Then one goes and explains the thing that has just been named by its foreign name, its name in language A. It is always possible, I think, to explain sherbet or sharawadgi; that is how we honor Davidson’s principle of translatability; but in doing so we mark the foreign thing with a name that does not come from language B, the language in which we are doing the explaining, but rather reproduce a name from language A. We do not translate but transcribe. We become mimics. If the foreign word subsequently takes, if it becomes the word in language B for the item we were trying to translate from language A, we speak of it as a “loan word”—a significant term, because it is a lie: a loaned object is one you sooner or later have to give back to the giver, but we have been using amok since 1642, sharawadgi since 1685, kaolin since 1741, and show no signs of returning them to the speakers of Malay or Chinese. The feeling that the word is not completely ours, that it belongs somewhere else, makes us call it, apologetically, a borrowing though in fact we snatched it and intend to keep it.
All languages are full of loan words. Much of what is not loan words in a language is calques, that is, formations of native words used to imitate a foreign word. “Interaction,” one of the favorite terms of people in translation studies, was coined around 1830 in imitation of a German term, “Wechselwirkung.” “Translation” was coined in ancient Rome to imitate the Greek “metaphora.” And who knows how “Wechselwirkung” and “metaphora” emerged: possibly as calques on a precedent term that we have lost track of.
In Chinese, loan words are often doubled by calques. Historically the loan word comes first and then is covered, or covered over, by a nativizing term that makes it appear as if the correspondence between the Chinese vocabulary and the vocabularies of the entire world were seamless, as if translation had always already happened. The loan word is mildly shocking; it sticks out like a sore thumb or a new penny. For Chinese is an ancient and rich language, with subtle distinctions and countless inter-references; if you can’t say something in proper Chinese, maybe it isn’t worth saying. But new objects and practices emerge and must be named somehow. For example, the telephone. When this object was new and began to be used in the international districts of Shanghai, some people referred to it as the delüfeng 德律風. From the sound of it, I assume the original term was French—téléphone—rather than English, but no matter; it was definitely foreign, as you can see from its three-character structure and the fact that the word sequence is absurd: if you didn’t know what a téléphone was, how could you guess from hearing it named as a “wind of virtuous proportion”?
Afterwards, or perhaps simultaneously but in a different neighborhood, one where a stricter sense of linguistic propriety ruled the roost, someone created a name for the new thing that made it seem as if it had always already had a name in Chinese: dianhua 電話, “electric speech,” which correlates meaningfully with such other objects and institutions as dianying 電影, “electric shadows” or cinema, dianbao 電報, “electric messenger” or telegraph, and on down the nineteenth century’s list of amazing media discoveries. Dianhua, properly speaking, translates the telephone; delüfeng transcribes it.
Dianhua and delüfeng correspond to two profoundly different attitudes about language, about the Chinese language and foreign languages, and about innovation or importation. Dianhua accentuates the readiness of Chinese to make room for all kinds of new things as if they had been there all along and just needed to be noticed; delüfeng accuses the Chinese language of incompleteness, asserts that there is no way to name the new thing without taking out a foreign loan. The polemical gesture of words like delüfeng emerges more clearly in the scholarly field, where using a term like ai-si-te-ti-ke 埃斯特惕克 ;implicitly rebukes those who use the homegrown and comfortable term of meixue 美學 (the study of the beautiful, or aesthetics) for their laziness and complacency; to seek yin-si-pi-li-chun 烟士披里纯, inspiration, rather than the traditional linggan 靈感 (spirit response), means that you are not going to accept some familiar Chinese substitute for a demanding and precise foreign concept, but have gone the whole hog in opting for conceptual estrangement. (I owe the last two examples, and many more, to my friend Liu Dong.) This gesture was of course repeated thousands of times in writing from the period of innovation, roughly 1920-1940, when the mastery of the Chinese language was up for grabs, the authority of settled terms was shaken, and Lu Xun, for example, a notably subtle and precise writer, could advocate yingyi 硬譯, “mechanical translation,” as a means of shaking Chinese readers and writers out of the complacency of familiar terms and old social arrangements. Yingyi, he thought, would bring people face to face with truths that language normally veiled. In most languages, I think loan words provoke anxiety about purity.
Loan words are an opposite to translation in the following sense: with translation, interpretation always precedes the restatement; but with loan words, incorporation occurs without interpretation. Translation works out what the meaning of the foreign text is, then elaborates a corresponding set of meanings that will suitably address the speakers of the target language. With transliteration, foreigners are putting words in your mouth. As often as not, this happens quite literally. Many of the things named with loan words are products meant to be eaten: a-si-pi-ling 阿斯匹靈 (aspirin), for example. Someone could have created a phrase like zhitong yao 止痛藥 (the medicine that stops pain), or a chemical definition like acetylsalicylic acid. But a-si-pi-ling, like aspirin, denotes a brand name, not a category of effects; it comes in a package, with a seal. I insist on the packing and the seal, because they materialize the mysterious character of the classic loan word, the fact that when you handle one you never quite know what the contents are, but simply convey it as a lump or unit: there is no knowledge to be derived from the a, si, pi, and ling of a-si-pi-ling. Similarly with another signifier that connotes the whole field of neologism and loan words, modeng 摩登, which as a package or brand name for modernity feels different from xiandai 現代. You don’t know if it’s ku’er 酷兒 (cool) or just a mi-si 迷思 (myth).
Presumably people dislike handling mysterious packages of unknown origin; they also have trouble remembering them. So in Chinese, many loan words have been devised so as to carry a subsequent interpretation. The borrowing was incorporation with no interpretation, pure mimicry as when English speakers imitated the sounds of amok, ketchup, kayak or samurai; but the Chinese language allows this mimicry to be doubled with an appearance of meaning, so that vitamins, wei-ta-ming 維他命, suggest that they have the function of “guarding one’s life,” or Viagra, wei-ge 偉哥, offers to equip you with a “huge brother.” As these examples indicate, the semantic supplement added to the pure loan words is mostly in the nature of advertising, and not always to be believed; this is not precisely translation, just a technique of borrowing that is cleverly adapted to the context of the arrival-point. We should refine our initial formulation, then: it is not so much incorporation without interpretation, but incorporation separated from interpretation (the interpretation comes after the incorporation and is optional, poetic even).
Loan words are most frequent in certain contexts. Obviously, foreign place and personal names will usually be represented by mimicry, sometimes re-semanticized: Bali 巴黎, Lundun 倫敦, Mosike 莫斯科, Malilian Menglu 瑪麗蓮夢露. Exotic food preparations (tusi 土司, bing qilin 冰淇淋, quji 曲吉, hanbao 漢堡, shadie 沙爹, xiangbin 香檳). The great linguist Chao Yuan-ren memorably transliterated the martini with a warning label as a ma-ti-ni 馬蹄你 (horse kicks you). Foreign institutions (the xiu 秀 or show, the tuofu 托福 or TOEFL exam). Above all, technological objects, for these are new in general—e-mail, for example, was barely part of the awareness of English speakers before it had become the object of a simultaneous Chinese calque (dianyou 電郵, or electric post) and loanword (yi mei-er 伊妹兒, or little sister Yi).
In many languages, certain provinces of vocabulary are thick with loan words, and for a reason. Food having been mentioned, it is good to be reminded that the peoples of the world know each other most intimately, from the inside out as it were, by tasting each other’s recipes. In many European languages the technical terms for sailing—yawl, bight, sloop, jib, and so forth—are practically the same across languages, and have a Norman or Scandinavian common past. Those are the people who got around on the water, and they left names in every port. Astronomy still bears traces of the Arabic and Indian intellectual input centuries ago: azimuth, Betelgeuse, nadir, zenith. An international specialist group found it easier and more convenient for mutual communication of their results to repeat the words the Arabs had used than to invent equivalents for each vernacular language. English has exported words relating to computers, no doubt thanks to the many Indian and Chinese engineers who work in North America and write manuals in the language of Noah Webster.
Transliteration or transcription thus operates as a complementary dynamic to translation, and unlike translation, it works on language as such, directly. It speaks to the signifier, it forces us to mimic inhabitual gestures, it often violates sense and grammar in the act of making room for a new word. In genetics, the complementarity of transcription and translation is one of the core principles: in expressing the genetic heritage of an individual, part of the information required is passed on by a process of translation, in which the markers are rendered by their opposite and parallel numbers, and part by a process of transcription, in which they simply repeat. (I am remembering eighth-grade biology, and very indistinctly: a bow to Crick and Watson and a plea for forgiveness!) The reason biologists use these terms, transcription and translation, derives from a philosophical parable invented by John von Neumann in the years before the structure of DNA had been identified. Mathematicians were trying to figure out what the logical prerequisites for heritability would be, and von Neumann came up with this analogy: Suppose you had a room, with wallpaper, furniture, and all the rest, and you had a camera capable of photographing every part of the room so that you might hang up the photographs in another, empty room, and reproduce the contents of the original room. After you had finished taking pictures of all the furnishings, carpet, etc., and pasting them in the corresponding places of the empty room, what is left to be recreated? Only the camera itself. The photographs in the empty room are translations of the first room, and the camera, which we have to suppose can be reproduced or cloned somehow, must be a transcription of itself, that is, a pure reiteration. You could say that in cases of linguistic transliteration, or the loan word process, von Neumann’s camera has failed to output a piece of the linguistic environment from room A to room B and has turned to reproducing itself.
New words do enlarge the worlds of speakers. They are a strong argument against the bland form of linguistic relativity that holds that no two languages are different in any important way, in any way that constrains the thinking or action of speakers. There is a longstanding controversy about the perception of colors and their naming in different languages. Every decade or so, a new formulation of the problem, or new experimental results, leads linguists to think, by a narrow margin in disputed polls, that perception either determines the colors we name, or that language chops up the spectrum in arbitrary chunks that we then treat as objectively existing. My contribution to this debate, a modest one, is “orange.” I am sure that things of the color orange existed and could be talked about for centuries before the word orange was imported into Northern European languages from Arabic via Spanish, along with the fruit. But before there were examples of the color orange—i.e., oranges—other things that happened to be orange might be subsumed under the categories yellow, golden, tawny, or fiery. The loan word adds a compartment to English, Dutch, and, with more dolorous consequences, Northern Irish.
The languages that make the heaviest use of loan words are creoles: for example, Haitian Creole, a language that consists of words largely taken from French (and French remains for Kreyòl a reservoir of available terms) set into grammatical patterns deriving from West African languages. According to a probable legend, the planters of the colony of Santo Domingo made sure that the slaves on any estate were a mixture of speakers of different African languages, taken from different regions, so that no large number of them would be able to plot together and rise up against their masters; the medium of communication between slaves and masters, and then of slaves among themselves, would have to be French. But opportunities to have sustained conversations about wide-ranging topics in French were few, and the slaves learned French words one by one, by imitation, and were not encouraged to become fluent speakers, not to mention readers and writers. (Some did, of course, like the great Toussaint Louverture.) Kreyol developed in this condition of limited language contact, with an elegant grammar consisting, like weiqi or Go, of few rules having great flexibility. The French words it uses have split off significantly from their French meanings and been adapted to the prosody of the new language. “N’ap fe anpil bagay pou pwoteje dwa moun nan kontinan ki rele Azi,” though it is almost all French in content, probably means almost nothing to an average French speaker: “Nous faisons beaucoup pour la protection des droits de l’homme en Asie,” or “We are doing a lot of things for the protection of human rights in Asia.” The logic of incorporation and mimicry does not mean at all that the imitation will be slavish; rather, a creole language changes and recombines the elements it has taken from a predecessor language. However, those elements are in an overwhelmingly dominant measure loan words. English has been described as a creole of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon. Probably all languages are creoles that have forgotten where they came from.
The seemingly limitless extension of translation here finds another limit. Emily Apter’s book The Translation Zone devotes several chapters to writing by so-called Francophone authors from North Africa and the Caribbean. (This word, like Anglophone, bothers me; it seems to be designed to convey, in a hypocritical fashion, the information that Francophones are French-speakers but don’t look like French people. Try addressing a white Frenchman as a Francophone and tell me the results.) The style, which Apter describes enthusiastically as an adventurous new blend, clash and translation of French with other idioms, is basically a creolized French, that is, French with frequent doses of loan words from foreign languages and from creoles that originally derived from French but have now come to see unrecognizable and exotic to French people. However, it is the untranslated quality of these creole passages that captures my attention, the fact that they mix, without altering or nativizing, words from all over; and to describe this as a translation asserts a dominance of semantics, of meaning and interpretation, that simply doesn’t occur here. It is rather about interpretation being brought up short. As the interpreter of purdah, sofa, samovar or teepee was once brought up short.
Apter’s book concludes with a fantasia about digital communication as the ultimate extension of translation. Translation makes certain information accessible to more people more of the time than the untranslated text does; similarly, digital communication promises to make everything accessible to everybody all of the time. Mark Hansen, in his excellent New Philosophy for New Media, remarks of binary code that it serves as a “digital Esperanto” for word, sound, image, movement, money, every kind of data and difference in the world. But here too, the persuasive metaphor is the precisely wrong one, for digital media do not interpret the contents they vehicle in any meaningful way. Your computer does not understand the Word file you type into it, or express its content to another computer’s understanding when you email the file to a friend. Rather, it codes the letters and formatting into a sequence of ones and zeroes that are then copied onto the hard disk and recopied, through instructions, onto the other person’s computer, then re-represented as letters and formatting. Transliteration again, incorporation without interpretation; translating or summarizing content (as when I tell you about a conversation I had last week with another person) is a very different matter. Media do not deal with content; they vehicle content, they permit it to be packaged, they subject it to algorithms and encoding, that’s all. And when we deal with digital media, as with technological objects generally, we do not “open up the black box,” so to speak, and understand it from the inside. Rather, our relation with media is one of quotation, block citation, repetition and selection. A digitally mediated message is in creole, to the degree that it is complex and multi-medial. I cut and paste; I drop a film clip or a photograph into a Power Point presentation. To do this, I do not in the least need to understand the movie camera, the digitization process, the computer program that runs the film clip or the LCD screen that lights up to display it. Each of these things is for me, practically speaking, a black box with a button on it, and maybe a cable that I can use to connect it to another black box. This is wonderful, because things happen regardless of my subjective comprehension of the process, but it is what makes us already, always already, post-human.
Most technology is inscriptional and transcriptional, rather than translational. We use translation to talk to other humans, because humans are keyed to the meaning-based behaviors that translation can address, but machines simply repeat. When we use loan words, when we devise creoles, we are acknowledging the repetition, the inclusion of otherness in ourselves, transcription as the internal limit of translation. We are answering the call of the delüfeng. It rings for thee.
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