Found In Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives And Transforms The World, by Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetzsche

Language and translation are often tricky matters. It is hard to translate well, and yet those who translate are often not particularly recognized unless something goes wrong. During the Cold War, Soviet Premier Kruschev got a lot of hostility for saying “We will bury you” to the West, when it seems that he actually said “We will outlast you,” which is equally incorrect but far less provocative in nature. In a world where language is vitally important in how human beings operate, those people who cannot explain themselves to those around them face all kinds of difficulties in dealing with the police, in asking for help in general, and in achieving good results in medical care or in education, or in any number of endeavors. This particular book, written by a couple of people who are pretty experienced in translation and who also seek the insight of plenty of others involved in the field, does a good job at explaining what aspects of translation are vital in the contemporary world and what sort of hope we have of increasing language fluency so as to be able to engage in better translations in the future, as well as examining the way that translations have been useful in the contemporary world.

This book is moderately short at between 200 and 250 pages and it is divided into seven chapters. The book begins with a foreword by David Crystal as well as an introduction about the experience and background of the authors. This is followed by an opening chapter that provides the perspective of the author in saving lives and protecting rights in translation, which can sometimes be difficult (1). The authors then turn their attention to questions of war and peace and comment on how translation with regards to diplomacy can be a particularly tricky matter (2). After this the authors discuss doing business and crossing borders and how this often requires linguistic knowledge (3). After that the discussion of sharing stories and spreading religion in translation provides the authors with a chance to talk about the importance of literary translation, that vastly underpaid profession (4). This is followed by a discussion of entertainment and the importance of translation when it comes to music, films, and television, and the like (5), including translating opera. The authors then discuss the importance of connecting the world and advancing technology, which gives a chance to discuss matters with the makers of Google Translate (7). The book then ends with a final note, acknowledgements, endnotes, resources, and an index.

I would like to comment a bit on the authors and their view of what is untranslatable. Within the Muslim world, for example, the Koran is considered to be untranslatable, and there are a great many concepts that lack an easy one-to-one correspondence in terms with other languages (like English). In general, though, terms can either be transliterated if it is important for them to be understood as terms, as English tends to be willing to do wholesale when it comes to concepts ranging from the Portuguese saudade to the German sehnsuct and Gestalt and the Persian googooli, among many others, or they can be translated by multiple words that explain the sense of the word in question. For example, the German schadenfreude is one of my favorite words to express a complex feeling that has no direct English equivalent, but it can certainly be translated by saying that it is the malicious enjoyment at someone else’s suffering–not a good feeling, to be sure, nor something praiseworthy, but certainly a real feeling that people have. It is important for us to recognize that translation does not consist in finding one-to-one correspondence between every word in the source language with a single word or concept in the target language, but it is rather doing as was done by those who returned from the Babylonian captivity to Jerusalem during the times of the Persian Empire, who did not know the Hebrew and had to have it translated into Aramaic, recorded in Nehemiah 8:8: “So they read distinctly from the book, in the Law of God; and they gave the sense, and helped them to understand the reading.” Any translator should aspire to do the same, in whatever endeavor they are working.