International Women’s Day: La Malinche

 

Today, 8 March, being International Women’s Day, it’s appropriate for this blog to feature one of the most famous of women interpreters, an NPIT interpreter at that, La Malinche. Why NPIT? Because she became interpreter for the Spanish conquistador of Mexico Hernán Cortes by circumstance and not by training or for money.

Her story has been told many times, both as history and in fiction, and her reputation has varied from traitress to heroine. Briefly,

Marina [maˈɾina] or Malintzin [maˈlintsin] (c. 1500 – c. 1529), more popularly known as La Malinche [la maˈlintʃe], was a Nahua woman from the Mexican Gulf Coast, who played a key role in the  Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire by acting as an interpreter, advisor, and intermediary for the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. She was one of 20 enslaved women given to the Spaniards by the Natives of Tabasco in 1519. Later, she gave birth to Cortés's first son, Martín, who is considered one of the first Mestizos (people of mixed European and Indigenous American ancestry).

For another famous NPIT woman interpreter, enter Sacagawea in the Search box on the right.

La Malinche wasn’t Cortes’ only known NPIT interpreter. The other was a man, Gerónimo de Aguilar, but that’s another story.

Sources

La Malinche. Wikipedia, 2021.

Gerónimo de Aguilar. Wikipedia, 2021.

Image

Detail from the Lienzo de Tlaxcala canvas c.1550 showing Doña Marina with Hernán Cortes. 

Elegy for Buea

 

From time to time this blog reprints an earlier post that seems worth reviving. With over 450 posts in its archive, there’s plenty to choose from. This time I’ve chosen one from the year 2009. The choice was determined not only by the content but also by the place where the event that’s described in it took place.

 It’s been my good fortune to visit a number of beautiful, peaceful places in the world  before they were spoiled one way or another: Beirut, Dubrovnik, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) by wars, Rangoon (now Yangon) by coup d’état, Bali and Ibiza by tourism, the Taj Mahal by pollution, Cairo by revolution and demographics, Alexandria by neglect. Petra and Granada survive by the skin of their teeth in spite of modern accretions. I came too late to Dresden. To those disfigured by conflicts must now be added Buea.

Buea is a sprawling township at the foot of Mount Cameroon in West Africa, rich in banana plantations. It’s so idyllic that the heads of the first European colonists in the area, pre-1914 Germans, chose it for their summer residence. I spent happy weeks there teaching at its university and lodging in its British-era Mountain Hotel, where one year I witnessed the beginning and end of an extraordinary marathon, the famous Guinness mountain race. Now Cameroon is torn by an all-too-typical internal conflict based on stupid divisions of nationalism and language. I grieve for it and for my erstwhile students.

The event related here was my introduction to an important function of interpreting that’s are rarely even mentioned in conventional courses, namely church interpreting, and to a style of interpreting in which the interpreter does not remain neutral, impersonal or impassive.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2009

Church Interpreters 3: West Africa

When Cameroon, in West Africa, was formed at independence by amalgamating former British and French mandated territories, its enlightened first president, Ahmadou Ahidjou, made it a country that would be officially bilingual in the two colonial languages. But ‘officially bilingual’ doesn’t mean that all individual citizens are bilingual. As in many other officially bilingual countries, for example Canada, the parliament and the national government couldn’t function without a professional corps of Expert Translators and Interpreters. Cameroon gave university graduates scholarships to go for training in France, England, and later in Canada, where I came to know many Cameroonian students. Once the first generation or trainees had acquired experience, however, the government thought the training could be done at home. So a national Advanced (i.e. postgraduate) School of Translators and Interpreters was opened at Buea, in the heart of the English-speaking area of the country. Buea is a very pleasant, scattered hill station township on the lower slopes of Mt Cameroon.

Besides the two official languages, Cameroon also has about 200 native African languages as well as English and French pidgins. In those there is no formal training for translators.

When foreign Christian missionaries started work in the country in the late 19th century, they couldn’t be effective unless they found a way of communicating with Africans in the domestic vernaculars. At most a few missionaries might learn one or two languages with a large community of speakers such as Douala, a Bantu language that is widely understood today because the city of Douala is large and important. But it would not have taken them very far afield. The only solution: interpreters recruited from the local congregations. It’s a method that was put to use all over Africa. In the early days, missionary interpretation was of dubious quality:

“Since early missionaries could not know the language, they had to depend on interpreters whose own linguistic competence might be small and who might lack any knowledge of Christianity. What kind of gospel the missionaries were heard to preach can only be guessed at.” (McManners, The Oxford History of Christianity, p. 478)

But that was long ago.

One Sunday morning in the 1980s, I was coming out of the Advanced School at Buea when I saw a large crowd on the campus. The people were dressed in their Sunday best, the richly coloured clothes of the women looking especially festive. In front of the crowd a stage had been erected, and on it were just two men, the centre of rapt attention. I stopped to watch.

Both men were Africans. Both were wearing black suits. There was not much difference between them of height or build, but one was younger. Both were carrying a black book in the right hand. Both were haranguing the crowd for a couple of minutes at a time, alternately. They had similar voices. They made the same gestures. In fact they were speaking different languages, but I couldn’t distinguish that. It was as if they were engaged in an impassioned mimicry of one another.

After the first few changes of speaker, I realised that I’d happened upon an evangelical church service or prayer meeting, and it seemed likely that one speaker was the preacher and the other was his interpreter. This was confirmed to me by somebody in the crowd; also that the interpretation was from Douala into another African language. So far so good, but which was the speaker and which the interpreter? Either of them, by his strong voice, his intonation, his body language, appearance and dress, could have passed for preacher. They stood there side by side, neither showing deference. However, another question to my informant confirmed what I might have deduced: that the interpreter was the younger of the two. He, like his preacher model, put on a rousing performance that lasted for another half hour.

“Are all the church interpreters like this?” I asked my informant. “Oh yes,” she replied, “How else could they inspire the congregation to turn to Jesus?”

Young Children As Natural Language Teachers

 

 

 

Young children can learn languages, but can they also teach them? The question is prompted by several videos that have appeared on YouTube showing toddlers teaching American Sign Language to their siblings. Here’s a text and a still photo from one of them (see Sources below):

Three-year-old Amelia was born deaf and began signing at 14 months. The inquisitive kid decided to teach her brother too. Using an iPad Amelia flicked through images of animals. Then showed her brothers how to match the sign for each one. Amelia’s Mom Jennifer spotted her daughter and decided to document it. “My sons were mesmerized with her signing the animals,” said Jennifer.  “It’s been proven learning two languages at a young age helps brain development.”

Thus the well-attested natural ability of young children to learn languages meets up with another human ability that may also be instinctive and inherited, namely the desire and ability to teach. We are aware of the latter in its more advanced form, namely the ability of trained teachers and the liking many of them have for their work; but as with other human skills (such as professional football or translating) it may be based on something more primitive and not needing instruction, whether formal or informal.

The idea that teaching is instinctive, and therefore by implication inherited, is catching on nowadays. A recent book (see Sources) says as follows:

“First we explore how children naturally use ostensive communication when teaching; allowing them to be set in the emitter side of natural pedagogy. Then, we hypothesize that the capacity to teach may precede to have even a mature metacognition… Thus we propose that teaching… may be occurring as an instinct from a very early age.”

The double instinct for language learning and for teaching may even perhaps begin lower down evolution than humans. For instance there is the case of the famous gorilla Koko who taught some American sign language to her companion gorilla Michael, though admittedly her environment wasn’t natural and she wasn't young. We should look at the other means and media of communication besides human-like language.

 Sources

Parents catch deaf daughter teaching siblings ASL. YouTube, 2019. Click [HERE] or go to

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JxMU28h5mA.

Cecilia I. Calero, A. P. Goldin and M. Sigman. The Teaching Instinct. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9, 2018, pages 819-230.

Michael (gorilla). Wikipedia, 2021.

Summarising as Translating

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                     

Lay people are only aware of one kind of translating: the transfer of writings and utterances between natural languages. Whereas translatologists know there are many kinds, which vary as to their media, purposes, skilfulness, etc. One kind is summarising. It’s also known to academics as abstracting and to school students as precis-writing.

 

A seminal article about types of translating was Roman Jakobson’s 1959 article On linguistic aspects of translation. In it he distinguishes between interlingual translation (translating between languages) and intralingual translation (translating within the same language, traditionally called paraphrase). In this post we will be mainly concerned with the intralingual kind, although there is also a good deal of interlingual summarising.

Abstracting must not be confused with extracting. In the latter, short significant passages are selected from the source text and strung together verbatim. Extracting can be done by algorithm. The algorithmic extracting that I receive from Academia.edu is fairly successful, though it is affected by the type of source document. Nor must it be confused with writing abridged translations, which are shortened by omitting some passages in the original, and with them some details. For example, publishers cut out the scientific disquisitions from the early English translations of Jules Verne because they thought young readers would be bored by them.

 

Let’s turn now to translating. There are broadly speaking two ways of translating.  There is the purely linguistic method of substituting words, phrases and syntactic structures; and the study of it falls in the domain of contrastive linguistics. And then there is the ‘deverbalisation’ procedure in which the translators first interiorise the content and integrate it into their own thoughts, and then reverbalise it to make a target text. Here we will only be concerned with the second type. According to influential French translatologist Danica Seleskovitch (see photo and Sources), it’s the form in which our thoughts are stored to long-term memory and she strongly recommended it to her student interpreters.

Translating, in Jakobson’s broad sense, is to take a text that has been written in one text and reproduce its content in the another text. Summarising meets this definition but with some conditions. Here are some guidelines for an ideal summary of the precis kind:

·       Is written in the precis writer’s own words

·       Is much shorter than the original, often many times shorter

·       Is clear, concise, coherent, and precise

·       Contains all the essential points, author’s tone, facts, opinions, thoughts and main idea of the original passage

·       Is well-knit and makes logical sense and follows a logical order

·       Won’t contain details not found in the original passage

·       Is well-structured, has no language errors, and makes a meaningful passage.

 

Content therefore consists of “tone, facts. opinions, thoughts and main idea.” Deverbalising makes it possible to apprehend these. But summarising doesn’t stop there. It requires that the translator apply selections and judgements to them and only reverbalise the product of the process. It follows that there must be some higher-order mental faculty that directs and accomplishes all this. (Some people don’t believe we can deverbalize, anyway not completely; but here we assume it’s possible.)

 

Summarising is therefore an  exceptionally complex form of translating and a challenge for artificial intelligence.

 

Sources

Roman Jakobson. On linguistic aspects of translation. In R. A.  Brower (ed.), On Translation, Cambridge MA, 1959.

A Comprehensive Guide to Write the Perfect Precis. Bangalore: Olliveboard.

Danica Seleskovitch. Language and cognition. In D. Gerver and H. W. Sinaiko (eds.), Language Interpretation and Communication, New York, Plenum Press, 1978, pp. 333–342.

Arthur B. Evans. Jules Verne’s English translations. Science Fiction Studies, vol. 32, 2005, p.80 et seq.

The Tenets of the Natural Translation Hypothesis

 

Good riddance 2020

and

A Happier New Year to everybody!

 

The new year is a good moment to take stock and clarify. This post is intended as an introduction for newcomers to the Natural Translation hypothesis (NT), especially students, and to clear up some misunderstandings.

 

Translating is a quasi-universal human capability. “Quasi” because it has a prerequisite, namely bilingualism, that not all humans possess; but it is universal in bilinguals. It should therefore be mentioned in any description of human language capability.

Translating is a specialisation for language of a more general mental capability. The more general capability enables us to convert mental representations and storage of concepts and feelings from one form of expression to another. This is sometimes called intersemiotic translation, but it includes translation between languages and it extends to feelings or sentiments. We call it conversion.

Bilingual infants start translating so young and with so little exposure to examples of translation, in fact as soon as they are in the least bilingual, that we must suspect there is an inherited element in it. They do not have to be taught to translate; indeed they will do it even if their elders avoid encouraging them. It is the insistence on an inherited element and on the absence of teaching that distinguishes NT from other kinds of NPIT (non-professional interpreting and translating).

The universality of translating across languages, media (voice, writing, signs), cultures and time periods is another phenomenon that pushes us to think there must be something inherent in the human make-up that enables it. 

NT translations are mostly of a simple and everyday kind, though they need not be. Some explanation is required for the progress from that level to the difficult and highly skilled translations that are done by literary translators and professional document translators. This progress can be achieved by several routes or a combination of them: by college courses, by practice under the guidance of an experienced mentor, or by self-learning from examples. However, the more advanced levels of translating are built upon NT and have been called “the icing on the cake.” 

Basic Readings

The papers The Importance of Natural Translation, Translating As An Innate Skill and How a Three-year-old Translates, all of which are available on the Academic.edu page https://independent.academia.edu/BHARRIS.

Image credit: Google Images 

The N-Word: A Thorny Problem of Affective Translation

A post on this blog earlier this year treated the topic of affective or emotive translating. (To retrieve it, enter affective in the Search box on the right.) There it was considered as mainly a problem of literary translation. However, a recent case illustrates that it extends much further.

The University of Ottawa, where I used to teach, is a very politically correct institution. It’s located literally in the shadow of the Canadian parliament. It therefore comes as a surprise to hear that the university has recently been caught up in accusations of racism. The accusations come from Black students.

 I was head of a department there for several years and we had a constant contingent of Black African students, mainly from Cameroon because Cameroon is a country that is officially bilingual in English and French like Canada. Relations were good. I never received any complaint from those students; on the contrary they were so happy with us that I and other members of the staff were invited to come and teach them in Cameroon, which we did.

 So what has caused the recent fracas?

 It happened because a lecturer uttered the infamous N-word in class. (I won’t risk further controversy by spelling it out here.) She didn’t call anybody by it. She didn’t speak approvingly of it. She simply cited it “as an example of a word that a community has reclaimed.” That is to say, she did a bit of descriptive linguistics. A student protested, was supported by others, and the lecturer was suspended though she was later reinstated.

The objection to quoting and describing the N-word, as opposed to using it, is clearly unjustified. All the major English dictionaries list it and spell it out, though they accompany it by a usage label such as offensive. Some even speak the pronunciation. Indeed the Merriam-Webster has a whole paragraph on its usage and history. There are other words, for example Yid (for Jew), that are very offensive but don’t raise the same passions today. And opinions change. For instance it wasn’t until the 1970s that the OED dared to print c**t in full.  But there’s no use arguing over it, because it’s not a matter of rational argument but of emotion.

And so the all-too-familiar battle broke out between those who condemned the lecturer and those who supported her. In response to her suspension, 34 professors in multiple departments signed a letter of support for her… saying that the use of the term can offer educational value and that a classroom is a place for debate.

“It is important that university administrations, while helping to uncover and abolish all forms of systemic racism, ensure that the transmission of knowledge, the development of critical thinking and academic freedom is protected,” the letter said in French.

 In a statement posted to social media, the Students Union called the professors’ letter “appalling.” A group of law students and a group of med students wrote in separate letters that they were “gravely alarmed” by the [professors’] letter… and called on the school to develop a zero-tolerance policy on the use of he N-word by anyone at the University of Ottawa.

"I cannot even fathom what academic freedom is because I’m here trying to tell you using the N-word is already alienating me and not giving me a freedom to exist in these spaces,” said… one of the students who signed the letter from law students.

