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POLITICAL STUDIES: 2012
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00965.x
Moving Political Meaning across
Linguistic Frontiers
post_965
1..19
Richard Oliver Collin
Coastal Carolina University
Diplomacy, international commerce and the academic study of international relations are all based on the assumption
that we can cross linguistic borders with very complicated words and concepts in our cognitive luggage. This article
studies the complexities of communicating political words and concepts from one language/culture to another, noting
that traditional political science has shown little interest in this process or its dangers. From linguistics, however, come
two opposing theories: the effability principle defends universal translatability, while the linguistic relativity/SapirWhorf hypothesis holds that meaning (particularly abstract conceptual thinking) is locked within the grammatical and
semantic structure of individual languages and can be transmitted with difficulty or not at all. After considering these
rival positions, we conclude that the translation of political ideas from culture to culture can be more problematic than
we have commonly believed.
Keywords: languages; political science; translation; Sapir-Whorf; effability
Talking across Cultures
In Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 motion picture classic The Silence, a professional translator
named Ester, her estranged sister Anna and Anna’s young son Johann are travelling by train
through an anonymous, war-torn country with an unknown language. When Ester
becomes ill, the three Swedes take refuge in a crumbling grand hotel. The lonely Anna
seduces a waiter, first commenting: ‘It’s good that we can’t understand one another’, but
then pouring out her torment to her uncomprehending bedmate. For her part, Ester tries
to communicate her needs to an elderly porter, discovering that none of her working
languages (Swedish, English, French and German) are understood wherever they are.
Johann suggests making a word list, so Ester begins assembling a lexicon, pointing to objects
and transcribing the porter’s response.
As artistic cinematography, The Silence is a powerful metaphor on the difficulty of
communicating; the two sisters cannot manage a meaningful conversation even in their
shared Swedish. On a more immediate level, The Silence speaks to the nightmare of being
caught without a phrase book in a country where we do not speak the local language and
where no-one speaks ours. How do we function in a multilingual world if we cannot move
meaning across language barriers, either by mastering the relevant foreign tongue ourselves
or by employing a professional like Ester?
Granted enough time, Bergman’s Ester would have mastered all the obvious words in the
mystery language, and made a start at sorting out the grammar. It would have been a long
time, however, before she would have felt comfortable discussing democracy or civil rights
or ethnic conflict. How do we talk across a linguistic divide about political life? One of the
few political scientists to think about this problem is Raymond Cohen of the Hebrew
University (2004, p. 27) who identifies the inherent difficulty in transferring political
meaning from one language to another (emphasis in original):
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Words attached to basic objects such as foot, sun, and tree translate without much loss or
distortion of meaning from one language to another. However, more abstract nouns like justice,
soul, sovereignty, and leader are embedded within overall signification systems and possess special
associations that may be conveyed only with difficulty, if at all.
Cohen’s pessimistic ‘if at all’ is worrisome. There are some 6,000 separate languages
currently spoken by humankind (Collin, 2010, p. 426).With translated texts and interpreted
speech, can we speak intelligibly to one another about serious political topics, venturing
across this babel of languages? No-one can possibly learn all the languages in play in a given
situation and anglophone political leaders do not generally even try. None of the major
American and British politicians actively involved in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, for
example, speaks either Arabic or Hebrew. Negotiations are conducted in English which is
not spoken competently by many Palestinians and is only a second language for most Israelis
(Cohen, 2001, p. 25). Somewhere in the process, is there a supremely competent Ester able
to move what a Palestinian leader says into Hebrew via English without loss of semantic
cargo?
Effability versus Relativity
Some linguists believe that all natural languages possess what is awkwardly called effability,
the capacity to express any idea (Katz, 1978, pp. 209–16; Kibbe, 2003, pp. 52–3; Malpas,
1989, pp. 233–64; Searle, 1969). If accepted as universally true, the effability principle would
make this a shorter article, since a political concept in any source language should be
directly translatable into its precise semantic equivalent in any target language. Some authors
prefer the term ‘universalist’ to describe what we are here calling effability.
The opposite end of the scale is generically called linguistic relativity, a hotly debated
cluster of ideas challenging the notion that we can reliably move meaning of any sort from
one language culture to another. In the field of linguistics generally and specifically within
linguistic anthropology, there has been a half-century’s quarrel over the notion that our
language influences, channels or even controls what we can think and say. In this view,
words and texts are defined solely or principally from the point of view of a given culture.
We are nudged or even constrained to think one way in a given language and another way
in a second tongue, making real translation – particularly of complicated concepts deeply
encoded in specific cultures – difficult or impossible. In his important new book, Linguistic
Relativities, John Leavitt explains the effability-versus-relativity debate in deep historical
terms, showing convincingly that it is an enduring conflict in Western intellectual thought
and not merely a technical quarrel among modern linguists (Leavitt, 2011). The term
essentialist is sometimes used to describe the belief that a given language evolves to describe
the essence of a given culture in a way that cannot easily be translated into other languages
and other cultures.
Let us briefly examine these two rival theories. All supporters of the effability principle
have qualified it with a commitment to context, since no-one believes that a successful
translation can be achieved by the mechanical substitution of words in one language with
‘equivalent’ words in another. ‘Translatability’, as it is sometimes called, could clearly only
happen within a given narrative setting.We might not be able to render specific words or
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short phrases into every natural language, but – this theory holds – we ought to be able to
convert every contextualised statement into an equivalent context without loss of meaning
or even nuance.
Enthusiasts for the effability principle also make a concession about vocabulary. Indigenous societies have all the words they need for their way of life, but must borrow or create
new vocabulary to cope with changing technology.We must not expect, therefore, a precise
lexical equivalency between the !Xóö language (as spoken by hunter-gatherers in rural
Botswana) and English (as spoken by sociolinguists in Oxford). The ‘big’ languages have
many more words than localised ‘little’ languages. Depending on how and what you count,
English may contain close to a million words; some unwritten tribal languages may have
only a few thousand, making it problematic to contemplate translation at any level of
complexity (Ong, 2002, p. 105). Before talking about nuclear physics to a non-literate
hunter-gatherer community, new vocabulary needs to be invented in the target tongue. In
practice,Australian Aborigines who want to study nuclear physics will find it easier to learn
English than to reconfigure their own tongue. Hence, some ‘small’ languages will never
really generate words for everything.
The ‘small language’ problem has continued to nibble at the edges of effability as
investigators have uncovered examples of cultures in which certain concepts simply did not
exist and were hard to import from another culture. Famously, Robert Levy (1973, p. 305)
investigated the emotional life of Tahitians and discovered that the culture had ‘no
unambiguous terms that represent the concepts of sadness, longing, or loneliness’, making
it difficult for the islanders to grapple with depression and melancholy when they did
occur. Dan Everett spent the better part of two decades working with the Pirahã Indian
people who live on the banks of the Amazon, discovering in the process that the Pirahã
lacked the basic concept of numbers, despite his efforts to teach them elementary arithmetic. In defiance of the principle of effability, you cannot translate ‘forty-two’ into the
Pirahã language (Everett, 2008, p. 117).
There are only a few thousand Pirahã, however, and 7 billion people who manage
‘forty-two’ without difficulty. The famous Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop chipped
away at the myth of a ‘primitive’ language by translating Einstein’s Theory of Relativity into
his native Wolof (Cisse, 2006, p. 109; Kibbe, 2003, pp. 52–3). Many language scholars and
perhaps most working translators support some version of the effability principle (Greene,
2011, p. 106; Ricoeur, 2006, pp. 41–8).
Effability and its Discontents
Effability has always been controversial. British philosopher Walter Bryce Gallie tossed a
smoking bomb into the debate with a 1956 paper entitled ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’
(Gallie, 1956). In this frequently cited article, Gallie maintained that there was a class of
complex concepts, many of them political, which are always contested or argumentatively
redefined. Evaluative words like democracy and justice are individually conceived in speakers’
minds on the basis of their lived experience and the complex of emotional connotations
that have grown up around the word and its underlying concept. Hence, even in a
monolingual context, we can never be sure if my justice is precisely the same as your justice.
As Gallie noted, ‘to use an essentially contested concept means to use it against other uses
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and to recognize that one’s own use of it has to be maintained against these other uses’
(Gallie, 1956, pp. 171–2). Converting democracy into a French démocratie or a Russian
demokratiya (dcmokrati:) (i.e. attempting to move the idea into another language culture)
is, therefore, even more perilous.
Coming at the same problem from a different angle, the Harvard philosopher WillardVan
Orman Quine (1964, pp. 26–79) generated his theory of ‘radical indeterminacy’, which
suggested that we never really know precisely what a word in another language means to
a native speaker of that language.
From yet another perspective, authors like Raphael Patai and Bernard Lewis have voiced
doubts about the possibility of expressing Western political ideas in Arabic, arguing that the
language of Islam lacks crucial words and concepts for elementary Western ideological
terms. Counter-attacking, the late Edward Said (1979) famously created the term Orientalist
to describe this relegation of Arabic culture to second-class status. This is a vexed issue to
be explored below, but many modern Arabists would argue that Arabic is totally effable.
With the possible exception of some scientific terms, anything you can say in Manhattan
or Knightsbridge you can say in Sadr City or Marrakesh (Elkhafaifi, 2002, pp. 254–8).
On the other hand, many arabophone Muslims do not themselves believe that it is
possible to translate the Qur’an into another language (Spolsky, 2004, p. 49). As the literal
word of God, the meaning of the Qur’an is embedded within the original Arabic and
cannot be meaningfully transferred into a different tongue (Abdelwali, 2007).
In terms of lexical and structural relationships, some languages are linguistically ‘close’
to one another, like German and Dutch, or Italian and Spanish. In terms of origin and
descent, other languages can be quite distant, like Portuguese and Korean. At a technical
level, the difficulty of translation would intuitively seem to grow as the ‘distance’ between
languages increases, but it may also be the case that similar political cultures produce
similar terms. There is, for example, no linguistic relationship between English and Japanese, and yet most political words travel from Tokyo to Washington in a fairly straightforward fashion. There is not much conceptual difference between democracy in English
and minshu shugi
in Japanese.1
The idea of linguistic effability was reinforced when the formidable Noam Chomsky
claimed that language is innate and fundamentally universal (Joseph, 2004, p. 56; Levinson,
2003, p. 25). As explained by Steven Pinker (2007, p. 91), for example, we do not think in
words at all, but in conceptual semantics, that is,‘assemblies of basic concepts in a language
of thought’. This mentalese only becomes language when we learn our mother tongue
(Evans, 2010, p. 180; Levinson, 2003, p. 33). As Pinker (1994, p. 82) says, ‘Since mental life
goes on independently of particular languages, concepts of freedom and equality will be
thinkable even if they are nameless’.
Relativity in Language and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Linguistic relativity is sometimes viewed as an American invention, but there is a rich
British and continental heritage behind it. John Locke explicitly did not believe that English
legal and political ideas could be translated into other languages (Wierzbicka, 2006, p. 302).
German scholars like Johann Herder (1744–1803) and William von Humboldt (1767–
1835) wrote that language and culture were inextricably linked to one another, with each
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human language evolving to express a Weltanschauung unique to that society (Gumperz and
Levinson, 1996). Interest in the language-and-culture nexus crossed the Atlantic with Franz
Boas (1858–1942), a German-born polymath who achieved fame in the United States as
the architect of modern anthropology.
Most students of language would associate linguistic relativity with the work of Edward
Sapir (1884–1939), and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), who jointly created
what is conventionally called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.2
If cognitive content hides in conceptual systems buried in individual languages, Sapir and
Whorf wondered, can we ever effectively transfer meaning – especially complex abstract
meaning – from one speech community to another? If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is even
minimally true at any level (and there are several levels or versions of the theory), then we
have more unexplored problems in trans-lingual communication than we have previously
understood. Is it possible that political keywords like constitution, legislature, citizen, country,
political party and legitimacy are all so culture specific that they cannot be rendered accurately
from source languages into target languages?
The mostly widely accepted (or ‘weak’) version of Sapir-Whorf holds that the language
we speak conditions or affects (but does not absolutely control) the way in which we
perceive reality. The hypothesis has oscillated in popularity, enjoying fairly wide acceptance
in the years after the Second World War before becoming slightly disreputable by the 1960s.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, some scholars had become enthusiastic neo-Whorfians; others were prepared to endorse linguistic relativity at least at some
level, albeit without explicitly rejecting the effability principle. As Ellen Bialystok (2001, p.
121) noted:
Words have power and ... can take on a life of their own. Words can then determine ideas,
because they focus our attention on certain concepts at the expense of others and evoke
assumptions that may never be made explicit.
It would be wrong to see students of language as divided into two rigidly defined camps
with effability principle loyalists squaring off against partisans of linguistic relativity. Instead,
we should view these two rival theories as opposite ends of a continuum of subtle and
closely reasoned views.
Some ‘effability’ scholars are optimistic that – with enough work and competence –
even complex meanings can cross linguistic frontiers. Relativists like to point to ways in
which meaning gets ‘stuck’ in a specific language/culture and cannot easily make the
transition into another society’s language. Many working philosophers of language try to
have it both ways. As George Steiner once equivocated: ‘Between verbal languages,
however remote in setting and habits of syntax, there is always the possibility of equivalence, even if actual translation can only attain rough and approximate results (Steiner,
1998b, p. 15).
From the perspective of political meaning, therefore, the debate is significant. Are the
linguistic relativists correct in hinting that abstract political words like legitimacy or ideology
are locked within a given language culture and lose essential aspects of their meaning when
moved to a different language? Or can we be rescued by effability theorists, confident of our
ability to translate any human idea into any human language?
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Shoot the Translator
While there must have been translators for most of human history, the field has become
increasingly professionalised in recent years with a number of academic journals and
translation studies departments in well-regarded universities, especially in the United
Kingdom. Translators and interpreters are a critical (if unrecognised and unexamined)
element in the flow of political information around the world. As Christine Schäffner
(2004, p. 120) notes,
It is through translation that information is made available to addressees beyond national
borders; and it is very frequently the case that reactions in one country to statements that were
made in another country are actually reactions to the information as it was provided in
translation.
We need to make a distinction between the technical problems and ethical concerns of
professional translators on one hand, and the reasons why some words and concepts are so
deeply embedded within a language and culture that they cannot be easily and accurately
rendered in another language and culture, on the other.While this is a problem with which
translators need to grapple, our focus here is less a question of translation and more a matter
of what might be more reasonably termed comparative or multilingual political semantics. Let us
first explore a class of problems where an accurate translation might be theoretically
possible, but – in practice – is often unachieved because of circumstances.
Losing it in Translation
In most real-world situations, translation/interpretation is not actually done by professionals
but by bilingual amateurs of varying levels of competence. And even professionals sometimes operate under time or situational constraints that make accuracy difficult to achieve.
No-one knows how simultaneous translators do it, but they clearly cannot interrupt a
shouting match in the UN General Assembly to explore a subtle political nuance. An
interpreter brokering a negotiation between Kurdish and Arab militias in northern Iraq may
worry more about not getting shot than not being perfectly understood (Collin, 2009). And
personal ideological convictions may be at play. Neve Gordon (2002) describes how Israeli
translators – working from English into Hebrew – have sometimes simply excised whole
pages that conflicted with their vision of Israeli society.
An emerging problem involves the use of what may be called a ‘brokering’ language.
With enormous translation bills to pay, organisations like the UN and the EU (and many
multinational companies) object to hiring translators capable of working in every relevant
language pair, so a document in Maltese will be translated into English before it is
rendered into Finnish. This game of Chinese Whispers eliminates the cost of a Maltese–
Finnish translator, but subjects the translated text to the double semantic trauma of
passing from Valletta to Helsinki via London (Greene, 2011, p. 175). It also raises the issue
of anglophone hegemony that has worried many commentators who see English as
becoming the globe’s ‘default’ language to the detriment of others (Pennycook, 1998;
2010; Phillipson, 1992; 2003). Quite apart from its political implications, this Anglocentric perspective may tempt both political analysts and translators to define a concept
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fundamentally in terms of its English usage without considering that the word or phrase
may present – when rendered into another language – semantic variations ranging from
the subtle to the spectacular.
Professional translators strive to generate a rendering in the target language that accurately reflects – in the most precise possible way – every nuance in the source language
text. Regrettably, political leaders often have a stake in creative ambiguity. The issue is
too complicated for complete exploration here, but the famous 22 November 1967
Security Council Resolution 242 was meant to create the legal basis for peace in the
Middle East after the Six-Day War. The document was drafted by the British delegation
before being translated into French and the other official languages of the Security
Council, and the English and French versions were proclaimed to be identical and
equally authoritative. The French text, however, called for the ‘Retrait des forces armées
israéliennes des territoires occupés lors du récent conflit’, which can reasonably be rendered as ‘the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from the territories occupied during the
recent conflict’. The US-backed English version merely required the ‘withdrawal of
Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict’ (Lynk, 2007, pp. 12–3,
emphasis added).
The US and Israeli governments preferred the English version because this language
could be interpreted to accept an Israeli retreat from some of the conquered territories,
leaving the ultimate border subject to negotiation. The French version was more acceptable
to francophone countries where a complete Israeli retreat to the pre-1967 border was
anticipated (Dajani, 2007, p. 32).
Even the transliteration of writing systems poses a problem for translators. Arabic and
many South Asian languages, for example, are written mostly with a series of consonants,
leaving the reader to fill in the vowels. As a further complication, not all of the consonants
have exact equivalents in English (Collin, 2011). As Libya crashed into civil war in 2011,
Britain demanded the ouster of Gaddafi, while Americans denounced Qadhafi and Qaddafi.
