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Anthropological Linguistics

Cultures, Languages, and Translations

Author(s): Zdenk Salzmann
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Anthropological Linguistics, Vol. 2, No. 2, Translation between Language and Culture:
A Symposium Presented at the 1959 Meetings of the American Anthropological Association
(Feb., 1960), pp. 43-47
Published by: The Trustees of Indiana University on behalf of Anthropological Linguistics
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30022241 .
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CULTURES,

LANGUAGES, AND TRANSLATIONS

Zdenkk Salzmann
Sedona, Arizona

If we agree to the twofold proposition that (1) language is an autonomous

part of culture and (2) translating between languages is putting them to a test
of equivalence - then we are implicitly raising a number of interesting
questions concerning the relations between the terms in the title of this paper.
I shall try here to deal briefly with some of these questions.
TRANSLATIONS
From a functional viewpoint, one may distinguish three types of translations - morphologic, practical, and aesthetic. 1
The main purpose for translating a language morphologically
is to
elucidate its structure at the level of the smallest meaningful elements that
constitute it. Since there is no necessary one-to-one relationship between
the morphemes of any two languages, morphologic translation is nonequivalent
to its original (though of course a particular short sequence of morphemes in
a language may be rendered equivalently by a specific translation).
Examples
of morphologic translation are plentiful and are customarily found together
with sample texts appended to grammars of previously unanalyzed languages.
A practical translation is carried out when a message is adequately
transmitted by means of a code different from that of the source.
Good
practical translations should be equivalent to the original and generally they
are; at any rate, with some effort they easily can be. In recent years, an
increasing number of significant technical articles have been translated into
other languages; such translations are practical and their equivalence is often
indirectly but rigorously attested by experiments in the many branches of
natural science.
When a source (or more specifically and most commonly a literary work
of art) is translated with special care to generate a comparable total effect,
an aesthetic translation has been attempted.
Although equivalence between a
literary work of art and its translation is attainable (one may argue with Croce
and others contrariwise on purely theoretical grounds), it can only be approximated when dealing with lyrical poetry and paronomasia.
The following poem by Konstantin Biebl, one of the chief representatives
of Czech pure lyrical poetry from the period between the two World Wars,
serves as an excellent example of the tremendous difficulty that aesthetic
translations may pose. Apart from a synesthetic element, each of the first
43

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Anthropological

Linguistics,

Vol. 2, No. 2

five lines is built around one particular vowel phoneme, the last line around
a diphthong (both 'y' and 'i' of the written Czech represent the i phoneme).
My practical translation is appended; the graphic arrangement of the original
was preserved to facilitate comparison.
SKALA2
TyEinky v tichych i bi'och liliich
ve svgtlezelen4m
svStle zelenO
Lolo Lolo
tma pada na jantar jak zlata harfa v barvich
ut
smutku purpur strun

sala

Jdou loukou tmou

SCALE
Stamens in silent and white lilies
in the light-green light of green
Lola Lola
darkness falls upon amber like a golden harp with color glows
the yellow of sadness the purple of strings,
They walk through a meadow in darkness
For an example of close approximation if not equivalence in aesthetic
translation we may draw from Leonard Bloomfield's translation of Gerhart
Hauptmann's Vor Sonnenaufgang. 3 In order to preserve the paronomasia of
the original, based on a defective articulation of dental stops by one of the
drama's characters,
Bloomfield rendered "Sie hatte nur noch einen einzigen,
da
langen Zahn sollte es immer heipen; Tr6ste, tr6ste mein Volk! und es
kam immer heraus: 'R6ste, 'r6ste mein Volk! " as "She had only one, solitary,
long tooth - and she tried to sing: 'In the Lord put I my trust' and it always
sounded like 'In the Lord put I my rust! "
CULTURES AND TRANSLATIONS

While it is generally recognized by literary critics and historians that

aesthetic translations play an important part in the development of national
the impact of practical translations upon culture has, on the
literatures,
whole, been seriously underestimated or neglected by both anthropologists
and linguists.
And yet there are many instances in the history of nations and
entire culture areas in which profound changes in a pattern of culture were
wrought not by conquest or contact but by linguistic means - translations.
An excellent example of such an impact is found in the cultural histories
of the Moslem world and of Europe during the Middle Ages. Within a relatively

Cultures,

and Translations

Languages,

45

short period of time during the Abbasside caliphate a great number of practical translations into Arabic of mathematical,
medical, and
astronomical,
other writings from various sources were completed.
This undertaking was
of such intensity that it was carried out not only by interested scholars but by
a whole staff of translators at Baghdad who were highly respected and publicly
Thus, by the end of the ninth century, most of the classical Greek
supported.
writings had been rendered into Arabic either directly or from Syriac translations.
As a result of this prodigious activity, few aspects of Islamic culture
were unaffected.
It is a most interesting quirk of history that this enormous debt to the
West was soon to be repaid with much interest by Islam to a Europe oblivious
of much of its splendid Greek heritage - repaid by means of translations.
Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy became the centers of this second current
of translating, this time from Arabic into Latin. Corresponding to Baghdad
of the ninth century, Toledo of the twelfth century boasted not only one of the
Gerard of Cremona, but a whole college of
greatest medieval translators,
under
the
translators
patronage of Raymond, Archbishop of Toledo. This
transmission,
through Arabic, of the original Hellenic cultural fund, enriched
new
elements (e.g.,
Moslem elaborations in medicine and chemistry
by many
and the Hindu zero), gave a powerful impetus to a more direct study of Greek
civilization.
Thus practical translations had their share in precipitating the
ultimate

passing

of medieval

culture.4

LANGUAGES AND TRANSLATIONS

The effect of translations upon languages into which translations are
made is likewise of considerable interest and should receive more attention
from anthropological linguists.
Recently many heretofore unwritten languages
have been very seriously and competently studied by missionary linguists
whose ultimate purpose is to introduce Christianity to pagan peoples by translating certain portions of the Scriptures or the entire Bible into their languages.
Any such competent translation implies language standardization and consequently a new set of factors to which both the language and the rest of the culture
will necessarily
respond, particularly if the scriptural translation is associated
with the introduction of literacy and other urbanizing elements; and inasmuch as
standardization

tends

it will increase

stability

to reduce

the rate of change

and the extent

on every plane of the language system

of variation,

in question.

The significance
of Biblical and other translations
for languages of
literate
societies
has always been appreciated,
particularly
by linguistically
oriented students of literature.
A brief example will therefore
At
suffice:
the beginning of the Czech National Revival toward the end of the eighteenth
the Czech language and other cultural institutions
century,
suddenly found
themselves
tasks
which
could
be
not
carried
out
without a
facing
successfully
for the decline suffered during the preceding period.
major effort to compensate
Under these circumstances
the rehabilitation
of the Czech language became of
crucial importance.
of Revivalists,
this
By the time of the second generation

46

Anthropological

Linguistics,

Vol. 2, No. 2

pivotal cultural enterprise was given leadership by Josef Jungmann, whose

monumental Slovni'k esko-ngmecho [Czech-German Dictionary] as well as
his many contributions to modern Czech scientific terminology and his
from half a dozen European
pioneering translations of literary masterpieces
him
to that of Hus and
a
commensurate
earned
national
standing
languages
Comenius.
It is no exaggeration to state that the syntactic and lexical
foundations of Modern Standard Czech were laid by Jungmann's translations.
CULTURES,

LANGUAGES, AND TRANSLATIONS

When language is said to be an autonomous part of culture, autonomy

is usually extended to the phonemes and morphemes as such, to their
hiearchical and/or sequential ordering, and to the changes which these units
and consequently their.mutual relationships undergo; the lexical and semantic
features of a language are generally held to be closely correlated to the rest
of the culture, possibly as a result of the broad influence of the stimulating
ethnolinguistic hypothesis of Whorf. What appears to be frequently forgotten
is that all cognitive experience may be linguistically
coded without an
of
loss
the
of
information,
appreciable
language.5
regardless
What is therefore impressive is the practical translatability
of languages.
At present, the Scriptures appear in a new language at the rate of more than
one a month, according to a recent pamphlet of the American Bible Society.
The fact that these practical translations are equivalent (by the exacting
standards of the translators) means that because every language readily
employs lexical innovations peculiar to itself, no language fails to measure
up in an acculturation situation. 6
On the other hand, aesthetic translations of specific original sources
can only be approximations; they fail to achieve equivalence for very much the
same reasons which cause morphological translations to be intrinsically nonTo translate the advertising slogan "Better buy Buick" into
equivalent.
another language may be more difficult than to render a short story. In his
Mirror for Man Kluckhohn relates the following experience:
Once in Paris I saw a play called "The Weak Sex." I
A year later in Vienna I took a
found it charmingly risque.
of the same play.
girl to see a German translation
Though
she was no prude,Iwas
embarrassed
because the play was
vulgar if not obscene in German. 7
This observation
where German is
is that either the
lent to the original
gestive Austrians

cannot be taken to mean that French is inherently

risque
What the example points up
inherently vulgar or obscene.
translation
of the play was not functionally
particular
equivaor that references
which Frenchmen
find amusingly
sugfind outside the bounds of propriety.

If it is now remarked that I have departed from the theme of this symposium,

I should

reply that translation

between

language

and culture

is

Cultures,

Languages,

and Translations

sometimes associated with translations

have not been altogether irrelevant.

47
and that my brief remarks

perhaps

NOTES
1. For another discussion of the functions of translations and of
equivalence see Joseph B. Casagrande's article The Ends of Translation,

IJAL 20. 335 - 340 (1954) .

2. Quoted from Konstantin Biebl, Di'lo (Praha, 1952), Vol. I (19261929), p.8 (Collection "Zlatfmi fethzy").
3.

Before Dawn: A Social Drama,

Poet Lore 20.241-315

(1909).

4. Much information about these translations and translators is found

in George Sarton's Introduction to the History of Science, Vol. I: From Homer
to Omar Khayyam (Baltimore,
1927) and Vol. II (Part I and 2): From Rabbi
ben Ezra to Roger Bacon (Baltimore,
1931).
5. For a discussion of this point see Roman Jakobson's
paper On Linguistic Aspects of Translation in On Translation,

A. Brower (Cambridge, Mass.,

6.

See also my article

20. 137- 139 (1954).

7.

stimulating
ed. Reuben

1959), pp. 232-239.

The Problem

of Lexical

Acculturation,

Clyde Kluckhohn, Mirror for Man (New York,

IJAL

1949), p. 155.