Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

To return to the parable of Jim lost in the woods with his partner Jane, one of the pair might say on smelling the welcome aroma of coffee brewing nearby, “Aha! I smell coffee!” or else “Can you smell what I smell?” or “Can you smell coffee, too?” These are different sentences having what linguists would call different sentence meanings, but in that context they all have the same force—namely, that the camp is near at hand, that they are not lost, that they should rejoice, and so on. In translation the differences between these sentence meanings hardly matter. What matters here is to preserve the force of the utterance, and knowing how to do that in another language is the translator’s main skill. Levels of formality in conversation, as well as customs and rules about how men and women may relate to each other when lost in the woods, vary quite widely between languages and the cultures that they serve. For the story of Jim and Jane, the translator’s job is to express the force of the utterance in those particular circumstances in forms appropriate to the target language and culture. Whether or not the chosen form of words corresponds to the sentence meaning of the sentence that Jim uttered is beside the point.

Of course, Jim could have communicated the meaning he attached to his having smelled a particular smell not in words but with a smile, a twitching of his nostrils, a wave of his hand. In many circumstances such as these, nonverbal communication can have pretty much the same force as an utterance. It’s an awkward fact for translation studies, but the truth is that meaning does not inhere solely to words. When it comes to knowing what something means and what meaning has been received, there is no clear line to be drawn between language and nonlinguistic forms of communication—in the story of Jim and Jane, between smiling, twitching, waving, and speaking. There’s no clear cutoff point but only a shifting and ragged edge between language use and all the rest.

Symptoms and nonverbal complements to verbal expression lie on or just over the edge of the field of translation, which covers only utterances that have linguistic form—but there’s always more to an utterance than just its linguistic form. That’s why there’s no unequivocal way of saying where one mode or type or level of meaning ends and another begins. If you turn off the soundtrack of the bus-trap sequence in The Great Escape, you see a man in a leather coat saying farewell to two guys in mufti, one of whom returns his good wishes and then, inexplicably, tries to run away. You would have understood nothing. But if you just listen to the soundtrack, without seeing the context in which someone says “Good luck” with a slight German accent, you would probably have understood even less. The context alone doesn’t tell you what the utterance means unless you can hear the utterance as well; conversely, the utterance alone doesn’t contain nearly enough information to allow you to reconstruct the context. You have to have both.

Film is a useful tool for exploring the myriad ways in which meaning happens. What we understand from a shot or sequence is formed by different kinds of information made available by various technical means. The angle of the camera and the depth of field; the decor; the characters’ clothing, facial gestures, and body movements; the accessories displayed; the sound effects and background music that have been superimposed all affect the meanings we extract from a sequence or shot. In the most accomplished films, no single stream can be separated from all the others. They work in concert, and their timing is integral to the meaning that they build. Each stream of meaning is one part of the context that gives all other streams their power to mean and necessarily affects the specific meanings that they have.

What is reasonably clear from film is also applicable to human communication in general, including the blandest and simplest of sentences uttered. For translation, and for us all, meaning is context.

The expression “One double macchiato to go”—an expression I utter most days, around 8 a.m.—means what it means when uttered in a coffee shop by a customer to a barista. The situation (the coffee shop) and the participants (customer and barista) are indispensable, inseparable parts of the meaning of the utterance. Imagine saying the same thing at 2 a.m., in bed, to your partner. Or imagine it said by a trans-Saharan cycling fanatic on arrival at a Tuareg tent camp. The words would be the same, but the meaning of their being said would be entirely different. Symptomatically, it might be that you were having a nightmare, or that dehydration had driven the cyclist out of his mind. Any piece of language behavior, even a simple request for coffee, acquires a different meaning when its context of utterance is changed.