Italy criticised Gheddafi while Spain condemned Gadafi and France opposed Kadhafi. This
potential confusion becomes critical when using computers, since a search for the late Mr
Gaddafi may not produce much information about Kadhafi.
Malinowski’s Interlinear Method
Professional translators try to produce text that does not look like a translation, rejecting the
old-fashioned word-for-word system that generates translationese (Grossman, 2010, pp.
31–69). When crucial issues of war and peace depend upon understanding political
discourse with precision, however, a totally smooth translation may only be desirable at a
final stage in the process. In an important essay, John Sturrock (2010, p. 55) reminds us that
there is merit in an approach pioneered by the famous Polish anthropologist Bronislaw
Malinowski (1884–1942) who devised an interlinear system with three evolving lines: a
transcription of the original text or speech act in the source language; a target-language
translationese or word-for-word rendition of the source text preserving the original word
order; and finally a smooth and final version in the target language. To illustrate the
Malinowski method, let us glance at one sensational translation controversy. Iran’s
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sparked global outrage in a 2005 speech which was translated by
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the NewYorkTimes and most other periodicals as containing the words,‘Israel must be wiped
off the map’.3
According to Farzad Sharifian (2009, p. 420), the actual Farsi sentence uttered by
Ahmadinejad was:
Va
emâm-e
aziz mâ farmudand ke in rezhim-e eshghâlgar-e ghods
And
[the] Imam [Khomeini] dear our said
that this regime occupying
Jerusalem
Our dear Imam Khomeini said that the Israeli regime occupying Jerusalem
bâyad az
safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad.
has to from page of time
disappear.
must vanish from the pages of time.
The middle line is the translator’s working area or scratch pad. It reproduces on a
word-for-word basis what the source text actually says and in the same word order. In this
and all subsequent adaptations of the Malinowski system, the use of brackets indicates a
word that does not appear in the source language but is understood or required by the target
language. Sturrock argues that the middle line in the interlinear provides translators with an
opportunity to ‘show their work’ in the same way that budding mathematicians are asked
to display the process that led them to their answer. The inevitable clumsiness of the
translationese line allows the reader to sense the ‘otherness’ of the source language which
could represent a profoundly foreign culture. Freud employed the hard-to-translate word
durcharbeiten to describe the process of working through an issue in order to resolve a conflict,
a phrase with overtones of forcing one’s way through stages in a process like the kneading
of bread dough. Malinowski’s middle line could be regarded as the durcharbeiten stage in
translation.
Without underestimating Ahmadinejad’s deep hostility to Israel, the ‘wiped off the
map’ translation does suggest genocide, whereas his actual words merely reminded his
listeners that the Ayatollah Khomeini felt that the Israeli ‘regime’ needed to be removed
from Jerusalem, a sentiment most Middle Eastern leaders would echo, either publicly or
privately. The harsh ‘wiped-off-the-map’ rendering could have come from the ideological bent of the translator, but it was more probably the result of an editorial intervention.
Editors seem to feel free to reorganise translated material, converting it into more exciting copy. Anna Romagnuolo (2009) has examined translations of American presidential
inaugural addresses as they appeared in the Italian press, discovering that the editors had
restructured the target language text to blend with the ideology and interests of an Italian
reader.
In another example, Americans were shocked by a November 1956 threat by Nikita
Khrushchev. His blunt ‘We will bury you!’ became a headline in every newspaper in the
world, giving the impression that the Soviet General Secretary was menacing the United
States with nuclear destruction.4 In fact, Khrushchev was probably just being a
good Marxist in claiming that communism would survive after capitalism was
‘buried’. He was wrong, but so was the translator in missing the metaphoric use of
‘bury’.
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Nravits: vam ili nct, no istori: na na0cj storonc. My
vas
zakopacm.
Like
you or
no, but history on our
side.
We
you
dig in/ you bury.
We’ll be here when you’re gone. ✓
Like it or not,
history is on our side.
We will outlast you.
As in this example, the Malinowski interlinear can be used to look at potential
ambiguities, cross out interpretations that have been considered but rejected, and
put a tick (✔) by the interpretation that achieves the best equivalence with the
original.
Wandering Words
The translator’s work can be complicated by the tendency of words and phrases to vary
across several dimensions in both the source and the target language. A diachronic (or
longitudinal or historical) analysis would pursue the meaning of a word as it evolved over
the course of time (Steiner, 1998a, pp. 18–29). In the 1942 movie Casablanca,‘Sam’ sang to
Ingrid Bergman that a ‘kiss is still a kiss’, but the word in French has evolved diachronically.
Before attempting to baiser anyone in Casablanca today, it would be wise to consult a
modern dictionary.
In a diachronic example, the term liberal was first employed to describe people
who believed in unfettered commercial markets. After three centuries, it means roughly
the opposite since a modern British or American liberal would doubt the merits
of unregulated capitalism. President F. D. Roosevelt was proud to call himself a liberal,
but Ronald Reagan successfully made the word into what Raymond Williams (1983,
p. 179) called a ‘loose swear-word’ and contemporary American politicians now avoid
the label. In confusing academic language, those who still approve of unfettered
financial dealings are sometimes called neo-liberals, meaning that they continue to believe
what the early liberals believed about the merits of uncontrolled commerce (see
Figure 1).
Clearly, analysis may also be synchronic or horizontal as we look at the various contemporary meanings a word may have in different parts of the same speech community.
Whatever they call themselves,American and British liberals stand to the left of centre and
most ‘liberal’ parties worldwide are left wing. Confusingly, many ‘liberal’ parties founded in
the early 1800s are today to the right of centre and Australia’s Liberals are actually
conservatives. If we are trying to translate liberal into some target language, for example, we
need to decide whether to translate the meaning or the word, and accept that the results will
be unsatisfactory in either case.
When a political word has shed (or never acquired) precision within a source language,
there will be an inevitable vagueness when we gloss it into a target tongue where it may be
rendered into a word with the same level of ambiguity (Steiner, 1998a, p. 18). Anna
Wierzbicka (1997, pp. 125–55) illustrates the fuzziness of political keywords with a long
analysis of the meaning of freedom in several languages. In a similar vein, Ishida Takeshi
(1969) and Anita Wenden (1995, pp. 4–6) have observed that peace has distinctly different
connotations when translated into different world languages.
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Figure 1: The Wandering Liberal: Diachronic and Synchronic Dimensions
Asymmetric Polysemy
In the 1991 film version of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs, the cannibalistic Dr
Hannibal Lector announces his intention of ‘having an old friend for lunch’. This double
entendre can be deciphered in another language but not really translated, since ‘having for
lunch’ in English can mean inviting someone to dine with you or eating a specific food, in
this case, a tasty old friend.
This is an example of polysemy, a common if sometimes complicated linguistic concept
(Ricoeur, 2006, p. 30; Steiner, 1998a, p. 35). A polyseme is a word or phrase with several
related meanings. Its near relative is the homonym which is one word with several unrelated
meanings. We will refer here to both categories as polysemes because in practice the
distinction can be difficult to make (Pinker, 2007, pp. 108–9). Asymmetric polysemy occurs
when a word has two or more meanings in one language, any one of which can become
several different words when translated into a second language. This can be either a minor
linguistic hurdle for the translator or the reflection of a major difference in cultural
perception.
This polysemic confusion extends to politically significant words like citizenship and
nationality, sometimes used as synonyms and sometimes to refer to different (and even
opposing) ideas. Scholars in the social sciences see citizenship as the legal relationship
between an individual and a sovereign state with reciprocal privileges and responsibilities.
In this view, citizenship is a legal status unconnected with ethnicity. Nationality, on the other
hand, suggests membership in an ethnic community. A Roman Catholic Nicaraguan who
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is monolingual in Spanish but acquires citizenship in South Korea through marriage
becomes a Korean citizen but retains Nicaraguan ethnicity or nationality. Two separate
sovereign states may share a common nationality; citizens of North and South Korea are all
ethnic Koreans although they are citizens of different countries. It is also possible to belong
to an ethnic community that is not a sovereign state. In this sense, Iraqis who speak Kurdish
as their mother tongue will be citizens of Iraq, but partake in Kurdish nationality, something
they share with Kurds across Iraq’s borders with Turkey, Iran and Syria.
Some countries respect the divide between nationality and citizenship and a British/EU
passport defines its holder as a ‘British citizen’. A large number of British citizens speak
Urdu, practise Islam, self-identify as Pakistanis and cannot be plausibly described as core
members of some imagined ‘British’ ethnicity. Similarly, Russian makes a distinction
between citizenship (gra#danstvo or grazhdanstvo) which is the legal status of someone with
a Russian passport, and nationality (na,ional6nost6 or natsional’nost’) which derives from
the Latin nation (= birth) and refers to ethnic origin, regardless of citizenship.
More often, however, the distinction is murky. The residents of a given country can
be called – in English – the people or the population. In German, Das Volk (the people)
means the German people primarily as defined by language and heritage. As Jan Blommaert and Jef Verschueren (1999, pp. 144–5) observe, the word Bevölkerung means inhabitants who may either be German Volk or Gastarbeiter (resident aliens who legally live and
work in Germany) or even German citizens whose native language is not German. A
similar distinction emerges in Malaysia, which has a Malay majority but large minorities
of Chinese and South Asian ancestry. In bahasa Malaysia (the version of Malay that has
become the national language), ethnic Malays are called Bumiputera or ‘sons of the soil’
while Indians and Chinese (who may have lived in the country for many generations) are
referred to as rakyat, which simply means a resident of the country, and is sometimes used
to refer specifically to Malaysians who are not ethnic Malays (Lowenberg, 1999, pp.
167–9).
More often, however, nationality is confusingly conflated with citizenship. An American
passport explicitly offers citizenship as a synonym for nationality. This may reflect the
‘melting pot’ self-image of the United States where immigrants are expected to trade in
their used national culture for a new American identity. France preserves the same ambiguity with its use of nationalité on official documents.
Words become complicated and intensely controversial in the Middle East, particularly
when they are translated inconsistently. The modern Hebrew word ezrahut (or
)
means citizenship. Nationality (in the sense of membership in a cultural and linguistic
community) is le’um (or
).5 For outsiders, the confusion begins with the Israeli
government’s own translation into English of what is rendered in official Israeli sites as the
1952 ‘Nationality Law’, despite the fact that nationality means ethnicity in Hebrew, and the
Hebrew word used in the relevant legislation means citizenship (Margalith, 1953).
The issue of asymmetrical polysemy affects a wide range of issues in political translation.
As we can see from the examples offered above, sometimes a core meaning can be
communicated by an agile translator by merely choosing appropriate words in the target
text. In other cases, the word is asymmetrical because the perception of reality is asymmetrical, which can present a real obstacle to communication.
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The Dictatorship of Grammar
The essence of the Sapir-Whorf insight is that some elements of meaning are required by
the grammatical structure of certain languages but not others. As the great linguist Roman
Jakobson (1959, p. 116) famously observed, ‘Languages differ essentially in what they must
convey and not in what they may convey’. When one language demands that certain
information be encoded in a text while a second language makes no provision for this
added meaning, it can be difficult to move subtleties back and forth. We see this in issues
relating to relationships between interlocutors, gender and what is called evidentiality, a way
of encoding how speakers know what they are asserting.
For example, some languages force us to specify the relationship between ourselves and an
interlocutor. The most familiar example is the tu–vous distinction in French and many other
languages. Javanese has high and low forms that are effectively different dialects (Joseph,
2006, p. 71). Thai has eight categories of words for addressing people calibrated on the basis
of their rank. Japanese and Korean both have elaborate hierarchical codes (Coulmas, 2005, p.
93),something that can be difficult to translate into a language like English,where everybody
is you, regardless of status. Some languages (like English) compel us to employ personal
pronouns like ‘I’,‘you’ and ‘we’ while others assign this function to the verb, permitting the
optional use of a pronoun for emphasis (Kashima and Kashima, 1998). The use or omission
of a personal pronoun can create hard-to-translate connotations.
Compulsory specificity can also exist in gender identification. In English, Dr Lector can
say ‘I’m having an old friend for lunch’ without revealing the gender of the friend who will
be dined with or dined upon. In most heavily gendered languages, however, words are
inescapably masculine or feminine. In English, David Cameron and Hillary Clinton are
both politicians. In French, Nicholas Sarkozy is un politicien but the new head of the
International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, is inescapably une politicienne.
We are forced by some languages to indicate how we know a fact we are asserting, a
specificity built into the grammar. Two major language families with an evidentiality
grammar are Turkish and the indigenous Andean language of Quechua (Pinker, 2007, p.
131).While it can be difficult to translate, evidentiality can soften a statement by distancing
the speaker from the allegation. For example, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan recently denounced the ‘vulgarity’ of the opposition leadership but implied that
the information had come to him indirectly.6
Lider
Leader
ve
and
genel
generals
başkan
president
yardımcıları
aides
da
also
aynı
same
üslupsuzluğu
lack of style
discourtesy✓
The leader and his top party aides have apparently adopted the same discourtesy.
benimsemiş.
adopted.
(2nd hand)
It is not impossible to translate a statement from Turkish or Quechua into English but it
does call for attention to the range of evidential phrases available since English usage
certainly supports a range of certainty.Wierzbicka (2006, pp. 37–58) notes, for example, that
English is rich in what she calls epistemic qualifiers, phrases that indicate the speaker’s level of
certainty for a given assertion. These would include expressions like ‘I think’, ‘I imagine’
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and ‘I suppose’, all of which would accomplish roughly the same function as some
evidentiary phrases in Turkish or Quechua.
Encoded in Culture
While any use of the word culture invites controversy, a linguistic relativist would expect to
find that certain expressions have evolved within individual cultures to describe phenomena
or patterns of thought that exist uniquely within that speech community. These expressions
are – necessarily – going to be impossible to translate fully into other languages that have
generated their own words for phenomena that may be parallel or similar but not the same.
As Raymond Cohen (2001, p. 29) notes, ‘Rooted in a certain cultural soil, words do not
always travel well’. In his famous Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff (1987,
p. 312) astutely observes that it is sometimes possible for a bilingual to understand a concept
in one language but to be unable to translate the word into another language. In cases where
a concept exists without an equivalent word, we can simply kidnap a foreign word and add
it to our lexicon (Russell, 1991, p. 426). Everyone’s favourite Yiddish word is chutzpah, for
example, which can be used positively or pejoratively but has no equivalent in English.
Anglophones have found the German Schadenfreude irresistible and it now appears in
English whenever we wish to feel pleasure in the misfortunes of another. It is a well-known
phenomenon that Italian lacks an autochthonous word for privacy, although Italians have
happily borrowed the English phrase. Difficulties only arise when the concept does not
exist and cannot easily be created.
Framing in Political Language
A brief mention of framing will suffice because this is a well-studied aspect of both language
and politics, albeit mostly through the analysis of meaning within a single language, what
we might call monolingual semantic analysis. The issue is raised here only to illustrate the
generally unstudied difficulty of transferring some ‘framed’ political concepts between
different languages or multilingual semantic analysis.
A ‘framed’ word or phrase is one that contains two distinct semantic elements: first, a
core meaning; and second, the speaker’s implied attitude toward that core. An evaluative
word or a phrase may be ‘framed’ by unconscious usage, reflecting the attitudes of a
community, or it may be ‘framed’ deliberately to shape the axis of a debate. The classic
example comes from the frequently used word terrorism, which means not just an act of
political violence, but one of which we disapprove. If a ‘framed’ word or phrase becomes
common, it will fulfil the conditions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by shaping the way
a community sees a given issue. A framed expression may be moved to a parallel culture
that shares the same attitude toward the same core meaning, but only with difficulty to
a culture that does not.
Whether the Anglo-American attack on Iraq in 2003 was liberation or military conquest
depended very much upon how you framed the event linguistically. The operation was
almost exclusively mounted by British and American armed forces, but called the Coalition,
which implied a concerted effort by many countries. Those Iraqis who continued to resist
this Coalition after the fall of the Ba’athist regime were called anti-Iraqi insurgents, despite the
fact that they were almost all Iraqis fighting against anglophone foreigners. Clearly, if I can
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get you to use my language, I have won the debate. And if war’s first casualty is truth,
language is the next to go.
In the US, the term family values has become the preserve of conservative and religious
Americans who honour what they perceive to be the ‘traditional’ nuclear family and
disapprove of homosexual marriage or gay adoption or sexuality outside marriage. You
can translate the words, family values, into any human language, but the phrase loses its
moralistic sense once it leaves English. Rendered directly into Danish, for example, family
values becomes familieværdier, but the word denotes society’s responsibility to provide
daycare centres, parental leave after childbirth and medical care for children, a far cry
from opposition to gay marriage.7 Family values in Hindi becomes Pārivārika mūlyōm
, literally family values, but suggesting the joy of being a member of a
caring family.
Clearly, a framed word or phrase can be exceptionally difficult to render into a target
language because the translator needs to find not only an appropriate word for the referent
but a way of suggesting the speaker’s attitude toward whatever the word or phrase signifies
in the source language.
