Funny and surprising on every page, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? offers readers new insight into the mystery of how we come to know what someone else means—whether we wish to understand Astérix cartoons or a foreign head of state. Using translation as his lens, David Bellos shows how much we can learn about ourselves by exploring the ways we use translation, from the historical roots of written language to the stylistic choices of Ingmar Bergman, from the United Nations General Assembly to the significance of James Cameron's Avatar.Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across human experience to describe why translation sits deep within us all, and why we need it in so many situations, from the spread of religion to our appreciation of literature; indeed, Bellos claims that all writers are by definition translators. Written with joie de vivre, reveling both in misunderstanding and communication, littered with wonderful asides, it promises any reader new eyes through which to understand the world. In the words of Bellos: "The practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different: we speak different tongues, and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same—that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist. Nor could anything we would like to call social life. Translation is another name for the human condition."
When I was an undergraduate, a story went around among students in my college that a fellow called Harris had refused to teach translation classes on the grounds that he did not know what “translation” was.
He’d challenged the faculty board to tell him what it was he was being asked to teach. Everyone knows what it is! they said. Translation has been taught here for centuries. But knowing how to perpetuate an academic tradition is not the same thing as knowing what you’re doing. Harris could not possibly teach a subject his seniors were unable to define.
We thought it a great giggle: a junior don had used a philosophical conundrum to get out of a chore and tied the fuddy-duddies into knots.
Despite the tantalizing puzzle set by Roy Harris at the start of my adult life, I have dared to teach translation for several decades since then. I have also translated many books and become the director of a program in translation and intercultural communication. So it’s about time I tried to answer his question.
However, answers are best found when the question itself is well put. “What is … ?” doesn’t normally provide a good prompt. It usually leads you headlong into hairsplitting disputes about the meanings of words.
The meaning of the word
Here are some of those other questions: What can we learn from translation? What does it teach us?
Many others then spring to mind: What do we actually know about translation? What is it about translation that we still need to find out?
We also have to ask: What do people mean when they offer opinions and precepts about the best way to translate? Are all translations the same kind of thing, or are there different operations involved in different kinds of translating? Is translating fundamentally different from writing and speaking, or is it just another aspect of the unsolved mystery of how we come to know what someone else means?
This isn’t a book that tells you how to translate, or how I translate. There are plenty of good books of those kinds; there’s no need to add a lesser one to the pile.
Instead, it is made of stories and examples and arguments that circle around what seems to me to be the real issue—understanding what translation
I’ve tried to paint a big picture by exploring the role of translation in cultural, social, and human issues of many kinds. To do so, I’ve used scholarly books and articles and exploited many erudite friends, but in many places I’ve also drawn on personal experience.
As I grew up in England and live in the United States, the point of view of this book is located unambiguously in the English-speaking world.
Because English is currently the dominant interlanguage of the world, English speakers who aren’t involved in translation have a harder time than most others in understanding what translation is. That’s my main reason for writing about it.
Finding out what translation has done in the past and does today, finding out what people have said about it and why, finding out whether it is one thing or many—these inquiries take us far and wide, to Sumer, Brussels, and Beijing, to comic books and literary classics, and into the fringes of disciplines as varied as anthropology, linguistics, and computer science. What translation does raises so many answerable questions that we can leave the business of what it is to the side for quite some time.
Douglas Hofstadter took a great liking to this short poem by the sixteenth-century French wit Clément Marot:
He sent a copy of it to a great number of his friends and acquaintances and asked them to translate it into English, respecting as well as they could the formal properties that he identified in it:
