Translation at Aston

We thought this was very funny and highlights the importance of studying translation properly!

The volume of available information on translation is growing thanks to online websites, blogs etc. However, as my students are quickly finding out, it can be difficult to discriminate between what is reliable and what is not. I have recently come across this website which I thought I would share with you because it is a wide-ranging collection of very interesting (and mostly academic) papers and links on different topics in translation.

Papers cover issues in terminology, revision, localisation, globalisation… Have a look and see for yourself!

http://linguagreca.com/blog/2012/03/online-papers-articles-translation/

The death has been announced of Emmett Bennett, one of the most extraordinary translators in the long history of translation practice. His greatest achievement was to have provided key analytical charts that helped decipher inscriptions on clay tablets unearthed by archaeologists in Knossos, Crete. These bore a series of ostensibly comprehensible pictograms, but since there was no other script accompanying them, it was impossible to work out their exact meaning.

Trained in classical languages, Bennett spent much of World War Two helping to decipher secret Japanese codes. At the same time, working alongside Alice Kober, he was trying to assemble the elements of the language in which the clay tablets from Knossos were written. In 1951 he published the results of his research so far in The Pylos Tablets. This work argued that the language of the tablets (called Linear B by Bennett) contained eighty different characters, each representing a distinct syllable. While he had thus worked out the syllabary, however, he still did not know how to interpret these symbols.

The breakthrough came a year later in 1952 when a keen amateur linguist called Michael Ventris, working alongside Cambridge classicist John Chadwick, used Bennett’s charts to crack the code and reveal that the tablets were written in a very primitive form of Greek. The tablets detailed the life of the ancient societies on Crete and described how they prepared for harvests, religious feasts and war. Examples of Linear B were subsequently identified across the rest of Crete and mainland Greece.

Thus, Bennett made a central contribution to one of the trickiest translation assignments which the Ancient World has left us. Throughout a long academic career which took him from Yale to the University of Texas and finally Wisconsin, Bennett would be known as a world leader in the field of translating Mycenaean scripts. Kober and Chadwick too were known as distinguished academics. Michael Ventris, the only amateur linguist among them, was awarded an OBE in 1955 in recognition of his work on Linear B, but died in a car accident in 1956.

Students often arrive at university with a fairly narrow view of what translation is. The translator’s job is often thought to involve a simple transfer of a message from one language to another with the aid of a dictionary. This is about as faithful a representation of translation as a map with ‘there be dragons’ is a faithful representation of the earth’s geography.

Curiously, those who are more aware of the elastic relation between language and meaning are often to be found on our TV screens! Consider this sketch from Catherine Tate who exploits stereotypes of the phonetic landscapes which a range of languages involve (click on the image):

Of course this isn’t translation in the sense of transferring a message from one language to another. We laugh, however, because Tate’s failure to translate while improvising a different phonetic landscape makes us more aware of the distance between the various codes in which we normally communicate. We laugh as well because of the social consequences that result from this distance.

In the following sketch, however, Armstrong and Miller exploit another funny bone of the translator which consists in mixing the ways in which messages are encoded in different languages (click on the image).

What Armstrong and Miller exploit, moreover, is what can happen when translation is taken quite literally. Yet at the same time, they play with the transferred codes so as to foreignise even further the comedic result (I have been living in the Paris since the sixth months is not in fact a literal translation of the French J’habite à Paris depuis six mois).

All of which goes to show that while the translator is often invisible, translation is very quickly rendered visible when we break the smallest of conventions. Translation Studies are not always hard work!