Different Tropes for Different Folks
When dealing with a concept or institution that exists within one society but not another,
communication can be very difficult (Bahameed, 2007). One of the major advocates of
seeing language in terms of a specific culture is Anna Wierzbicka. In her studies of the
English language, Wierzbicka (2006, pp. 5–14) maintains that there is an ‘inner circle’ of
anglophone countries (the UK, the US, Ireland,Australia and New Zealand) where political
and legal systems have led to the creation of a vocabulary that does not render successfully
into other languages. In what she calls ‘Anglo-English’,Wierzbicka (2006, p. 16) argues that
words like fair, bias, commitment and compromise are rooted in the English common law
tradition and shed much of their original senses when translated into a different language
culture. Strongly influenced by the Sapir-Whorf perspective,Wierzbicka (2006, pp. 103–40)
dwells convincingly on the oft-used word reasonable. In English, we make a reasonable effort
to obey laws within a reasonable time. If we are arrested on reasonable suspicion, we count on
a jury of reasonable people to determine that there is reasonable doubt about our guilt. This
usage works well within the common law judicial tradition, which depends heavily on
precedents established by earlier cases; what is reasonable is what a judge and a jury have
found reasonable. Outside the anglophone world, however, civil law systems are inspired by
the Roman and Napoleonic legal traditions in which legislators attempt to define very
carefully what is and what is not legal, leaving judges very little latitude to decide whether
behaviour has been reasonable or not.
Sometimes a phrase has to clear several linguistic hurdles, each deeply embedded in a
separate culture. In Andean Quechua (called Quichua in Ecuador), we find the phrase
sumak kawsay, which means (roughly) ‘living in harmony with others and in concert with
nature’. Sumak means good, but also carries with it the sense of something beautiful. Kawsay
is life. So why not translate the phrase as the good life? For the Quichua speakers, the good life
consists less in fine wines and holidays in Paris and more in living in sync with their harsh
but beautiful mountains. Sumak kawsay is such an important concept in Quichua that it
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appears five times in the Ecuadorian Constitution, each time linked to the Spanish buen
vivir.8 To project the culturally embedded meaning, however, the Ecuadorians have defined
buen vivir/sumak kawsay in their constitution as follows:
Se reconoce el derecho de la población a vivir en un ambiente sano y ecológicamente equilibrado, que
garantice la sostenibilidad y el buen vivir, sumak kawsay
One recognizes the right of the population people to live in an environment healthy and ecologically
balanced that guarantees sustainability and the good life (a life balanced and integrated with nature)
or sumak kawsay (leave in original).
We recognize the right of the people to live in a healthy and ecologically-balanced environment that
guarantees sustainability and buen vivir, or sumak kawsay.
In the case of a phrase like sumak kawsay, there is merit in not offering a specific translation
of hard words if there is a danger that they will lose almost all of their contextualised
meaning when moved to another language (Slobin, 1996, p. 70). Hence, in the above
translation, we have left buen vivir and sumak kawsay in the two original tongues to remind
the reader that no straightforward rendering is possible.
Sometimes, the same event means one thing to one culture and something else to
another because it has been differently encoded by different histories. For example, people
who detonate explosives strapped to their bodies in order to kill their enemies are typically
called ‘suicide bombers’ in the Western press, although some European languages employ
the Japanese term kamikaze. William Polk (2005, xvi) notes that in Arabic the equivalent
word is muShta-HiD, which carries within it the deep Koranic connotation of someone
who is giving witness to religious faith. Suicide bomber and muSHta-HiD might be translated
as equivalents, but the core sense or deep meaning for each word is profoundly different.
This does not mean that Arabic speakers all revere suicide bombers; it does suggest a
comprehension of the religious motive behind self-destructive murder that Western cultures lack.
Sometimes tragedy defies translatability. Deciding upon the mass murder of European
Jews, Hitler’s government referred to the process as an Endlösung (final solution, or the last
stage in resolving a problem). The use of this phrase by Hitler’s colleagues has defined it too
closely to the Holocaust to be used in any other context and the word Endlösung fails to
appear in many modern German dictionaries (Klemperer, 2006 [1957], p. 140). In Hebrew,
the ‘final solution’ becomes Shoah (
), which means catastrophe in Hebrew. Ironically,
when Palestinian Arabs lost the 1948 war to the emergent Israelis, they referred to their
defeat with the Arabic word for catastrophe (nakba or
). For the triumphant Israelis,
the Palestinian nakba was called milkhemet HaShikhrur (
or War of Liberation).
Your liberation is my catastrophe.
Laws and Legislatures
Staying for the moment in the Middle East, let us look at basic words for what is generically
called a legislature. In every functioning Western democracy, periodic elections are held to
send representatives to a lawmaking body that has the power to control the executive in
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certain areas. Legislature derives from the Latin root for law (lex – legis), implying that
humans have the right and the capacity to make laws to govern their behaviour, changing
these laws as perceptions of justice evolve. For example, male homosexuality in the United
States and Britain was once a criminal offence leading to imprisonment. While it is still
condemned by virtually every religion, adult homosexuality is now legal in every advanced
democracy. Today, the dispute has moved on to the issue of gay marriage, unimaginable only
a few decades ago. Same-sex marriage has been legalised in many Western societies and
no-one doubts that the US Congress and the British parliament have the legal capability to
pass the same legislation should they desire to do so. Western legislatures make law.
There are 22 member states within the Arab League, where political life is mutating with
breathtaking speed.With the marginal exception of Lebanon, none is presently what would
be regarded in the West as an established democracy although most have what is usually
called a majlis (or
). This word is normally translated as legislature although its Arabic
root merely suggests a ‘sitting together’, a ‘meeting’ or a ‘consultation’. Majlis lacks the
notion of a lawmaking assembly, however, because the Islamic view of law is quite different.
God makes laws, not human parliaments. Men do not possess the power to legalise anything
God has condemned. As a human institution, the majlis exists to advise but not to control
the executive.While there has been an effort by some Arabic societies to create governments
that resemble Western democracies in terms of formal structures (legislatures, elections and
a judicial system), the embedded or contextualised meaning of an Arab majlis differs
significantly from a European legislature (Ayalon, 1999).
Importing ‘Democracy’
Even the fundamental political word ‘democracy’ is hard to translate. Francis Dupuis-Déri
(2004) has demonstrated how the word democracy has evolved diachronically in the years
since the American and French Revolutions, moving from sometimes pejorative to uniformly positive in the anglophone world. And as Frederic C. Schaffer (1998, p. 14) warns us:
Xhosa speakers today talk of idemokrasi, Chinese students demonstrated for minzhu, andVáclav
Havel attempted to institute demokracie. These examples are hardly trivial. Translating minzhu,
demokracie, or idemokrasi, by ‘democracy’ as journalists and scholars regularly do, is potentially
problematic because the cultural premises that infuse American practices and institutions may
not be universal.
