Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

C.K. Ogden, the famously eccentric co-author of The Meaning of Meaning, believed that much of the world’s troubles could be ascribed to the illusion that a thing exists just because we have a word for it. He called this phenomenon “Word Magic.” Candidates for the label include “levitation,” “real existing socialism,” and “safe investment.” These aren’t outright fictions but illusions licensed and created by the lexicon. In Ogden’s view, Word Magic is what makes us lazy. It stops us from questioning the assumptions that are hidden in words and leads us to allow words to manipulate our minds. It is in this sense that we need to ask: Does “translation” exist? That is to say, is “translation” an actual thing we can identify, define, explore, and understand—or is it just a word?

In English and many other languages the word for translation is a two-headed beast. A translation names a product—any work translated from some other language; whereas translation, without an article, names a process—the process by which “a translation” comes to exist. This kind of double meaning is not a problem for speakers of languages that possess regular sets of terms referring both to a process and to the product of that process (as do most Western European languages). Speakers of English, French, and so forth are quite accustomed to negotiating such duplicity and can play games with it, as when they say walk the walk and talk the talk. More specifically, words derived from Latin that end in English in -tion nearly always name a process and a result of that process: abstraction (the process of abstracting something) alongside an abstraction, construction (the business of building structures) alongside a construction (something built), and so on. In a related kind of word use, the teacher of a cordon bleu cookery lesson hardly needs to explain that the French use cuisine to name both the place where food is prepared (the kitchen) and the results of such preparation (haute cuisine, cuisine bourgeoise, etc.). Handling the different meanings of translation and a translation is therefore not a real problem. We should nonetheless keep in mind that they are not the same thing and always be wary of taking one for the other.

The difficulty with translation is different. Many diverse kinds of text are habitually identified as instances of “a translation”: books, real estate contracts, car maintenance manuals, poems, plays, legal treatises, philosophical tomes, CD notes, and website texts, to list just a few. What common property do they have to make us believe that they are all instances of the same thing that we label “a translation”? Many language professionals will tell you that translating a manufacturer’s catalog is utterly different from translating a poem. Why do we not have different words for these different actions? There are other languages that have no shortage of separate words to name the many things that in English all go by the name of “a translation.” Here, for example, are the main words that you have to talk about them in Japanese: