Interpreting: August 2006 Archives

So Dr. Breuer challenges Nietzsche. I wrote about the first six chapters a few days ago: my enthusiasm hasn’t dimmed. :-)

“We are each composed of many parts, each clamoring for expression. We can be held responsible only for the final compromise, not for the wayward impulses of each of the parts” (300).

“’One must have chaos and frenzy within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.’” (179-180). [oft-quoted, even by the Deaf community!]

Ok folks, let me toot my own horn a little bit. The following email is about an article I submitted for (competitive!) publication two years ago. :-)

“A voice belongs first to a body, then to a language” (52).

Negar told me about an Iranian saying, that learning another language adds a new person to your self. Yes, new capacities, new zones of expression and perception, yet what Berger says is also true, the voice – in its emotion-inducing physicality [my qualification] – remains the same. This use of the word “voice” is different than Blommaert’s conceptualization of “voice” as the operationalization of intersubjective, discursive power. The intersubjective part is the part between real individuals engaged in real time (face-to-face synchronic time or asynchronous technologically-mediated time – as in the turn-taking among myself, Yasser, Jeff, Amanda, and . . . you? wink! Why not?!!)

The discursive part is the larger framework of relationships in which each of us is embedded and all of us partake. Every time we speak (via our physically-embodied voice or through written text), each utterance spins forward along a dialectical trajectory as an outgrowth of previous exposure and knowledge. Simultaneously, each utterance opens onto a potential new vista, an unknown dark zone. “Dark” because not yet lived: unexperienced, and therefore unknown. (Thanks Negar; and original thanks to Chris Baxter, who played with calling me a "dark ally" during the 2005 Supporting Deaf People Online conference.)

I read Berger and translate his words into mine. “It is prudent to believe that the large is more real than the small. Yet it is false” (53). He is discussing the myth of scale, the myth that suggests that the macrosocial is more real (e.g., more powerful) than the microsocial. “If we are trapped, my heart, it is not within reality” (53). He writes to his love as I wish to write to mine. :-) The point, however, has wider application: let me attempt to articulate it precisely.

If we – for instance Muslims, Christians, Palestinians, Israelis – are trapped it is not exclusively because of impersonal institutional forces grinding out grim realities such as the devastation in Lebanon. We are “trapped” also within our own individual, personal and private (dialectical) trajectories. Our “hearts” (our loves, passions, dreams and visions) are constrained by “a vestige of the fear reflex to be found in all animals, in face of another creature larger than themselves” (53).

A major factor that feeds this fear is the loss of home. Berger ties the loss of home explicitly to emigration. More words about emigration are necessary, Berger claims, “to whisper for that which has been lost” (55). Emigration can be understood as the driving feature, the essential characteristic, of global transnationalism. Whether one chooses to move to another country temporarily or permanently, for purposes of education or work, or is forced to move for literal survival (to work or to seek asylum), what is threatened by this move is home. Edward Said discusses this too, in the extraordinary re-ordering of his conception of self that was required when he was sent to boarding school in the US.

“Originally,” Berger explains, “home meant the center of the world – not in a geographical, but in an ontological sense” (55). He continues, “To emigrate is always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments” (57).

When the physical site of home is lost (left, taken away, inaccessible) one resorts to “the habit which protects” (64) and “the psychic level of turning in circles in order to preserve one’s identity” (63).

It hasn't been so easy finding good software for my Mac OS X (version 10.3.9).

Some online resources:

Seslisozluk, which also has a discussion forum.

Someone's list of word-phrase translations.

Hmm...this could be useful, an explanation of adding Turkish fonts to a Mac.

Some widgits for my dashboard:

Elmasuyunet [which does not seem to be available for download? :-( wah!] and Ligpuan, which shows the current weekly standings from the Turkish Premier Soccer League. (I'm interested, but it's not much help with the language!)

I can track the Turkish financial market but I can't translate to and from English! (Should I be frustrated?)

((nah. just keep looking.))

((((Too bad I can't read French!))))

Harumph! I'll look again later. :-/

This concept scared me right away. Is the Turkish language like Mandarin (Chinese), which depends on tones? I am so bad with matching pitch. :-(

But no, it seems to do with pronunciation, with phonetics, but not tone. Whew/ (and if I’m wrong oy oy trouble on the way!) Turkish uses suffixes extensively, and has a flexible syntax, words are used in different positions resulting only in differences of style, not meaning. I’ll have to learn the difference between types of clauses better than I know them now. :-(

The author, Hikmet Sebüktekin, of the text I bought describes the content of words and utterances this way: “Turkish is tradition-bound. The mere mention of a single word referring to a cliché, a proverb, or an anecdote, of which there are thousands, often suffices to activate complex meanings stored in the mind of every Turkish speaker” (v).

This is one of the things Marie Gillespie discussed in her presentation at Crossroads 2006 on politics and translation, translating politics, although (I think) her examples were Arabic. It also reminds me very much of Lila Abu-Lughod's anthropological study of the Awlad ‘Ali, a Bedouin culture. Particularly the way women used language. She says the men do this as well but she had more access to the women and their ways of speaking.

Turkish is regular, its “forms are put together with almost mathematical precision and utmost economy” (v). Thank you Atatürk! At least, I’m guessing there is a relationship between the development of the orthographic system and the present-day phonetics – but perhaps I am mistaken. It could be that the language was already auditorily rhythmic and the writing developed (with nearly perfect correspondence, each sound having one specific letter) to match. I’ll require a native informant to straighten me out on this, ácaba?

Turkic languages have a wide distribution and minimal linguistic differences among dialects: 90 million speakers in the Balkans, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq…Azerbaijan, Kazakstan, Kirghizstan, Tadzhikstan, Turmenistan, Uzbekistan…Afghanistan, China, Iran, and Russia. This on top of the 60 million native Turks.

The title of the exhibition, "El/le", has many layers of meaning in Turkish, and it is for this reason that we have preferred to retain this title without translating it into another language. The word "el" refers to both "hand" and "stranger", but the phrase "el/le", its mirror image, can be interpreted as "by hand", "to touch" or "with a stranger"

(Quoted from the Exhibition Brochure.)

As I tend to do, I noted all of the references to interpreting in Nine Parts of Desire.

“I wanted to ask her if she blamed the Iranian government for not showing her son some mercy, but Janet, who was translating, s hook her head slightly and didn’t put the question. Instead, I asked gently if she felt that all her sacrifices had been worth it” (100).

“Even Hamzah [King Hussein’s young son] wasn’t excluded. Although the boy’s command of English was perfect, he preferred to speak Arabic, and would force his father to act as translater” (136).

“One British doctor, on an eighteen-month posting to a Jeddah hospital, thought his interpreter had failed him during an ante-natal checkup on a twenty-eight year old Bedouin. ‘I asked her when she’d had her last period, and she said, “What’s a period?” It turned out she’d never had one. She’d been married at twelve, before her menarche, and had been pregnant or lactating ever since” (172).

“Official translators milled among the athletes, facilitating conversations. Each of them wore the usual Iranian attire – black hood and long tunic – but with a vivid, color-coded athletes’ warmup jacket pulled incongruously on top. Indigo and acid green meant the translator spoke English; pink and chrome yellow, Russian; lime and sky blue, Arabic. As conversations bounced from Farsi to Urdu to English, the hotel lobby filled with a pleasant, feminine buzz…But in one corner a group of men sat self-consciously, murmuring together in Russian, without the aid of the young women translators…” (208).

“When I decided to write a story about the controversy, Sahar looked at the floor and said nothing. ‘Do you want me to find someone else to translate?’ I asked. She nodded. She didn’t want to visit Cairo nightclubs or talk to dancers” (217).

I could add commentary to each of the preceding quotes, but today I will refrain. :-) Each reflects certain decisions that interpreters must make, constantly, during each and every interaction. These are all reminiscent of the examples Marie Gillespie shared in her talk on the politics of translation. Brooks characterizes

“the Arabic language [as being] as tribal as the desert culture which created it. Each word trails a host of relatives with the same three-letter cluster of consonants as its root. Use almost any word in Arabic, and a host of uninvited meanings barge into the conversation. I learned that one of the words for woman, hormah, comes from the same root as the words for both ‘holy, sacrosanct,’ and ‘sinful, forbidden.’ The word for mother, umm, is the root of the words for ‘source, nation, mercy, first principle, rich harvest; stupid, illiterate, parasite, weak of character, without opinion.’ In the beginning was the word, and the word, in Arabic, was magnificently ambiguous” (10-11).