Schaffer’s classic study, Democracy in Translation (1998), focused on the 70 per cent of
Senegalese who speak Wolof as either a first or second language, and he conducted many
interviews in that language to get a sense of what democracy actually meant to Senegalese
who had moved the French démocratie into the Wolof demokaraasi. Schaffer (1998, pp. 51–65)
found that demokaraasi in Wolof referred less to electoral behaviour (voting leaders in and
out of office) and more to the search for consensus (achieving community unity), solidarity
(taking care of friends and neighbours in times of need) and a structured equality or
even-handedness (in the sense that a polygamous husband would treat his wives equally or
a mother her children fairly). Demokaraasi did not mean equality in the Western sense, since
there continued to be important social and gender-based difference in status and it lacked
the core connection to winning and losing elections.
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Conclusions
Our conclusions are tentative and all require more systematic research, but here are some
preliminary thoughts.While a debate over the relative merits of the effability principle and
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis provides an illuminating heuristic device, it does not seem
productive to search for clear-cut winners and losers (Leavitt, 2011, pp. 8–9). Language
seems to have enormous capacity for effability and difficult meaning can usually be
transmitted trans-linguistically, albeit with time, effort and goodwill. When languages and
cultures are very different, however, some translations may be so difficult as to be – for all
practical purposes – impossible. If a basic concept does not exist in a given culture, a
‘designer word’ will probably not fill the void.
As students of politics, we need to take political translation as seriously as the language
professionals take it.Whenever we read or listen to a political statement that originated in
another language, we should be asking a series of questions.Who said this? In what language
were they speaking? Was the speaker/author a native speaker of that language? And –
crucially – who translated it and under what circumstances? As Gallie observed a halfcentury ago, trying to find the meaning of a political phrase – even in a monolingual setting
– is already complicated; the multilingual semantic analysis of political realities sometimes
verges on the impossible.
And explanation and/or decipherment is not translation. In comparing two German
words for country,Wierzbicka (1997, pp. 156–77) dedicates 21 densely written pages to the
difference between Heimat and Vaterland. Her discussion is brilliant, but no translator/
interpreter will ever be allowed a 21-page parenthesis in the middle of a European Union
speech by the German Chancellor.
The interaction between language and society has been studied competently and actively
by a community of scholars from various disciplines, but political scientists have been
unaccountably absent from that conversation. This is a tragedy. International politics is an
exercise in language, and without a studied appreciation of that fact, we find ourselves like
Ingmar Bergman’s Ester and Anna, cognitively marooned in a world of words that are
forever foreign to our ears.
(Accepted: 12 October 2011)
About the Author
Richard Oliver Collin obtained a doctorate in politics that began at Harvard and reached completion at Oriel
College, Oxford. He is an author and academic whose books include Imbroglio (1980), Winter of Fire (1990), Contessa
(1994) and The Man with Many Names (1995), as well as scholarly articles on ethnic, ideological and linguistic conflict.
His next book, co-authored with Pamela L. Martin, is Introduction to World Politics: Conflict and Consensus on a Small
Planet (Rowman & Littlefield, August 2012). Despite an early career as an official of the US Department of Defense,
Richard Collin has been active in the peace movement over the past two decades. He is Distinguished Professor
Emeritus at Coastal Carolina University but now lives in East Yorkshire. Richard Collin, 62 Minster Moorgate,
Beverley, East Yorkshire HU17 8HR, UK; email: [email protected]
Notes
Gratitude goes forth to: Ms Aleksandra Sanjines for expert help with Russian; Dr John Myhill of the University of Haifa and Professor
Raphael Cohen-Almagor of Hull University for Hebrew; Dr Min Ye for Chinese; Dr Suheir Daoud for Arabic; Ms Duygu Mehmet
and Dr Pelin Basci of Portland State University for Turkish; Ms Gazala Ahmed for Hindi; and Inti Cartuche Vacacela, Martha
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O’Kennen and Dr Liliana Sánchez for Quichua. Special thanks to Randall Wells, Pamela Martin, Michael Morris, Ruth Wodak,
Raphael Cohen-Almagor and Thea S. Collin who – along with three anonymous reviewers – expertly critiqued the manuscript.
1 Thanks to Hiroyoshi Hiratsuka for this insight.
2 The literature on Sapir-Whorf is vast, and the best summary with bibliography can be found in the 2011 Leavitt study noted above.
For Sapir’s own writing, see Edward Sapir, Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality, originally published in 1949 and
re-issued by the University of California Press in 1985 (Sapir, 1985 [1949]). John B. Carroll has assembled the key writings of
Benjamin Lee Whorf in his 1956 Language,Thought and Reality: Selective Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (Carroll, 1956).
3 See the NewYork Times, 26 October 2005, p. 1. Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/ international/middleeast/
26cnd-iran.html [Accessed 4 January 2011]. This translation became the subject of an epic quarrel between the Farsi-speaking
Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, who rendered it correctly, and the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who used
a different source text to argue that Cole was an Ahmadinejad apologist. See Cole, 2009, p. 201, and p. 271, fn 13.
4 See the New York Times, 19 November 1956, p. 1. Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/21/weekinreview/
headliners-decent-burial.html?scp=3&sq=%22We+will+bury+You%22&st=nyt [Accessed 20 February 2011].
5 Dr John Myhill of Haifa University helped in explaining this issue.
6 See the Turkish CNN for the original quote at: http://www.cnnturk.com/2011/turkiye/02/01/erdogandan.mubareke.
halka.kulak.ver/605326.0/index.html [Accessed 15 February 2011]. Thanks to Dr Pelin Basci for the help here.
7 Ms Christina Andersen lent a hand with the Danish.
8 Gracias to Dr Pamela L. Martin of Coastal Carolina University for help in understanding the language here and the concept behind
the language.
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