Color in the Eye of the Beholder

When you look at a traffic light, what colors can you name? Most people will say that the lights are red, yellow, and green. However, Japanese people often will refer to the light as being blue in color, not green. This has its roots in the history of the Japanese language, as their word ao—until the modern period—covered both green and blue. Ao in Japanese comes from the dye plant, ai, which as a dyestuff covers the whole of the blue-green portion of the spectrum.  Some cultures have what might at first seem to be peculiarly chosen "basic" color names until you learn their associations with the culture's central food sources or dye plants, or precious commodities.

The color name that covers both blue and green in many native languages of the American Southwest is also the name for the stone, turquoise. You can be certain that, in cultures where a staple food is poisonous when green and edible when red, there are separate names for green and red. In our own history, we have a very similar example to the "blue" traffic lights of Japan: "orange" didn't enter English as a color name until the 16th century, after the fruit itself was first brought to England, quite late in the evolution of our color vocabulary, which is why we still refer to "red" hair.

Berlin & Kay—early theorists of the order of evolution of color names—had to, at some point, translate the names their subjects gave to colors into English in order to assign them a place in their evolutionary chart. Often they did this using bilingual subjects, which is of course problematic, since they would already think or operate in two different linguistic color spaces. When they used dictionaries, how had the dictionary writer decided on the English equivalent of the color name?

Finally, most male English speakers can come up with eleven independent color names, but female speakers are far more likely to come up with dozens of color names without straining. Girls are culturally conditioned to be familiar with this terminology from an early age.

 If you want to participate in a color naming experiment, visit colornaming.net, as the folks over there are trying to determine an online color naming model.

Translation Theory, or Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The problems with translation are many. Does a translator literally translate the meaning of every word, or does he instead do justice to the more metaphorical or poetic parts of a work? It’s never an easy question to answer, and a happy medium is perhaps the safest way to go. Starting with the Tower of Babel, the problems with translation have only multiplied.

Cicero and Horace, in the first century BC, were the first theorists who distinguished between a sense-for-sense translation, and a word-for-word translation. Their comments on translation still have profound effects on current translation theory. Great modern figures of literary translation have included Vladimir Nabokov, who translated many of his own works into English and attacked other writers for their unfaithfulness to the literal sense of words, and Walter Benjamin, who—in The Task of the Translator—presented stylistic concerns wherein he postulates that, by definition, a literary translation produces deformations and misunderstandings of the original text.

However brilliant these men were, the average person does not concern himself daily with translation theory nor gets over-the-top excited to read a book on it. Therefore, I viewed with great excitement the release of David Bellos’s book Is that a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (Faber & Faber, 2011). It appeared that the book would treat the sometimes tedious subject of translation theory in a light and humorous manner. Adam Thirlwell, in his New York Times review of the book, aptly stated that “The theory of translation is very rarely—how to put this?—comical.”

And coming from the synopsis of the novel on the publisher’s website: “Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. What's the difference between translating unprepared natural speech, and translating Madame Bovary? How do you translate a joke? What's the difference between a native tongue and a learned one? Can you translate between any pair of languages, or only between some? What really goes on when world leaders speak at the UN? Can machines ever replace human translators, and if not, why? The biggest question is how do we ever really know that we've grasped what anybody else says - in our own language or in another?”

The title of the book is an allusion to Douglas Adam’s popular novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which a Babel fish (a small, yellow, leech-like fish) can be inserted into the ear and acts as a universal translator, instantaneously translating from any spoken language to another. This is the same concept behind the alien devices inserted into the Earthlings in the Danish film, Rejsen til Saturn (The Trip to Saturn). There are countless other examples of television shows, films, and novels dealing with cultural clash due to translation problems. So, besides the infusion of the problems of translation into popular culture, will the average person care about translation theory? Well, they should.

For example, many students use Google Translate, a very popular free translation service that provides “instant” translations between (at the moment of publication) 58 different languages. The site’s stated goal is to “make information universally accessible and useful, regardless of the language in which it’s written.” It’s a noble goal indeed. But how does it work?

According to the site, when generating a translation, it searches for patterns across millions of documents that it has access to. It then tries to detect patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, and guesses what the appropriate translation should be. It is not an exact science. The more documents that Google Translate can analyze and has access to, the better the translation quality will be. Of course, the makers of Google Translate recognize the problems with machine translation and allows you to click on individual words and select from a drop-down menu a better translation.

Yahoo has a similar service, called Babel Fish (yes, that too is named after Douglas Adam’s creation). Its website gives a much more obscure explanation of how it works, but it must be assumed that it’s run in a very similar way. Finally, Facebook has a Translations application that allows for individuals to help translate the website text and phrases with the goal of translating it into every major language on earth. (To learn about the science behind machine translation, check out the Machine Translation Archive and the Statistical Machine Translation.)

While tech companies are approaching machine translation very seriously, there is no reason it shouldn’t be fun for the rest of us. And that’s what David Bellos is trying to make it with his novel. In fact, there is even a short animation of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? If it’s any indicator of the novel itself, it looks to be a humorous read.