Translation on the whole is, arguably, more art than science. Guidance can be given and general principles can be taught, but after that it must be left to the individual’s own feeling for the two languages concerned. Almost inevitably, in a translation of a work of literature, something of the author’s original intent must be lost; in those cases in which the translation is said to be a better work than the original, an opinion sometimes expressed about the English writer Edward Fitzgerald’s “translation” of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, one is dealing with a new though derived work, not just a translation. The Italian epigram remains justified: Traduttore traditore, “The translator is a traitor.” Messages and codes
Translation serves to extend the communicative value of a text. Sometimes people want to restrict it. Confidential messages require for their efficacy that they be known to and understood by only the single person or the few persons to whom they are addressed. Such are diplomatic exchanges, operational messages in wartime, and some transmissions of commercial information. Protection of written messages from interception has been practiced for many centuries. Twentieth-century developments in telegraphy and telephony, and the emergence and growth of the Internet, made protection against unauthorized reception more urgent, whether of texts transmitted as speech or those sent as series of letters of the alphabet. Codes and ciphers (cryptography) are of much longer standing in the concealment of written messages, though their techniques are being constantly developed. Such gains are, of course, countered by developments in the techniques of decipherment and decoding (as distinct from getting hold of the key to the system in use). An important by-product of such techniques has been the reading and interpretation of inscriptions written in otherwise unknown languages or unknown writing systems for which no translation exists. The decipherment of the Linear B script in the 1950s and its recognition as Mycenaean Greek, an early Greek dialect written in a form of orthography quite distinct from the later classical Greek alphabet, was first achieved by the application of cryptographic “code cracking” methods (see also cryptology).
Linear B inscribed tablet, c. 1400 BC, from the Palace of Minos, Knossos, CreteHirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich
Language learning
All physiologically and mentally typical people learn the main structure and basic vocabulary of their native language by the end of childhood. It has been pointed out above that the process of first-language acquisition as a medium of communication is largely achieved from random exposure. There is legitimate controversy, however, over the nature and extent of the positive contribution that the human brain brings, both cognitively and linguistically, to the activity of grammar construction—the activity by which children develop an indefinitely creative competence from the finite data that make up their actual experience of the language. The importance of social interaction between children and their interlocutors is another significant factor. Creativity is what must be stressed as the product of first-language acquisition. By far the greater number of all the sentences people create during their lifetime are new; that is, they have not occurred before in their personal experience. But individuals find no difficulty at all in understanding at once almost everything they hear (or otherwise receive) or for the most part in producing sentences to suit the requirements of every situation. This very ease of creativity in human linguistic competence makes it hard to realize its extent. The only regularly reproduced sentences in most users’ experience are the stereotyped forms of greeting and leave-taking and certain formalized responses to recurrent situations, such as shopping, cooperative activities in repetitive jobs, the stylized parts of religious services, and the like.
Yet, despite the truly immense achievement that the progressive mastery of one’s first language constitutes, it arouses no comment and attracts no credit. It is simply part of what is expected in growing up. Different people may be singled out for praise in certain uses of their language, as good public speakers, authors, poets, tellers of tales, and solvers of puzzles, but not just as communicators. The credit that some individuals acquire in certain communities for “speaking correctly” is a different matter, usually the result of speaking as one’s mother tongue a prestigious standard dialect among people most of whom speak another, less-favoured one. Bilingualism
The learning of a second and of any subsequently acquired language is quite a separate matter. Except for one form of bilingualism, it is a deliberate activity undertaken when one has already nearly or fully acquired the basic structure and vocabulary of one’s first language. Of course, many people never do master significantly more than their own first language. It is only in encountering a second language that one realizes how complex language is and how much effort must be devoted to subsequent acquisition. It has been said that the principal obstacle to learning a language is knowing one already, and common experience suggests that the faculty of grammar construction exhibited in childhood is one that is gradually lost as childhood recedes.
road sign in English and French, CanadaA road sign, in English and French, warning drivers about wildlife crossing a highway, Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada.AdstockRF
Whereas most people master their native language with unconscious ease, individuals vary in their ability to learn additional languages, just as they vary in other intellectual activities. Situational motivation, however, appears to be by far the strongest influence on the speed and apparent ease of this learning. The greatest difficulty is experienced by those who learn because they are told to or are expected to, without supporting reasons that they can justify. Given a motive other than external compulsion or expectation, the task is achieved much more easily (this, of course, is an observation in no way confined to language learning). In Welsh schools, for instance, it has been found that English children make slower progress in Welsh when their only apparent reason for learning Welsh is that there are Welsh classes. Welsh children, on the other hand, make rapid progress in English, the language of most further education, the newspapers, most television and radio, most of the better-paid jobs, and any job outside Welsh-speaking areas. Similar differences in motivation have accounted for the excellent standard of English, French, and German acquired by educated persons in the Scandinavian countries and in the Netherlands, small countries whose languages, being spoken by relatively few foreigners, are of little use in international communication. This attainment may be compared with the much poorer showing in second-language acquisition among comparably educated persons in England and the United States, who have for long been able to rely on foreigners accommodating to their ignorance by speaking and understanding English.
It is sometimes held that children brought up bilingually in places in which two languages are regularly in use are slower in schoolwork than comparable monolingual children, as a greater amount of mental effort has to be expended in the mastery of two languages. This has by no means been proved, and indeed there is evidence to the contrary. Moreover, because much of a child’s language acquisition takes place in infancy and in the preschool years, it does not represent an effort in the way that consciously learning a language in school does, and, indeed, it probably occupies a separate part of the child’s mental equipment. The question of speed of general learning by bilinguals and monolinguals must be left open. It is quite a separate matter from the job of learning, by teaching at home or in school, to read and write in two languages; this undoubtedly is more of a labour than the acquisition of monolingual literacy.