story asserts that the car manufacturer Chevrolet was embarrassed by the poor sales in Mexico of its model named Nova (No va = ‘It doesn’t go’, in Spanish). The vital website http://www.snopes.com investigates and arbitrates on this and many other plausible and far-fetched urban legends. Nevertheless, mistranslations of product names or ‘How to Use’ instructions into other languages can cause serious commercial problems and expense, as Microsoft discovered in 1996. A furore arose in Mexico over a number of offensive definitions which had somehow survived the translating and editing processes and appeared in Microsoft’s Spanish language Thesaurus, equating, for example, indígena [native person, or (Mexican) Indian] with native, savage, and cannibal; Westerner with white, civilised; and lesbian with perverted. The outcry was so strong from the media representing Mexico’s 100 million inhabitants that the software giant was obliged to insert profuse apologies into Mexican newspapers and magazines, offering a hastily prepared update (minus the offending terms). The full page Spanish advertisement in the magazine Proceso (7 July1996) mentions terms like “serious errors”, “incorrect connotations which are offensive” and “we apologise for these errors”.

Although I cannot vouch for the following two examples, chosen as the most feasible of a somewhat mixed bunch posted on a translation website (www.languagetranslation.com/humorous_examples_pg1.html), se non sono veri, sono ben trovati. The first I hand over to Chinese (Mandarin?) translators for checking. The second one, also in need of verification by someone who has seen the original, at least appears linguistically feasible.

“In Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation” came out as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead.” Also, in Chinese, the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan “finger-lickin’ good” came out as “eat your fingers off”.
When Parker Pen marketed a ball-point pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to say “It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you.” However, the company mistakenly thought the Spanish word “embarazar” means “to embarrass”. Instead the ads said that, “it won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant”.”

Legal aspects

On 13 November 2007, during the long-running media pursuit of the case of the missing English girl in Portugal, reporter Fiona Govan filed a report on ‘Madeleine McCann: Possible translation errors’ in the UK Telegraph. (www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1569143/Madeleine-McCann-Possible-translation-errors.html)

“Inconsistencies in the statements given by the McCanns and the group of friends who were dining with them at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance may have been caused by errors in translation, it emerged today.
Portuguese detectives investigating the case of the missing four-year-old have admitted that they are reassessing the original witness statements to look for inaccuracies in their translation.”

Evidence of the possible consequences of gross misinterpretation by unqualified court interpreters provided in an Internet forum report of an article in The Scotsman (30 October 2007).
(Source: http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_culture&Number=295852989)
“SCORES of convicted foreign criminals could walk free because of the appalling quality of official translators in Scottish courts, a leading linguist has warned.
Alena Linhartova, who has interpreted in Scotland for 20 years, said people were effectively being “pulled off the street” to translate in a growing number of court cases.
This has called into question the reliability of evidence and raised serious doubts about whether foreign nationals, particularly from eastern Europe, can expect a fair trial in this country.”

Misinterpretation in medical situations

An article promoting the need for more funds to employ professional interpreters in US hospitals offers an example of the potential high cost of mistranslations in medical lawsuits. The following case is alleged to have been brought by a patient. (The result of the case is not given.)

“A $71 million lawsuit against a Florida hospital began when medical staff misinterpreted a patient’s symptoms. When a patient explained that he felt nauseous (‘intoxicado’, which has several meanings), they assumed he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol. The patient was eventually diagnosed with a brain aneurysm and became quadriplegic.” (http://healthlink.mcw.edu/article/1031002276.html)

Science and Technology

Almost unbelievable is the following excerpt from an account by CNN television of a 1999 Space exploration disaster caused by what appears to be a failure to translate basic English technical specifications into metrical terms. (http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9911/10/orbiter.02/)

“WASHINGTON (AP) — Failure to convert English measures to metric values caused the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, a spacecraft that smashed into the planet instead of reaching a safe orbit, a NASA investigation concluded Wednesday. […]
An investigation board concluded that NASA engineers failed to convert English measures of rocket thrusts to newton, a metric system measuring rocket force. One English pound of force equals 4.45 newtons. A small difference between the two values caused the spacecraft to approach Mars at too low an altitude and the craft is thought to have smashed into the planet’s atmosphere and was destroyed.”

Armand A. Gagnon, of Champollion Translations (www.linguatics.com/thesilentway/) offers the following historical example as ‘One of the Greatest Mistranslations of all Time’:

“Back in 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had observed the planet Mars through his modest 19th Century telescope and in his astronomy book, mentioned the “channels” (dried waterbeds) on the surface of the red planet. In his native Italian, “channels” is canali. When the wealthy Bostonian amateur astronomer Percival Lowell read a translation of Schiaparelli’s book and canali was translated as “canals” in English (implying a network on Mars created by intelligent beings), a life-on-Mars mania and madness then ensued well into the 20th Century. …”

Yet another anecdotal lesson is offered in an informative essay to prospective clients on the website of another translation agency. The context of the article is a warning about the significant (and inconvenient) errors which may result from a translator’s inadequate knowledge of the many differences (often subtle) between British and American English. The lesson would apply to translation from and into English. (Source: http://www.mcelroytranslation.com/languages/english/)

“To publish any kind of household appliance manual and constantly refer to the “earth” instead of the “ground” in talking about electrical connections could lead to a product liability suit. I am aware of a lawsuit that occurred when a transformer blew up in the United States that had been manufactured in Europe, because the instruction manual had been translated in China into what the Chinese fondly believe to be English (which English, we do not know) and the instructions for attaching the surge arrestors were so poorly translated that the surge arrestors were wrongly attached and the whole device blew up, at a cost of five million dollars to the owners of the transformer.”

(to be continued)

See also: Mistranslations. Introduction

This later blog article on fluency in foreign languages may also be of interest to some readers.