III. Words are Even Worse

WORD (n) the smallest unit of language that people can

understand if it is said or written on its own.

Stories about words.

1) In Russia, there are two words, ‘ голубой’ and ‘синий’ that mean ‘blue’, but they do not have the same meaning. The first is used for light or pale blue hues, the second for darker, navy or ultramarine shades. So both can be translated into English, subject to the addition of words that specify the quality of blueness involved. But you can’t translate plain English ‘blue’ back into Russian, because whatever you say – whichever of the two adjectives you use – you can’t avoid saying more than the English said. The conventions that hold sway among publishers and the general public do not allow translators to add something that is not in the original text. So if you accept those terms of the trade, you could quickly arrive with impeccable logic at the conclusion that translation is completely impossible.

Observations of this kind have been used by many eminent scholars to put translation outside of the field of serious thought.

2) Roman Jakobson, a major figure in the history of linguistics, pointed out that

‘сыр’, the Russian word for ‘cheese’, cannot be used to refer to cottage cheese, which has another name, ‘творога’ in Russian. As he puts it, the English word ‘cheese’ cannot be completely identified with its Russian heteronym.

As a result, there is no fully adequate Russian translation of something as apparently simple as the word ‘cheese’.

3) It’s an indisputable fact about languages that the sets of words that each possesses divide up the features of the world in slightly and sometimes radically different ways. Colour terms never match up completely, and it’s always a problem for a French speaker to know what an English person means by ‘brown shoes’. Since the footwear in question may be ‘marron. bordeaux, even rouge fonce. The names of fishes and birds often come in non-matching sets of complexity.

d) These well-known examples of the ‘imperfect matching’ do not really support the conclusion that translation is impossible. If the translator can see the sky that’s being called blue – either in real one or in the specific shade of blue for example- then it’s perfectly obvious which Russian colour-term is appropriate.

Similarly, if the cheese being bought at the shop is not cottage cheese, the choice of the Russian term is not an issue. The lack of exactly matching terms is not as big a problem for translation as many people think it is.

4) Pocket dictionaries contain common, frequently used words. Large dictionaries create the curious illusion that most of the words in a language are automatically translatable by slotting in the matching term from the dictionary. But there’s a huge difference between most of the headwords in a dictionary and the words that occur most often in the use of a language.

If translation were a matter of slotting in matching terms, then translation would clearly be impossible for almost everything we say.

5) Nomenclaturism – the notion that words are essentially names – has had a long history. A simple term such as ‘head’ can’t be counted as a ‘name’ of any particular thing. It figures in all kinds of expressions. It can be used to refer to a rocky promontory (‘Beachy Head’ in Sussex), a layer of froth (‘a nice head of beer’), or a particular role in a bureaucratic hierarchy (‘head of the department’). What connects these disparate things? How do we know which meaning ‘head’ has in these different context? What does it mean, in fact, to say that we know the meaning of the word ‘head’? that we know all the different things that it means? Or that we know its real meaning, but can also cope with it when it means something else? The story of the word ‘head’, as told in many dictionaries, is that once upon a time it had a central, basic or original reference to that part of the autonomy which sits on the top of the neck. Its meaning was subsequently extended to cover other kinds of things that sit on top of something else – a head of beer, a head of department, would represent extensions of all kinds. But as familiar animals with four feet instead of two have their anatomical heads not at the top but at the front, ‘head’ was extended in a different direction to cover things that stick put.

From this it follows that the word ‘head’ cannot be translated as a word into any other language. But the meaning it has in any particular usage can be represented in another language. Translation is in fact a very handy way of solving the conundrum of words and meanings. ’Head’ is considered a single word with a range of transferred or figurative meanings and can serve as an example of polysemy.

6)Yet, equally common words like ‘light’ are treated as a pair of homonyms – two different words having the same form in speech and writing – one of them referring to weight (as in ‘’a light suitcase), the other to luminosity (as in ‘the light of the day). There are some more examples Sometimes there is or is said to be a visual analogy between the central meaning of a word and one or its extensions, as when you nose your car into a parking slot, and

this is called metaphor; sometimes the extension of meaning is the supposed fruit of contiguity or physical connection, as when you knock on doors in your attempt to get a job, and this is called metonymy. The machinery of ‘figures the meaning’ is fun to play with, but at bottom it’s eyewash. Polysemy, homonymy, homophomy, metaphor and metonymy aren’t terms that help to understand how words mean, they are just fuzzy ways of holding down the desire of words to mean something else.

What you can say by means of translation is what the word means in the context in which it occurs. That’s a very significant fact. It demonstrates a wonderful capacity of human minds.

Translation is meaning. In languages like English the identification of words is more art than science.