I’ve been doing a fair amount of research on translation theory recently, and it’s really a fascinating field. There are as many facets and complexities as colors in a sunset, but at its core, it does have any number of interesting and easily understandable aspects. Since I’ve been looking around at different sorts of translation, I think it’s time to discuss one of the more basic choices that translators make (and one of the ones that most affects the readers): source and target language bias.

So, let’s say that I wanted to translate a modern Spanish novel into English. For the purposes of this article, I’ll be using the terms “source text/language” to refer to the Spanish version, and using “target language/text” to refer to the English translation.
Translation would be far more simple if all languages were identical, abstract sets of words, used identically by everybody. If this were the case, every word construction, tense, or framing would have an exact duplicate in every other language in the world. The English word ‘Table’ would be exactly the same as the Spanish ‘Mesa’, and every time you saw ‘Table’, you could just switch it out with ‘mesa’. So, ideally, I would sit down with my dictionary and my reference grammar and start replacing English words, sentences, and paragraphs with their Spanish “equivalents”. Once this substitution was complete, I would have a perfectly accurate copy of the original text which was completely understandable to a speaker of the target language.

As convenient as that would be, it’s not remotely true. Even in our quick example, ‘Table’ in English has a number of different meanings, and not all are covered by the Spanish ‘mesa’ (ranging from a Data Table, to “tabling” a resolutions). No two languages are exactly equivalent, and although some words might have quick and easy equivalents in both the source and target language, the vast majority of words and constructions will require the translator to make some decisions.

When these decisions start being made, there’s an opportunity for bias. Let’s say I come across the Spanish phrase “Mas vale pajaro en mano que ciento volando” in the novel. I need to make a choice here, as to how to translate it. Literally, it means “A bird in the hand is worth more than a hundred flying.” However, English does have a very, very similar expression, “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. So, I can translate literally, and favor the Source Language (Spanish) phrasing, or I can translate using the English idiom, and favor the Target Language.

In this case, the main difference will be in terms of native target language speaker’s perception. Using the literal Spanish would be what translators often refer to as a “difference” preference or “favoring the source language “, the choice to use different phrasing and, even through the translation, emphasize that the source language and the author’s words are different than how an English speaker might have written things. On the other side, using the English idiom might be referred to as “identity” preference (or “favoring the target language”), where the translator tries to make the target language text as accessible, understandable, and familiar as possible to target language readers.

This example is fairly simple, in that really, a native English speaker will understand what the phrase means even if it’s translated literally. However, imagine you’re given an idiom like “Estar como perro en barrio ajeno”, literally, “to be like a dog in a neighbor’s yard”. If one were to translate that literally, the target language readers might understand the words, but miss the meaning entirely. However, Ii one translated it (more accurately) as “to be like a fish out of water”, the target language reader would have a much easier grasp on the meaning behind it.

There are always other factors at play in the decision of translating certain phrases. I’ve been learning about translation theory with one of the professors in my department, and he recently made a very interesting comment about the translation of Native American stories and literatures. We were going through one of his translations of an Arapaho speech, and we stumbled across a particularly colorful phrase (along the lines of “walking into the other group’s camp”). He translated it literally for me, but he put it into the English version as a single English word, “assimilation”. When I asked why, he explained that he didn’t want to make it sound like the stereotypical, disney-style Native American speech. He said that although the Arapaho often do use metaphors related to the Old Ways, hunting and nature, he often chooses not to translate them literally, because he feels it really just reinforces the stereotype of how their language sounds, rather than the actual message of the story or speech.

So, every translation has a bit of bias. However, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This is a choice, and a tool in the hands of a skilled translator, and very seldom is a translation done favoring ONLY the target or source languages. Although translation theorists will likely argue this point, I suspect that the most accurate translation will likely fall somewhere in the middle, with a mix of difference and identity.
Sometimes, you need to favor the target language, to make the book clear, understandable, and readable to the readers, but sometimes you need to favor the source language, if for no other reason, just to remind the reader that the original work wasn’t written two weeks ago in Des Moines.

