Book review: Dictionary of Untranslatables
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Dictionary of Untranslatables
Edited by BARBARA CASSIN
Reviewed by Matthew Battles
A friend once remarked that the Korean language has no word for salad. Instead, it uses saleodu, a Korean-inflected version of the English word. It occurred to me that by that logic, there's no word in English for salad, either -- "salad" being derived from insalata from the Latin, where it names a salted dish. Defying the threat of unintelligibility, words emigrate quite happily from language to language. Loanwords, as etymologists call them, take root in a new language without much modification, retaining the flavor and frisson of their original tongue. Sometimes words find their way by assimilation, taking up residence as "calques" or direct translations from one language to another; "scapegoat" is an example, remade in rough, apostrophe-sprouting sixteenth-century English by William Tyndale from the Hebrew text of Leviticus. "Calque" is one such loanword; "loanword" itself, from the German Lehnwort, is also a calque.
Although purists and prescriptivists are always seeking the aboriginality of language, the tongues themselves are promiscuous, happy in one another's company. "All words are fossil poetry," Emerson declared, and by the same light, all words belong to someone else. Any cosmopolitan discourse makes use of the untranslatable, comprising a buzzing, evanescent community of idiolects, jargons, and lingue franche. The Internet is, of course, a marvelously efficient loanword generator. Take a term like "Net neutrality," which finds itself abducted into debates across formerly loanword-resistant languages. From the French edition of PC World online, for example, we have the following usage: "Le principe de Net Neutrality est simple: Internet ne doit pas favoriser, ni pénaliser, certains contenus par rapport aux autres" (where "Internet," too, is an untranslatable). At Le Figaro, we find the untranslatable corralled in a parenthetical: "Cette question, qu'on appelle la «neutralité des réseaux» (Net neutrality), est récurrente depuis plusieurs années sur le web." This usage is found at Le Figaro's tech blog -- the title of which is "Suivez le Geek."
Words in Princeton University Press's new Dictionary of Untranslatables are more rarefied than those used in Internet coverage or international cuisine. Subtitled "a philosophical lexicon," this massive tome seeks to capture, chart, and explain shifts in the usage of philosophical terminology in the ever-flowing river of Occidental philosophy emerging from classical antiquity, winding out of the European Middle Ages through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, splitting into streams of continental and analytic schools in the postmodern era.
As Barbara Cassin writes in the Preface, translation relies on "the suggestion of an always absent perfect equivalence":
http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/Dictionary-of-Untranslatables/ba-p/13076
Although purists and prescriptivists are always seeking the aboriginality of language, the tongues themselves are promiscuous, happy in one another's company. "All words are fossil poetry," Emerson declared, and by the same light, all words belong to someone else. Any cosmopolitan discourse makes use of the untranslatable, comprising a buzzing, evanescent community of idiolects, jargons, and lingue franche. The Internet is, of course, a marvelously efficient loanword generator. Take a term like "Net neutrality," which finds itself abducted into debates across formerly loanword-resistant languages. From the French edition of PC World online, for example, we have the following usage: "Le principe de Net Neutrality est simple: Internet ne doit pas favoriser, ni pénaliser, certains contenus par rapport aux autres" (where "Internet," too, is an untranslatable). At Le Figaro, we find the untranslatable corralled in a parenthetical: "Cette question, qu'on appelle la «neutralité des réseaux» (Net neutrality), est récurrente depuis plusieurs années sur le web." This usage is found at Le Figaro's tech blog -- the title of which is "Suivez le Geek."
Words in Princeton University Press's new Dictionary of Untranslatables are more rarefied than those used in Internet coverage or international cuisine. Subtitled "a philosophical lexicon," this massive tome seeks to capture, chart, and explain shifts in the usage of philosophical terminology in the ever-flowing river of Occidental philosophy emerging from classical antiquity, winding out of the European Middle Ages through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, splitting into streams of continental and analytic schools in the postmodern era.
As Barbara Cassin writes in the Preface, translation relies on "the suggestion of an always absent perfect equivalence":
Nothing is exactly the same in one language as in another, so the failure of translation is always necessary and absolute…. This proposition rests on a mystification, on a dream of perfection we cannot even want, let alone have. If there were a perfect equivalent from language to language, the result would not be translation; it would be a replica. And if such replicas were possible on a regular basis, there would not be any languages, just one vast, blurred international jargon, a sort of late cancellation of the story of Babel.The Myth of Babel is a story told by states, which tend to prefer their citizenries monolingual. And yet polyglossic diversity is the habit and the habitat of languages. There are more than 6,000 tongues spoken on the planet today (although more than half of them surely will die out by century's close). For much of history, most humans have been multilingual. In the context of modernity, linguistic virtuosity is the mostly the province of scholars; it's a delicious irony that in this respect (and not only this respect), the academy is strikingly similar to the kind of small-scale society anthropologists once called "primitive." .. read more:
http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/Dictionary-of-Untranslatables/ba-p/13076
