Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything

Translation is an interesting endeavor. No too languages are exactly alike. Meanings of words evolve over time. Even if words started from the same root, they may have different nuances today. Grammatical structures may also differ. Poetry can be even more challenging as meter, rhyme and association are all different.

The European Union has declared that each different language version of a law is official. There is no source and translation. However, this has resulted in court challenges where one version of the law ends up having a slightly different meaning than another. Thus, you can't get away from comparing different "official" versions.

There is also the concept of "translating up" and "translating down". There are also sometimes translations where the source includes different dialects or even text in the target language. When translating a Russian novel with French to French what do you do? Do you just leave the French as French? Or do you do something else to make it clear that it was in a different language than the main novel? How do you show accents that are written in different ways?

The translator plays a key role in changing the way in which we experience a work. A difficult novel may be more accessible (or vice versa). Technical jargon may be different. There may be subtleties that are missed or different in translation. In some places (like Japan), translators are well respected and regarded as talented artists in their own right.

The balance of translators can also be a challenge. In the EU, there may be many people in a poorer country that eager to work as translators. However, there is greater need for translators from the wealthier countries, but they have many other job opportunities.

This book provides an eye opening voyage into the field of translation. English speakers often don't pay much attention to translations. The bad translations that we sometimes see in cheaply translated instruction manuals are perhaps the only time we notice that there is some skill needed for good translation.