As an alternative to the recognition of particular natural languages as international in status, attempts have been made to invent and propagate new and genuinely international languages, devised for the purpose. Of these, Esperanto, invented by the Polish-Russian doctor L.L. Zamenhof in the 19th century, is the best known. Such languages are generally built up from parts of the vocabulary and grammatical apparatus of the better-known existing languages of the world. The relationship between the written letter and its pronunciation is more systematic than with many existing orthographies (English spelling is notoriously unreliable as an indication of pronunciation), and care is taken to avoid the grammatical irregularities to which all natural languages are subject and also to avoid sounds found difficult by many speakers (e.g., the English th sounds, which most Europeans, apart from English speakers, dislike). These artificial languages have not made much progress, though an international society of Esperanto speakers does exist. Nationalistic influences on language
Deliberate interference with the natural course of linguistic changes and the distribution of languages is not confined to the facilitating of international intercourse and cooperation. Language as a cohesive force for nation-states and for linguistic groups within nation-states has for long been manipulated for political ends. Multilingual states can exist and prosper; Switzerland is a good example. But linguistic rivalry and strife can be disruptive. Language riots have occurred in Belgium between French and Flemish speakers and in parts of India between rival vernacular communities. A language can become or be made a focus of loyalty for a minority community that thinks itself suppressed, persecuted, or subjected to discrimination. The French language in Canada in the mid-20th century is an example. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Irish Gaelic, or Irish, came to symbolize Irish patriotism and Irish independence from Great Britain, and Irish became Ireland’s first official language at that country’s independence. Government documents are published in Irish and English (the country’s second official language), and Irish is taught in state schools, though it remains under the significant international pressures exerted by English that are described above.
A language may be a target for attack or suppression if the authorities associate it with what they consider a disaffected or rebellious group or a culturally inferior one. There have been periods when American Indian children were forbidden to speak a language other than English at school and when pupils were not allowed to speak Welsh in British state schools in Wales. Both these prohibitions have been abandoned. After the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, Basque speakers were discouraged from using their language in public as a consequence of the strong support given by the Basques to the republican forces. Interestingly, on the other side of the Franco-Spanish frontier, French Basques were positively encouraged to keep their language in use, if only as an object of touristic interest and consequent economic benefit to the area. Translation
So far, some of the relatively large-scale effects of culture contacts on languages and on dialects within languages have been surveyed. A continuous concomitant of contact between two mutually incomprehensible languages and one that does not lead either to suppression or extension of either is translation. As soon as two users of different languages need to converse, translation is necessary, either through a third party or directly.
Before the invention and diffusion of writing, translation was instantaneous and oral; persons professionally specializing in such work were called interpreters. In predominantly or wholly literate communities, translation is thought of as the conversion of a written text in one language into a written text in another, though the modern emergence of the simultaneous translator or professional interpreter at international conferences keeps the oral side of translation very much alive.
The tasks of the translator are the same whether the material is oral, manual, or written, but, of course, translation between written texts allows more time for stylistic adjustment and technical expertise. The main problems have been recognized since antiquity and were expressed by St. Jerome, translator of the famed Latin Bible, the Vulgate, from the Hebrew and Greek originals. Semantically, these problems relate to the adjustment of the literal and the literary and to the conflicts that so often occur between an exact translation of each word, as far as this is possible, and the production of a whole sentence or even a whole text that conveys as much of the meaning of the original as can be managed. These problems and conflicts arise because of factors already noticed in the use and functioning of language: languages operate not in isolation but within and as part of cultures, and cultures differ from each other in various ways. Even between the languages of communities whose cultures are fairly closely allied, there is by no means a one-to-one relation of exact lexical equivalence between the items of their vocabularies.
In their lexical meanings, words acquire various overtones and associations that are not shared by the nearest corresponding words in other languages; this may vitiate a literal translation. The English author and theologian Ronald Knox pointed to the historical connections of the Greek skandalon, “stumbling block, trap, or snare,” inadequately rendered by “offense,” its usual New Testament translation. In modern times translators of the Bible into the languages of peoples culturally remote from Europe are well aware of the difficulties of finding a lexical equivalent for lamb when the intended readers, even if they have seen sheep and lambs, have no tradition of blood sacrifice for expiation or long-hallowed associations of lambs with lovableness, innocence, and apparent helplessness. The English word uncle has, for various reasons, a cozy and slightly comic set of associations. The Latin poet Virgil used the words avunculus Hector in a solemn heroic passage of the Aeneid (Book III, line 343); to translate this by “uncle Hector” gives an entirely unsuitable flavour to the text.
The translation of poetry, especially into poetry, presents very special difficulties, and the better the original poem, the harder the translator’s task. This is because poetry is, in the first instance, carefully contrived to express exactly what the poet wants to say. Second, to achieve this end, poets call forth all the resources of the language in which they are composing, matching the choice of words, the order of words, and grammatical constructions, as well as phonological features peculiar to the language in metre, perhaps supplemented by rhyme, assonance, and alliteration. The available resources differ from language to language; English and German rely on stress-marked metres, but Latin and Greek used quantitative metres, contrasting long and short syllables, while French places approximately equal stress and length on each syllable. Translators must try to match the stylistic exploitation of the particular resources in the original language with comparable resources from their own. Because lexical, grammatical, and metrical considerations are all interrelated and interwoven in poetry, a satisfactory literary translation is usually very far from a literal word-for-word rendering. The more poets rely on language form, the more embedded their verses are in that particular language and the harder the texts are to translate adequately. This is especially true with lyrical poetry in several languages, with its wordplay, complex rhymes, and frequent assonances.
At the other end of the translator’s spectrum, technical prose dealing with internationally agreed scientific subjects may be the easiest type of material to translate, because cultural unification (in this respect), lexical correspondences, and stylistic similarity already exist in this type of usage in the languages most commonly involved, to a higher degree than in other fields of discourse. Remarkable advances in automatic computer translation were made during the 1990s—the result of progress in computational techniques and a fresh burst of research energy focused on the problem—while the spread of the Internet in subsequent decades transformed approaches to, and the ease of, all forms of translation.