 The whole argument was, however, rendered beside the point because the lecturer never invoked academic freedom in her defence. Instead she apologised and said that she had made a mistake because English is not her first language and she isn’t comfortable in it. She is, like many lecturers at the bilingual University of Ottawa, a native French speaker who may be called on to teach in English. So let’s look at the N-word in French.

All the major bilingual dictionaries list the N-word and furthermore they spell it out shamelessly. And they all give as the first French equivalent nègre, though they accompany it with labels like péjoratif or vulgaire or offer alternatives like bougnole (raghead). Indeed nègre is often very derogatory, as in parler petit-nègre (speak pidgin French). Yet nègre doesn’t arouse the same degree of passion as the N-word does in English; and the same an be said of the Spanish negro, for I haven’t heard of protests about it here in Spain. Not that the French didn’t have Black slavery in earlier times, but…

The French colonies in the Caribbean, in which some 80% of the total population had lived under the slave system since the seventeenth century, underwent a most unusual experience involving the initial abolition of slavery in 1794 [by the revolutionary Convention], its re-establishment in 1802 and then a second – and permanent – abolition in 1848.

 Though not without racism, prejudice against Blacks was never as virulent in Canada or Europe as in the United States.  That’s why escaped slaves fled to Canada and Americans of colour who could do so, like Josephine Baker In France and Paul Robeson in England, went to live in Europe. There’s still not the obsession in Europe with Black racism that one can observe all the time on American television and in American politics. In short it’s plausible that somebody whose studies and training have been almost entirely in French-speaking Quebec, which is the case of this lecturer, might not feel the strong emotions that the N-word arouses in some Anglophone communities.

 The above remarks are not meant to take sides in the dispute. They are the observations of a linguist. Also of a translatologist, for it’s apparent that the N-word cannot be translated by anything that has the same emotive effect. Untranslatability is too often treated as a matter of all or nothing, but this is an unfortunate case of partial untranslatability. The denotation can be translated but not the connotation.

 

Sources

Joe Friesen. University of Ottawa professor at centre of controversy involving racial slur says she regrets actions. Globe and Mail, 20 October 2020. There were many other newspaper reports.

Merriam-Webster. Nigger. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nigger#usage-1 or click [HERE].

 Nelly Schmidt. Slavery and its Abolition, French colonies, Research and Transmission of Knowledge. www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CLT/pdf/Nelly_Sc… · Fitxer PDF or click [HERE].

Footnote

More recently than the above incident, (March 2021) the director of my alma mater, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, whose name is Adam Habib, has been caught using the word in a meeting and there has been a subsequent uproar. He used it in response to a question about lecturers using the term in class.

Habib, who is originally from South Africa and has been the director of the university since the new year, defended his use of the word by saying: “You do [find it unacceptable], I don’t actually. I come from a part of the world where we actually do use the word.” He added: “So why don’t I think it was problematic to use the word when I did. Well, because context matters and I was arguing for taking punitive action. You cannot impute maligned intention without understanding context. Do I believe that only blacks can verbalise the word. No, I don’t… I am aware that this is a common view among activists committed to an identitarian politics. I don’t identify with this political tradition. I grew up in a political tradition that is more cosmopolitan oriented and more focused on the class dimensions of structural problems.”

School poetry translators

 

The translating done by schoolchildren that is described in the academic literature is mostly of the school language brokering kind. It’s a practical, everyday activity,  part linguistic part cultural,  between students, staff and parents. There have been several examples of it on this blog, notably the Young Interpreter Scheme in British schools. (To find the posts, enter Hampshire in the Search box on the right.) But children are capable of translating at a much more advanced intellectual level if they are given the right motivation and encouragement – as indeed they should be.