Suggested Readings:

Introducing Translation Studies by Jeremy Munday : A good primer on translation theory and many of the issues discussed here (albeit with a generalized target language bias)

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pevear and Volokhonsky translation: A great book, and a more Target language biased translation.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constance Garnett translation: The same great book, but this is a more source language favoring translation.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, High Precision Language, Language Usage, Language in Fiction, Translation and Translation Theory | 3 Comments


So the other day, I was sitting in the hallway of my University’s Residence Halls, around midnight, and listening to a theology discussion which the RA’s were having. There were people of all different backgrounds there, but the most vocal was a young man of the Mormon faith. At one point, the question arose of Bible translation and the fallibility of human translators.

The young Mormon piped up with a very innovative analogy on translation which he learned in Seminary, which I felt was quite interesting. I’ll roughly paraphrase below:

The word of God is a lot like a picture hanging on a bulletin board. It only has one tack to secure it [representing the Old and New Testament], so anybody can spin it around as they’d like, changing the perspective, even though the picture stays the same. The translators each tilt it a bit differently, and it’s tough to see exactly what the right orientation is.

For us [those of the Mormon Faith], the Book of Mormon is a second tack. It provides a second hold, and keeps you from spinning the picture. Whenever there’s a question about the perspective and translation in one, you can consult the other. What might be unsure with one tack, is securely locked with two.

Whether you believe in the validity of either work, this is an interesting analogy. It seems to imply a distinct split between the actual “word” or message of God, and the written words used to pass it on, much like the split between concept and language used to describe it.

A similar idea is actually used frequently in the translation of a seminal work in Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhicharyavatara (‘Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life’) by Shantideva. Very early after its transcription (originally in Sanskrit), two highly authoritative versions were created of the work, one in Tibetan, and one in Sanskrit, and both are treated as equal by the Buddhist community. In modern translations, many of the translators choose to base their work off one version or the other, but use the other version to clarify difficult passages. My personal favorite translation, by Stephen Batchelor, was based on a 12th Century Commentary on the Tibetan text, but uses the Sanskrit for clarification in footnotes. When you’re dealing with differences as extreme as that between “May all women become men” and “May all women attain the rights and privileges of men”, a point of clarification is wonderful.

Now, let’s use a similar idea in a secular sense. I would like to describe an event, something complex, emotional, and generally slightly vague. Take, for example, an account of one’s first day leaving for College. Imagine a bilingual author were to write the story, once in, say, English, and once in Spanish. Not so much translating one into the other, but actually telling the story twice (with an effort to include much of the same information in both). Would the Spanish be a “second tack” for the English version and vice-versa? Could one use the Spanish to clarify the English ambiguities, and vice-versa? Most importantly, would another bilingual reader have a better idea what the author meant by reading both versions, rather than just one?

The more I look at it, translation seems messier and messier. I’ve begun to suspect that there is no such thing as a one-to-one translation, and that any time you switch languages or rephrase, something is lost or gained. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it, like all other things, needs to be studied further.

I hope this post made sense. If not, maybe I’ll try writing the same thing right next to it in Spanish. If it helps, I’ve just found a thesis.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, High Precision Language, Language Usage, Language and Ritual, Linguistic Mysticism, Translation and Translation Theory | 2 Comments


Last night, I was laying in bed, idly thinking about a project for my family’s printing business. The problem is as follows:

In order for us to replicate an image on some other medium, we need a copy of the original image. Inevitably, our less technologically saavy customers will send us tiny, highly compressed files, later asking for a large print with that same image. This is equivalent to hiring a mural painter to do your living room wall, and handing them a postage stamp to work from. File compression is a big problem in the printing business, and something that few non-graphics people really understand.

At this point, I sat up in bed and was struck that this presents a beautiful metaphor for language, on several different levels. The following is an exploration of this metaphor. For the purposes of this article, I snapped a picture of a few, not-so-randomly selected good books, and I’ll be using the same picture throughout the article. The books, in case you’re wondering, are Language, Thought and Reality by Benjamin Whorf, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Far from the Madding Gerund, the Language Log book.

The Original Image

So let’s start from a flawless original. In order to show you the original, I’ve uploaded it as a TIFF file. Now, the beauty of the TIFF file format is that absolutely nothing is lost when you save the picture. Every bit of detail that was there in the camera is there in the TIFF, earning TIFF the designation of being a “lossless” format. However, this is not without a price. Let’s view the file now:

See the image here… (1.8mb file, it may take a while to load, or might not load at all)

Because this is a lossless file, it is a very large and cumbersome. For this small picture, the TIFF file was a little more than 1.8 Megabytes. This is why it probably took some time to load for you. In addition, they’re difficult for some software to open. Firefox has to use Apple’s Quicktime to open them, and it can take a while even for a powerful program like Adobe’s Photoshop to open them. So, there’s a compromise here. You can get a high fidelity, lossless file, but it takes a long time to transmit, load, and open it.

