On the relative precision of languages

Sehr geehrter Herr S.

My first question is : how do you assess that a translation is “not very good ”?

It could sound candid.. but my question is genuine. See if one does not know the original language well enough....how can one really judge?

For my part, I always thought it difficult to judge whether a translation is, say mediocre or not.... To be perfectly honest, I am not sure I have encountered "mediocre" translations in my whole life, I mean "translations that were professional and edited"... Amateur, or translations done on the corner of a table yes... I have seen of various quality, starting with mine (sometimes...) because I do not have a particular talent or patience for that..

However, virtually everybody around me, at least once, said:.. oh my god, the translation is rather lousy... How can this be... I remember this former friend of mine, a girl foreigner- she had frequent infatuations on various topics.. and there she got infatuated about English (British English of course).. In that phase of her craziness nothing could compare to British ...(even if her English was nothing noticeable)... I remember then proposing her to read a book, that I had only in a French translation, frowning and pouting.. "Oh I cannot read that- the translation is too bad" (Sardonically, I was thinking then- pff how the heck would she know..)

Dropping sardonism then, the question remains how can I be so stupidly blind then? If everybody knows and I don't. Because, honestly, it never crossed my mind that a translation could be mediocre (again about professional translations)-- although I can conceive that this is the case... as everywhere there are better products and worse products.. nevertheless.. professional translators develop an intrinsic ability I believe... like cows they ruminate their grass... It is said that Baudelaire's translation of Edgar Allan Poe surpasses the original--- again having had the chance to read both in their original languages-- I have not noticed... Baudelaire is super and Edgar Allan Poe as well and they are different.

Truth is about mediocrity :I say that all the time about certain people's ability to write English (that is their desperate inability to express their foreign (or even just) thoughts to English). But then that is about thoughts, not quality of translation.( The worse part of it is that they do not even question themselves.. per definition their writing is always perfectly intelligible and they are outraged when they ultimately receive the referee's report and read the referees' comments about how awkward their language appears to them..)

The inkling about my inability to think of mediocre translations, is that if I never encountered any, it is probably because I am unable to recognize if they are good or bad- i.e. I have no discriminant discernment...

So do you, who obviously knows, have criteria? Would you share them?

About the relative precision of languages

Here is a topic, I have been wondering about and munching around for some long long time... When I think of it: it dates back to my early student years... ages ago. Which proves only, that some remarks or issues may stay with you for long and not quite clear why they would either.. it is a trifle issue somehow who cares? I've tried desperately to interest linguists or grammarians in this topic-without success: first because I seldom, these days, meet a linguist, lest a grammarian. Second, because provided I would, not clear that I would interest them with my thing.

Maybe you would come up with interesting views??

It all came along as I was sitting in a Parisian cafe, Aux Quatres Sergents , rue Mouffetard , near my school, with a friend . He was a student in philosophy, spending his time there (in an imitation of Socrates) never really attending course- or maybe sometimes. But as it turned out- he worked (maybe not even less then the others- today he has a successful career somewhere in the US). This guy, although not handsome in a standard "women's fashion mags" style, was nevertheless a notable philanderer and Lovelace: he was very funny especially in his philosophic diatribes about Love (but here the philosophical Love was personified by the ladies he was pursuing).

In that cafe also sat, what I was to learn later, a very respected specialist in English Comparative Literature (or something like that). He was Irish and, not to avoid the cliche, often enough drunk even at mid-day.

We were chatting about everything and nothing.. and, in particular, about the fact that yes, there were all in all less words in the French language than in the English language.

It is, of course, obvious when you take a good dictionary. But, of course, I had never paid any attention to that. The rationale is that English is the fusion of two "vocabularies": words of Latin origin and of old Saxon (or whatever) origin.

And indeed there are famous examples: one has lamb, and mutton to designate in English the live/dead, whereas mouton is for both in French (poor French). Identically between corpse and body. And the comical story a French humorist told about a Frenchman wanting to court an English noble woman but not extremely fluent in English. He, using his knowledge of French, would have allegedly told her that she had a beautiful corpse. Goes without saying, he was rather unsuccessful in his attempt to seduce the Belle.

From this mere reflection and given this, we derived to the issue of which of both of English or French, would be a more precise language?

