“You speak so
many languages! You should be a translator.”
“What do you
mean you can’t translate this memo into English? You speak both
languages, don’t you?”
“I don’t
speak your other language, I’m afraid. Can you translate what your
child is saying, so I can assess her language development?”
Sounds familiar?
There seems to be this deeply ingrained
conviction that the words multilingual and translator
are synonymous. This is like assuming that those of us who intone ‘La
donna è mobile’ while scrubbing our backs in the shower are
professional singers, which is quite funny. Translators are indeed
professionals, but being
multilingual is not a job description.
The
reasoning that multilinguals are translators because translators are
multilinguals would be just laughable, too, but for the common
practices which derive from it. Some of these may be rather harmless,
like encouraging multilinguals to choose jobs because they are
multilinguals, as in my first example above. Do monolinguals choose
their careers because they use one language? The reasoning draws
on two misconceptions, one about translators and one about
multilinguals.
Translators aren’t people who can say
the same things in different languages, and multilinguals aren’t
multi-monolinguals
who use their languages in order to be able to repeat themselves in
them. Languages, whatever they may be,
aren’t different containers
into which the “same things” can be poured. If they were, we
wouldn’t need borrowings,
for example, and translators wouldn’t need dedicated training to do
their job. Assuming that they don’t explains my second example.
Chapters 1, 2 and 12 of my book The Language of Language have some more about why such
misconceptions about multilingualism and translation came to be.
Multilinguals use different languages
because those languages serve different purposes, but translations
make one language serve the purposes of another. This is also why I
don’t think that translation is a useful method of learning a new
language.
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| Image © Tsunajima Kamekichi (Wikimedia Commons) |
My objections relate to my persuasion
that learning languages must mean learning to think in them
(or we wouldn’t need to learn them), whereas translation teaches
you to manage one language through another. I made this point in an
online discussion on this topic, at the academic site ResearchGate.
What I didn’t say there was that I’ve never forgotten the pleasure
I felt when I first dared to buy monolingual dictionaries of the
languages I was learning in school, and found that just reading those
dictionaries as you might read a novel taught me more about how to use
the languages than I had ever learned before.
Ability to translate demands a degree
of awareness of each of the languages involved that multilinguals
simply do not posses, as multilinguals. This applies to
interpreters too, of course. The main differences between the two
concern mode and timing: translators usually deal with printed texts
and may be lucky enough to take time to enjoy a nice cuppa once in a
while when inspiration lags, whereas interpreters, sometimes called
simultaneous translators, usually translate speech or sign on the
spot. I happen to have worked as both but, when off-duty, I’m quite
like my fellow multilinguals in often having no idea even which language(s) I’m using
at any one time.
My third example above illustrates an
unfortunate practice in school and in clinic. Relatives (or friends,
or neighbours) are co-opted to assist in assessment processes for
which they obviously lack qualification, just because they know the
language of the child under assessment. It’s like asking common
mortals to take screwdrivers and soldering irons to the innards of
their laptop, just because they use it every day. My example is
actually mild, because children are also asked to translate
for the sake of their elders. These two blog posts, authored by
speech-language experts, say it all, concerning the effects of
translation on assessment procedures and instruments: Brian A.
Goldstein’s ‘Providing clinical services to bilingual children: Stop Doing That!’
and Elizabeth D. Peña’s aptly titled ‘Stupid translation’. It is true that little and big
multilinguals do translate spontaneously, when they suspect that
misunderstandings may arise among users of their languages. But this
is much like 7-year-old big sister explaining to baby brother that
mum came home in a rotten mood today and it is therefore advisable to
tone down the usual level of mum-is-home mischief: we want people to
understand what’s going on. Big sister is not a cognitive scientist
for that.
Sisterly efforts to generate intelligibility by means of assorted translations must be a good
thing: human beings have spent quite a lot of their time as human
beings translating their languages for the benefit of fellow human beings.
Sometimes, however, it’s not entirely clear whether the purported
ability of multilinguals to translate makes them good guys or bad
guys. If you can make sense of unfamiliar (linguistic) behaviour,
then you must be privy to someone else’s secrets,
which makes you not-really-one-of-us. Multilinguals who confess their
inability (or unwillingness) to translate may, in addition, seem
reluctant to share those secrets with “us”, as my second example
illustrates. This may well be why multilinguals appear to have the
status of permanent guests
in all of their linguistic communities: I often get the uncanny
impression that the Traduttore, tradittore quip, which is
meant to apply to “disloyalty” to languages, keeps clinging to
the multilingual users of those languages and applying to people.
How “disloyal” to whom, then, are
those of us who insist that being multilingual means precisely that,
being multilingual? The next post, by a guest with whom I’ve
had the privilege of working before,
argues that a lucid understanding of multilingualism has yet to
impact decisions about language education policies.
© MCF 2014
Next post:
=Guest post= Mother tongue education or flexible multilingual education?, by
Jean-Jacques Weber. Saturday 28th
June 2014.