Quality over Cost

The next option (that I’m going to explore) is the JPEG file format. JPEG is a “lossy” format, meaning that, in order to save space and time when opening it, it throws out some of the data and detail. Ideally, it’s only throwing out details that are unnecessary or invisible to the human eye, but often, some loss becomes quickly apparent. Below is the highest quality JPEG that Photoshop can make:

Trio100

This file (compressed at Maximum quality) is pretty detailed still, and little is visibly lost. However, the filesize has gone down from 1.8MB to 188kb. This is a very good compromise, because you can still get the detail across, but you don’t have to take up as much time and space to work with the file. Now, let’s check out the same file, compressed at 50% quality:

Trio50

Here, you start to see some “artifacts”, or little jagged patches in the solid colors (look around the text on “language, thought and reality”). However, from this loss of quality, we are able to shrink the file down to 40kb. Finally, just for grins, let’s look at 0% quality JPEG (the most compression with the least quality):

trio0.jpg

We’ve now hit a very, very noticeable loss in quality, although the file is only 16kb in this state.

Here too, we see evidence of the compromise between size and detail.

What does this have to do with language?

Compare the following four example interactions:

1. Kim: "Where's Mom?"
Pat: "Although I'm not entirely sure, as I've been out of contact with her, I have no means of locating her exactly (via GPS or otherwise), and she has been known to make stops unannounced, she had earlier expressed an intent and desire to go to the John's Hair Salon, on 28th Street. Considering that she left around 10am, it is now 10:15am, and her salon sessions usually last approximately one hour, there is a good chance that she is still currently at the Salon."

2. Kim: "Where's Mom?"
Pat: "She said she was going to John's Hair Salon when she left 15 minutes ago."

3. Kim: "Where's Mom?"
Pat: "At the salon."

4. Kim: "Where's Mom?"
Pat: "Out."

Here, we have a very similar situation to the one above. There is a block of information that needs to be expressed, and many options as to how to best express it to maximize detail and efficiency.

Answer one is the Maximum Quality JPEG file of verbal expression. It gives every bit of necessary detail (and more) at the expense of time and energy. However, Pat’s response violates both Grice’s Maxims of Quantity and Manner, giving FAR more information than required or desired, slowing down interaction and cluttering Kim’s mind with more detail than needed. If everybody talked like this, nothing would ever get done quickly.

Answers two and three are both slowly sacrificing detail in favor of brevity. Both are significantly faster than answer one, but have enough detail to be meaningful and answer the question. Depending on the situation, either could be an acceptable answer to Kim’s question.

Answer four is the 0% JPEG of the conversational world. Although it provides some information, it’s not really enough for most purposes, and violates Grice’s Maxims of Quantity and Manner, this time at the other extreme. This answer would likely only frustrate Kim, and would make Pat sound like a Smart-Aleck.

So, in language too, we have to make this compromise. Is detail more important than brevity? What detail should we include? All of these interactions were lossy, and although the degree of loss wasn’t problematic until example four, it’s still vital to keep this in mind when examining language.

So where’s the TIFF?

The biggest difficulty with this metaphor is trying to find out what the TIFF file of Pat’s response is, and does such a thing exist? Although answer one was long and drawn out, there is still some missing detail there that Pat might have known. He didn’t include any clarification of how long it takes to get to the Salon, nor information on other stops that Mom might’ve been planning. No information was given about Mom herself, her manner of getting to the salon, or what else was said before she left. Although you could argue that some of that information might’ve been shared knowledge or knowledge easily assumed by Kim, the fact remains that there is always more that one could say about a subject.

Is our thought the TIFF file of conversation, the singular idea which contains all the detail which we discard when formulating speech? If that’s the case, would it be possible to find or create a “lossless” language? Perhaps this idea of lossless language is what I’m referring to with “High Precision language”.

Maybe it’s even one step further. Maybe the entire sum of our experiences and knowledge formulate one massive TIFF file, and all we do in conversation is crop and JPEG it as is fitting for the context. I kinda hope not, though. A file that big would take forever to open in Photoshop.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, High Precision Language, Language Usage, Language and Thought | 1 Comment

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