“There are many mentions in this blog of how young humans can be when they start to translate, but how old can they get before they lose the power?”
The question was posed in a post on this blog
in 2011. It bore the title Old translators never die.. they simply fade away. (To retrieve it, enter toronto eighties in the Search box on the right.) During
the intervening decade, little has been done to answer it.
So in the absence of scientific studies, we
are forced into the realm of the anecdotal and what follows is some of it. Nevertheless
it provides us with clues for the formation of some hypotheses.
Back
in 2020 there was a post on this blog about a lady, a Spanish natural
translation interpreter, who helped out impromptu at a bilingual dinner party.
To retrieve it, enter no age limit in the Search box on right the right.
“She interpreted… everything that was said in English, sometimes in full and sometimes in summary. She also translated into English things that she had first said herself… in Spanish. I noticed that sometimes she produced translations of items on the menu faster than I could think of them myself. She had no training in translation, not even an English language course.”
She was in her late seventies.
A little later, in 2011, there was the post Old
Translators Never Die. It was about a professional translator in Toronto who was
in his eighties and still working. I expressed surprise that he'd gone on for
so long. He replied, "One of the good things about translation is that you
can go on doing it to an advanced age."
I
myself continued translating routine stuff into my early eighties. When I gave
up it wasn’t because I couldn’t translate but because I found it too
tiring. Fatigue is an important factor in old-age behaviour.
Now comes news from India, that country of
literary translation par excellence, which raises the bar. It’s about Aditya Narayan Dhairyasheel or A.N.D. Haksar.
Since he retired 30 years ago, Haksar, who is based in Delhi and is now nearing
90, has spent hours translating Sanskrit works into English, to make them
accessible to more readers.
“His most recent translation, Anthology of Humorous Sanskrit Verses (see below) features 200 hasya or humorous verses drawn from various works of Sanskrit literature ranging from the millennia-old Bhagavad Gita and Mahabharata to compilations from the 13th and 14th centuries.”
No mean
feat.
Haksar was
formerly a career diplomat and ambassador to Portugal and Yugoslavia. He
therefore belongs to a particular class of literary translators, people who
have retired after distinguished careers and then taken up translation as
native translators. Another is my good friend the Tamil translator Prabha
Sridevan, who was a high court judge in another life. She has contributed to
this blog (and for more about her, enter prabha in the Search box.)
At this
point we can venture a hypothesis. It’s that mutatis mutandis there’s no age limit
to the ability to translate. It may continue unto death. ‘All other things
being equal’ because translating depends on other cognitive abilities in
addition to the core translating ability itself. Simultaneous interpreting
requires a very fast rate of processing that slows down with age. Consecutive interpreting
requires a good short-term memory. All translating requires a good memory for
words and names. And so on.
But survival
doesn’t mean unimpaired.
We have
long known, since the research on aphasics by Michel Paradis at McGill
University in the 1970s, that a linguistic upset can lead to surprisingly
aberrant behaviour in translating. But how about degenerations that are more
typical of old age such as dementia and Alzheimers? There’s plenty of scope
here for a thesis. Or for several theses.
Sources
A.N.D.
Haksar. Anthology of Humorous Sanskrit Verses. Delhi: Penguin Random House
India; May 2022.
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