The point is that a naive answer would be, well English, of course. And that would be because it has more words. That is: we would simply measure the precision with the word count- a possible solution.

This was the solution that my friend defended. But suddenly the Irish guy, intervened. He challenged this view and said in a doctoral tone- that French was more precise. And then fell back in his apathy or meditation. Yes, even if it has less words, French was more precise. This viewpoint has intrigued me since...

I have been thinking on and off about this and still cannot decide whether the naive solution is nevertheless the correct view to have on this or if the point of view of the Irish guy (maybe drunk who knows) does not deserve some deeper reflection. Or, finally if the problem is badly posed: which is probably partly the issue.

I have gathered the following elements: they are a mess and need to be sorted out- basically I believe here without sorting what is core and cultural and so on.. what is abstract or isn't.. one will never be able to construct a discourse that makes a little sense. But it is a play field so let it be now.

1. Premise: I believe there is a such thing as " the set of "core human concepts"". More I believe that it is common to all languages (or to put it differently- it is a pre-Babelian concept). On what does this assumption rest? Well, nothing precise to be sure, but even if men are born in different culture and languages: the sense of Sacred, notions like Love, Hate, etc.. are understood and known by all ex-ante (i.e. before graduating in philosophy!). But how really that should be represented (keine Ahnung...) and does this premise suit me because of my own obsession with structures.. (wieder keine Ahnung).

The coarse theory would be: words cover these core concepts. Yes I should think of how these core concepts combine in order to create all the shade concepts- (like some elements would be atoms and the rest.. obtained by some association rule).
Then since there is a set common to all- all coverings that show some redundancy would be less precise.
2. Immediate contradictions that I can find to that. Some (cultural) concepts exist only in one language- these are the alleged non-translatable words: Cosy, gemütlich etc.. why is the English word for "Angst" a German word or old saxon (again old something) ? etc... [this one is probably stupid- because why should I presuppose that Angst is German and not English?]. Freud?

Could there be "holes" in the core concepts? But then they would not be core... hmm how do these concepts combine to yield the others- is that like the atoms of a structure and what structure?
3. Some cultures develop a vocabulary that is more extensive for some specific concepts: snow for the Inuits (36 or 60 words or whatever to describe snow).. [ Here it appears that this thing about the Inuits is not true- it is a tale! see this later post and the reference I should have checked before! ]
Hmm: on top I would tend to believe that snow might be an element of the set of core concepts (why should it only contain pure abstractions like Love, Hate, Life, Death, Sacred.. etc..)?

With this then one would say: oh well for the Inuits snow can take myriads of shades, and thus a language like English that has a least one latin and one saxonian word- is not a minimum covering of the set of core concepts, but then it brings a lot of shades, thus precision [I know some people who argue that]... But that is not clear either.. and what if this polysemy would bring only fuzziness and confusion...

I take, for example, my colleagues (Germans or other, Russian) whose command of English is worse than mine (if even there is a command). They always believe that you can express yourself better in English because... blablabla... new words, sentence flexibility etc... I may accept that in comparison of French, English might have apparently easier rules--- but when I performed the translation from English to French of this 800 pages book, I was able to keep it almost one to one 800pages to 800pages- whereas there is a folk tale that is running that one should count on an inflation factor of 2 if not 2.5! Same contention with German and French: not talking about Russian and French. If one compares: French < German < Russian < English in terms of word count... and it is true that the word creation possibilities that are offered in Russian and German makes French look very miserable, the total sentence plasticity in Russian is not to be matched... but then the simplicity of the codes in English.. all this runs against the Bourbakist rigidity of the French sentence and the precision one can attain only if one treats the words with "surgicality" because otherwise the inflation factor explodes to unequaled heights? So there the precision could come in: in French when you have a high command - like some writers- and understanding of the words- then you can say the same without the debauch of words that other languages use.. For instance, Russian has a proliferation of apparently useless words (that nevertheless add a shade) but that you could do without in French...

What a mess....

The more I think about this thing, the more uncertain I become...
Does this make it a more precise language? I do not know...
Is the analogy with coverings a good one for this? I dunno.

Any thoughts?

Tags: abstractions, language, opinions, perso

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