 

One school that recognises and stimulates this potential is Christ’s Hospital at Horsham in the south of England.  As its name suggests, it’s a very old school; it was founded in London in 1552 when hospital meant “a charitable institution for the needy, aged, infirm, or young.” Its curriculum, like its uniform, has remained traditional; however, its independence has enabled it to be adventurous. Subjects that are available include History, Geography, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Latin and Greek. But besides the languages that it teaches, the advent of pupils from immigrant families has led to the presence of less common native languages among the pupils. Teacher Stephen Walsh was so inspired by the educational benefits enjoyed by pupils that he has developed a school-wide poetry in translation project

 

And so a pupil at Christ’s Hospital fought off stiff competition to win The Stephen Spender Prize 2020 for poetry in translation in the 14-and-under category. Hannah Jordan, won first prize out of over a thousand entries with her translation of a Tamil poem and received her prize at a virtual ceremony on 18^th November. Hannah continues a great tradition of poetry translation at Christ’s Hospital; many of the school’s students have had success in the competition in recent years, translating from a host of different languages, including Japanese, Swedish, Russian, Swahili and Modern Greek.

 

Hannah described in the commentary that accompanied her entry how she liked the poem because it was so true to her experience of life in India. “When we visit my family are constantly fixing things for my grandparents. As soon as we arrive, my dad puts together a long list of all the things that need fixing; inevitably, when we return, there is another list, yet we all get by just fine, even if the monsoon winds blow through the gaps in the wall.”

Hannah found the poem on a website, then worked with her mother on any tricky Tamil words then, in classic fashion, developed her literal version (what translators call a trot) into something more poetic, including for example the clever device of the repetition of And yet in each stanza. “One difficulty was making sure that the poem sounded funny in English yet kept the specific Tamil problems in the translation,” says Hannah.

Here is her translation:-

AND YET— OUR TAMIL LIFE

By Manushya Puthiran (2001)

Translated by Hannah Kripa Jordan

These doorbells –

Does it matter they don’t ring?

And yet—

None of my visitors

Have left without today’s gossip.

 

The bathroom latch is broken, so what?

A year and a half has gone by.

And yet—

No one’s privacy has been invaded,

No daydreams interrupted.

 

The chair may have a broken leg,

Its balance a little rocked.

And yet—

To the startled guest,

Not a hint of disrespect.

 

For more than a week now,

My car-brakes have been failing.

And yet—

God keeps watch on this city.

Still I return home,

In one full piece.

 

I suffer a pain in my belly,

But what can I do?

Nowadays it returns frequently.

And yet—

If I recline at a certain angle,

I can just about bear the pain.

 

Predicaments may be endless

In most parts of our life,

And yet—

Tamil life is plain sailing,

A thread without knots

 As always with a literary translation, it can be judged either for its accuracy in rendering the original or as a  production in the target language. In this case we have an unusual chance to make a comparison because Prabha Sridavan, a Tamil contributor to this blog, has kindly tracked down for us an earlier translation of the same poem done in India by acknowledged experts (see Sources). We also get a rare chance to compare a translation done by adults with one done by an adolescent.

Here is the earlier translation:-

The doorbells

don’t work

but no one goes away.

 

These one-and-a-half years

with no latch on the bathroom door

have endangered

no one’s privacy.

 

The broken leg of this chair

will not insult a guest

only slightly imbalance him.

 

I have been travelling

in this god-protected city

in a vehicle without brakes

for a week.

 

That pain at the base of the stomach,

somewhere to the left,

comes often these days.

if I sleep at a particular angle for a while

I can manage.

 

There is a lot

to be set right

everywhere.

 

Even so,

uncomplicated

is Tamil life.

 

 

Sources

Stephen Spender Trust. http://www.stephen-spender.org/spender_prize.html or click [HERE].

The Stephen Spender Trust is a charity promoting literary translation and multilingualism through school workshops and the annual Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation, organised in association with the Guardian newspaper .

 

The following link takes you to the Stephen Spender Prize Celebration online event where Hannah reads her poem at 16:37: https://youtu.be/kaq7ESAa16s or click [HERE]. The video is well worth listening to. The comments by the children are remarkably adult.

Translation by C. S. Lakshmi and Arundhathi Subrimanian, in The Unhurried City; Writings on Chennai, edited by C. S. Lakshmi, Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2004.

Image

Hannah Jordan.  Source: The District Post.