Bassnett, Susan (2011). Reflections on Translation.

Multilingual Matters: Bristol. Topics in

Translation: 39, pp. 27-30.

Chapter 2
Original Sin

Word for word or sense for sense is the question facing translators. When
should we follow a source text so closely that we reproduce each word,
and when should we diverge from that close following to create some-
thing that effectively translates the meaning, or the sense, instead? Most
translators would immediately opt for the second option, being all too
aware of the pitfalls of the word-for-word approach. After all, a transla-
tion that is too literal can be simply unreadable.
Inexperienced translators seem to go for word-for-word renderings, and
it seems to be a universal truth that translation in the tourist industry
worldwide is pretty dire. Here are a couple of word-for-word items, one
from an Indonesian hotel brochure and the other from a pamphlet pro-
duced by the city of Salamanca tourist office:

This building is surrounded by the density of trees away from the

noise of the traffic, although sometime the voice of traditional fruit
sellers offering their commodity break your serenity, however it
reflects the atmosphere of uniqueness.

The characteristic feature of this building is its baldachin-style cupola

which appears to hover over the central auditorium, seemingly
‘turning on’ the cascade of light that pours in through the lantern that
crowns it.

From both these paragraphs we get an idea of what is being described,

although the obscurity of expression is due to the translator having
adhered too closely to the original even, in the case of the Spanish, down
to translating inverted commas. In neither case has the translator felt
confident enough to break away from the structures of the original so as
to write a good, clear piece of English prose which, after all, is what the
tourist needs. Sometimes, though, translations are so bad that the meaning
is completely obscured. With so many examples of the inadequacies of

12
Original Sin 13

literal translation everywhere we go, it is hardly surprising that many

translators are wary of it.
The early development of computer translation is another example of
the pitfalls of literal translation. The idea, back in the Cold War days, was
that newspapers circulating in Moscow could be read in Washington
simultaneously, thanks to the skills of computer translation programs.
Here too, literal translation proved a reef on which that kind of linguis-
tic idealism foundered. Languages are in a constant state of movement,
and the early computer programmes, which were glorified dictionaries,
missed whole dimensions of language use, particularly the figurative. If I
translate a phrase such as ‘the onset of darkness’, the context will tell me
whether ‘darkness’ is being used literally or figuratively, that is, to indi-
cate a state of mind. If it is being used figuratively, then depending on the
language into which I am translating, I will have to use a different word
from that which renders the physical condition of nightfall. In short, I will
have to think through a set of textual and contextual problems, and the
early computers did not think like that at all. These days, computer
translation is a sophisticated enterprise, and the old weaknesses of literality
just a distant memory. Nevertheless, the inadequacy of machine translation
in dealing with certain kinds of text opened up debates about forms of
translation that still continue.
So with all this in mind, why would anyone want to defend literal
translation? Can it ever be useful? Well, yes, it can. Literal translation has
long been used in language learning as a means of testing grammatical
and semantic competence, or incompetence, as the case may be. My son
recently produced a German sentence that read: Ich bin lesen ein gut Buch.
Apart from having remembered to capitalise the noun, he had managed
to create an aberration. His defence, of course, was that he had translated
literally: I am = Ich bin, reading = lesen, a = ein, good = gut, book = Buch.
I protested that he had failed to take an account of the use of the present
continuous in English and the presence of case endings in German. This,
of course, is where I discovered the impossibility of explaining grammati-
cal error to a generation that has no vocabulary with which to talk about
grammar, but I will not go into that here for fear of exposing myself as a
reactionary, antediluvian, grammarian with a deep distrust of the conver-
sational method of language teaching. All I will say is that after some
discussion, the difference between the English and German sentence
began to emerge, and through the errors of literal translation he was able
to see an alternative. My mantra repeated to all my children and students
over the years that what is wonderful about knowing other languages is
that you can do different things in different ways in different languages
14 Reflections on Translation

seemed to have been heard. Literal translation can operate as a first step in
a process of acquiring skills that involve thinking in a new way and trying
to interpret the world differently, through understanding how another
language works.
A book by Robert Stanton, The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon
England, sheds new light on the importance of literal translation in the
development of the English vernacular. Until I read this, I had not consid-
ered the importance of literal translation as a tool for people speaking a
vernacular language to develop their own written version. English
emerged in a written form in the Anglo-Saxon period when some of the
flourishing oral literature began to appear in manuscript. The earliest
English texts were interlinear glosses of Latin writings, mostly religious
works. The glosses were notes on the text, written either between the lines
or in the margins, and often they were literal translations of Latin words
or phrases. The complexity of glossing systems has been the subject of
several scholarly studies, but for the purposes of this essay, let us think of
glosses as a form of literal translation. The function of glossing was clearly
to enable readers to understand the Latin work.
In the 7th century AD, the Venerable Bede proposed that the Lord’s
Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed should be translated into English, both
for the common people and ‘for clerics or monks who are unskilled in the
Latin language’. This suggests that monks were by no means as skilled in
Latin as might have been supposed. The Anglo-Saxon world was not one
in which learning could flourish easily. Apart from restricted supplies of
manuscripts, scribes to copy them and teachers to disseminate knowledge,
not all rulers promoted learning, and disease, wars and Viking raiders
made consistent study difficult. In that world, translating literally and
commenting on the Latin works that were available became a way of
disseminating knowledge relatively easily. Two tasks could be fulfilled by
such a translation exercise: the person writing the glossary would become
better acquainted with the structures of Latin, and the knowledge contained
in the Latin text would be made available to people whose knowledge of
Latin was weak.
Stanton suggests that Anglo-Saxon literary culture ‘was indelibly marked
by the very idea of translation’. Through literal translation, understanding
spread and gradually Anglo-Saxon began to acquire status in its own right
as a written language. By the time of King Alfred (849–899), it was possible
for the king to introduce bilingual education to England and to state, as he
does in his preface to one of his own translations, that translation is neces-
sary so that ‘all the free born youths who are now in England, who have the
means to apply themselves to it, be set to learning, whenever they have no
Original Sin 15

other duties, until the time that they can read English writing well’. Then,
Alfred declares that those whom teachers wish to educate further can begin
to learn Latin as well.
The story of literal translation through interlinear glossing of early
manuscripts is not just a specialised tale for scholars, but the story of the
birth of written English. Similarly, interlinear glossing in other European
languages gave rise to other written forms of vernacular, and meant that
oral literature that had circulated for centuries, such as the great Germanic
epics, the songs, riddles and stories could be set down in languages that,
at the very least, could stand up to Latin, even if they could not outdo
Latin stylistically at that point in time.
It is interesting to reflect on the role of literal translation in the
development of language skills. I started out disparaging word-for-word
versions, and I would still argue that a good translation moves on beyond
the literal, but close rendering of a text serves a very definite purpose.
The scribes making their Anglo-Saxon jottings were, one trusts, much
better linguists than my son, but the principle of aligning words so as to
understand how different languages work is one that is still recognisable
over centuries.

First published in ITI Bulletin May–June 2004.