Sportive Thoughts

I have failed in learning to read German. Monumentally. There are many reasons for this, probably the most blatant being that you cannot learn to read a language without completely understanding how to speak it. This fact stands up to pure and simple logic as well as certain scientific findings that link the phonetic task of language with the visual / orthographic task in the process of reading. In plain and simple language: when you read you are recognizing words that you have either (1) heard spoken and sometimes pronounce in daily speech or (2) can imagine being said aloud by yourself or another person. This second point hints at why the notion of an author is so important to us when we consider what a text is "saying"--we cannot imagine anything being said without the presence of some kind of speaker!

But I digress. A reader commented on my translation exercise, saying one must strive for accuracy in translation without losing the meaning of the text. This is by all means true; but the content of the belief spells out a much more complicated process than we may think.

For instance, what does it mean to say that "Yo tengo viente y tres annos" is accurately translated as "I am twenty-three years old"? The answer is plainly that the Spanish sentence conveys, without equivocation, exactly the same thing that the English sentence conveys. Moreover, what is conveyed is merely the meaning of the utterance; namely, that the speaker was born 23 years ago.

So a few things are going on when we translate this Spanish sentence into English. First, there is the conveyance or content of the Spanish. Some might say there is no content per-se, that the speaker merely wishes to communicate so as to have some sort of effect on the listener--informing him, interesting him, stalling or initiating conversation, etc. In any case, it is agreed that at the very least the speaker wishes to have himself understood, by a competent speaker of Spanish, and as a competent speaker of Spanish. If this were not the case, then it is hard to see how a speaker can accomplish anything without first establishing that he is communicating. He would just be making noises if this were not the case. So, there is some sort of intent behind saying, "Yo tengo viente y tres annos."

Second, there must be an equivalent conveyance in English. That is to say, if the Spanish is to be translated at all, then one must be able to establish communication in English as well as Spanish. One must be able to say, "I am twenty-three years old," effectively and intentionally. If not, then one would in effect translate the Spanish into noises that have no point of their own, besides being a receptacle and perhaps vehicle for the Spanish sentence. Think of radio waves; nobody speaks Radio. But we do "translate" regular speech like Spanish or English into radio waves, which then get turned back into the sounds corresponding to the original language. If translating were simply turning Spanish sentences into English ones, then it would seem no different than turning human speech into radio signals. But it is clearly more complex than that.

What's complex is the third point: language is not just effective, it is meaningful. Thinking more about our counterexample, the radio waves do have an effect. They transmit signals that are decoded into corresponding sounds, that are then understood by competent listeners. Yet the listeners do not listen to the radio signals. They listen to the sounds transmitted by the radio, and those transmissions themselves are not meaningful (unless the signals are in a code like Moorse, in which case you are using a language!). Spanish and English are their own languages, they have similar effects and sometimes the same meaning, as in the sentences "Yo tengo viente y tres annos" and "I am twenty-three years old".

But here's the catch. You cannot translate "Yo tengo viente y tres annos" into "I am twenty-three years old" without understanding both sentences separately, prior to the task of translation. In other words, if you don't know how to give your age in English, and you cannot speak any other languages that can serve as a proxy (like the Rosetta stone), then you cannot know how to give your age in Spanish. If you knew one of the two languages, then you could begin to figure out the other with the right effort.

Unfortunately, in my German course, this effort was never achieved. It is impossible to simply transcribe, word by word, from one language into the other and preserve meaning. For instance, transcribing (not translating) "Yo tengo viente y tres annos" into English you get "I have twenty and three years". That is not correct, simply because no native English speaker gives his age in that phrasing with a straight face. We learn to give our age by saying, "I am so-many years old." And, by knowing how to say that in English, and by recognizing that the Spanish speaker is trying to do the same exact thing, we learn the correct translation.

This all should be quite obvious, but the reasons why it is obvious are hard to grasp.